The National Audit Office argues that “the knowledge and experience which departments accumulate” is a valuable resource for policy making because it can “prevent failures and avoid reinventing the wheel”. Effective policy making thus requires “mechanisms for capturing institutional memory and making it easily accessible to staff”.225 For example, Defra’s failure to
incorporate lessons from the 2000 swine fever outbreak into a national emergency response plan partly contributed to the £3 billion cost of dealing with foot and mouth a year later.226
You are put in a post, you may know nothing about that particular area, but you are the expert. And it would be quite bad form actually to ring up your predecessor and say, ‘How do I deal with this United Nations election?’, you know, because we’re all brilliant analysts who can pick this up very quickly. I exaggerate, but the point is that the way that the structures are set up, and this is an absolutely crucial thing for policy, we don’t believe in our institutional memory and knowledge nearly as well as more nimble organisations.
Many of our interviewees said that failures to pass on knowledge emerged from a combination of cultural and structural factors:
227
One of the problems civil servants identified is that, as one put it, “we’ve never got to grips with managing [knowledge] through what we carry around in our heads”. Ministers often agree: as one noted, “there is surprisingly little handover from one minister to another... the sort of folk memory is very short”. Another confessed that “the funny thing is you never really know how other ministers... operate in their department”.
223 Senior civil servant interviewee.
224 Integrating analysts to policy teams may mean that the team manager also has to manage their
professional progression. This may not be easy: one interviewee noted that some economists preferred to be line managed by economists, since they better understand their language and development needs.
225 National Audit Office, Modern Policy-Making: Ensuring Policies Deliver Value for Money, 2001, p.59. The Sunningdale Institute’s analysis of Capability Reviews also concluded that a “more professional approach to knowledge capture and knowledge transfer” was needed – Sunningdale Institute, Take-off or Tail-off? An Evaluation of the Capability Reviews Programme, 2007, p.30.
226 National Audit Office, Good Government, 2008, p.28; available at:
http://www.nao.org.uk/idoc.ashx?docId=ea8e6a6e-9a50-4858-a867-17114318edce&version=-1 227 Senior civil servant interviewee.
7. Structures 79
The government admits that it has focused more on information management (the processes for creating, capturing and using information) than knowledge management.228 Nevertheless, it has
recently said it is a “core priority” to “move more towards being an organisation that builds on its collective experiences through securely sharing knowledge”.229 A knowledge management
strategy has been published, and a professional Knowledge and Information Management Function has been established, with a Network and a Skills Framework.230
Yet the government’s plan for action appears to rest on ensuring that “knowledge management and knowledge-sharing behaviours [are] integrated into core competencies at all levels”.231
Similarly, Defra’s knowledge and learning strategy expects staff to “help Defra retain knowledge when they move or leave”.232
The increased use of flexible pools makes the structural point even more pressing. As one civil servant argued:
In other words, the emphasis seems to lie on specifying required behaviours, rather than the organisational structures that shape these behaviours.
Inevitably we're moving more towards flexible resourcing and away from standing teams... And that's a challenge; it means you have to be much cuter about marshalling your expertise and your corporate memory. Your corporate memory is another thing the civil service has never needed to do in the past, but within about three years I'm going to need a proper corporate memory structure in [my policy area] because I can think of two or three people who will have retired, and I will no longer just be able to go to them and say, ‘Look, I've had this letter saying that we messed this company around in 1988, can you remember what happened?’
Flexible pools put greater pressure on structures to manage knowledge, since individuals’ incentives will move more towards developing transferable skills. The good news is that
departments have already started work: by 2009, ten departments reported they had a strategy in place to improve learning.233 The key is to make sure these strategies address the real
constraints on knowledge management; there is evidence that previous solutions have worked better in theory than in practice.234 We argue that flexible pools are the major new factor for
knowledge management that departments will have to deal with in the future.
228 HM Government, Information Matters: Building Government’s Capability in Managing Knowledge and
Information, 2008, p.10; available at: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/information-matters- strategy.pdf
229Ibid.
230 http://gkimn.nationalarchives.gov.uk/
231 HM Government, Information Matters, 2008, p.11.
232 Cited in National Audit Office, Helping Government Learn, 2009, p.30. 233Ibid, p.39.
8. Politics 80
8.
Politics
“Here’s the thing about modern politics, which politicians often don’t realise until it’s too late: politics is actually in the end about policy. And the best long term politics is the best long term policy. But you don’t always see that when you are in Government, to begin with particularly.” (Tony Blair, 2010)235