Knowledge Base

For making administrations not only more efficient but also more effective, activities and their costs should be closely linked to strategic outcomes and broader policy objectives. A monitoring with restricted focus on financial aspects in order to assess success of public services and political programmes is not enough. To reach a holistic view on success, it is more important to consider financial ratios interlinked with quality data, impact measurements and other performance indicators.

Information is an asset that is constitutive to the effective and efficient supply of public services. To ensure that information meets the purposes for which it is intended, it must be accurate, accessible, valid, timely, complete and relevant (relevance especially means regional explicit information). [1]
In all the interviews that we conducted, it has become very clear and verified that information plays a very important role in policy making processes.

Knowledge management affects the organisation´s technical assets as well as the employees’ willingness to share knowledge. Knowledge is an essential resource in public administrations and has to be stored in order to not get lost for the organisation. As a main reason for the loss of knowledge, participants of our focus group with a socialpolitical background named the retirement of employees. That is why it is important to build up a learning culture, to ensure and promote knowledge transfer within the organisation, as well as with relevant stakeholders.

Probably one of the biggest needs for administration is to keep up with the technical innovation. To cope with the production of huge volumes of data is a technical problem as well as a big challenge for the staff. On the one hand, there should be established technical infrastructure for new policies and the increasing number of data, on the other hand, the staff needs to be trained and able to manage data and produce “good” data.

Concerns about insufficient security and privacy are ubiquitous when it comes to the use of new technical possibilities - especially in public management. Besides the advantages and potentials, digitisation is associated with some technical and non-technical obstacles. Data protection and information security management can help to preserve trust in government. [1]

All interviewees stated that there is room for improvement in the technical infrastructure. The used technical infrastructure is partly outdated and does not meet current requirements, a fact that consequently increases administrative costs and leads to unnecessary bureaucracy. In addition, the lack of good infrastructure makes digitalisation difficult.