Process

The capacity building process constitutes several procedures that must work together to ensure successful intervention across local government. Therefore, it is advantageous to support the entire spectrum of processes (from strictly structured to unstructured), including activity- or document-centric and people-intensive, in consort with their adaptive integration. Additionally, it is necessary that adaptive process definition and composition is supported, with the intelligence for automatic process definition inference, given different situations which may call for variations in the process. Essentially, there are diverse, different requirements for task coordination and cooperation within and between activities, considering the diversity of processes.

Other elements necessitated, preferable and/or beneficial within this component encompass:

 Modelling workflow, useful in defining roles and delineating how teams understand their job functions and work processes. It is also important to determine the degree to which it is routine, with pre-specified actions requiring limited discretion.

 Automation of manual processes to the greatest extent possible, aids in mitigating delay, along with utilising templates, for a degree of customisation.

 Leveraging routine activities with process automation to increase operational efficiency, as well as to capture audit trails of activities and data, through tracking what has been done and monitoring deviations from plans.

 Monitoring performance (consistency, speed, output rate), to avoid built-in delays, in conjunction with the provision of support for information or knowledge sharing for the most unstructured, and support for organising in the most structured instances.

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Insight into how these processes perform in practice is critical to avoid failure. The execution of processes consists of people inefficiently doing their jobs amid a multitude of bureaucratic controls, with little or no visibility and control over what is happening outside the scope of their specific job function. Facilitating process awareness allows an awareness and perception into the impact of the actions of participants, as well as how sub-processes affect the global process or the organisations as a whole and their contribution to the strategic objectives.

Additional factors considered advantageous or crucial to realising the objectives of a collaborative effort include:

 A common and shared understanding of objectives, needs, and results with intermediate impact measuring metrics.

 Supporting seamless access to process support resources with ability to work on, share, and manage process models in a collaborative online environment creates greater insight, effectiveness and efficiency.

 Reinforcing integration across a diverse set of systems, platforms, and services. Process ownership, aligned responsibility and authority to drive process implementation.

5.4.2.4 Knowledge

Standardised operation and process terminologies, concepts, techniques and tools, in consort with harmonising all associated components and factors are crucial to ensure effective communication. An absence of knowledge results in a lack of insight, which affects the involvement or participation of stakeholders. Knowledge sharing of coordination mechanisms, such as schedules and plans to facilitate mutual adjustments to the activities of others without the need for negotiation, is critical to facilitate collaboration.

As people are involved in performing tasks, they need whatever knowledge is necessary to execute such tasks and to encourage the appropriate use of judgment. While some of this knowledge is extant in the mind of the user, and arises from experience (tacit knowledge), other forms of knowledge extend from external sources, for instance documents (explicit knowledge). Additionally, particular types of knowledge emanate from contextual information, which increases the awareness of people of the situation and circumstances, taking into account factors and contingencies related to other users. This makes certain elements and factors requisite, appropriate or expedient to ensure effective collaboration, in relation to knowledge, incorporating:

 Support of knowledge integration and providing simple access and manipulation mechanisms for querying distributed knowledge repositories or knowledge bases.

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 Facilitating methods and procedures to correlate and analyse data effectively - intelligently query, infer, and reason over the cumulative data.

 Presentation of information in an easy-to-understand manner.

 The usage of ontologies and specified vocabularies, engendering shared terminology and machine-readable codes to be used in specific instances.

 Providing context driven and personalised automated query/dissemination to avoid overload, and to mitigate manual searches by supporting automated search and translation processes.

 Matching heterogeneous data by employing ontology-based integration to support and provide an underlying structure for the alignment of meanings of data and context.

 Intelligent archiving and content management, which assists in capturing, retaining and distributing information, in accordance with a planned and strategised life-cycle.

5.4.2.5 Information

Disparate archiving standards exist in the public sector. Relative to their autonomy, organisations archive their documents using individually selected methods. The distributed agencies can collaborate with each other by exchanging data; however, they have different data formats and communication methods. Similarly to knowledge dissemination, this necessitates the need for a common dictionary to attempt to consolidate different concepts and their interpretations or meanings. Through a shared vocabulary, and associated ontology links, the foundation and capability of machine logic, interpretation, and inference can be provided.

Factors, issues and components which relate to information and are deemed necessary, beneficial or valuable include:

 The provision of the capacity for individuals in an organisation to decide or dictate what information they wish to provide about their activities to entities from various other organisations.

 Ensuring integration, in order to eliminate multiple versions of the same document, inconsistent coding, manual re-entry of information. and misinterpretation.

 Unifying fragmented information, to improve information access and awareness, which will assist collaborative interaction between distributed organisations.

 Supplying a single point of access to information from multiple sources, in conjunction with support for data visualisation, to spot trends and patterns utilising graphs, considering the potentially large volumes of information.

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 Automating information processing, while maintaining support for participants to use individual judgment in decision making.

 Monitoring of ease of use, access time, relevance, timeliness, completeness, appropriateness and conciseness.

 Semantic interoperability, to enable machine processable logic, inference, knowledge discovery, and data alliance between different information sources or systems, allowing systems to exchange and interpret data based on a predefined ontology of shared meaning of terms and expressions; however, this must be done securely.

 Customising access to large amounts of information through the usage of context information, considering the large number of role players.

5.4.2.6 Application

Different tools are employed in the public sector to support coordination related work. In addition to technology utensils, such as spreadsheets or word processing documents, there are a range of different implements and initiatives that gather and analyse information on progress, relative to capacity building in municipalities. Many are ad-hoc, and subscribe to unique specifications. The predominant information management programmes employed subscribe to creating and managing content centrally, while primarily depending on individuals for achievement. This emphasises the need to provide a well-designed, integrated tool for analysts, instead of an awkward combination of disjointed utensils. Currently, spreadsheets do not provide adequate functionality and guidance; they are mostly sporadic and disorganised and the use of technology consumes a great deal of time and effort. As information exists in diverse, varied parts on multiple systems, in several geographic locations and is not directly controlled, the existing approaches to managing information and knowledge are deemed too basic for the complexity of the environment. To mitigate these factors there are certain elements, implements and components which could assist in engendering effective collaboration towards a common objective, encompassing:

 Better user interfaces, with aggregation and effective decision making guides.

 Supporting a scalable/seamless application level integration of tools, which assumes different roles in a collaborative environment, to alleviate the burden and frustration from manually combining tools towards a particular purpose.

 The ability to present applicable information in different ways to various users, based on the user profile, through a customised and personalised setting.

 Supporting the dynamic integration of several visualisation applications to make information more meaningful.

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5.4.2.7 Infrastructure

Presently, work systems operate largely in isolation from one another. The current strategy of establishing a human infrastructure to effect integration and coordination in the public sector is inadequate. There are no computerised links between systems, meaning that an ICT facility to expedite asset improvement and possible automation is lacking.

Existing support applications are provided by different vendors, with members using multiple applications to support their coordination efforts, including legacy applications. The lack of integration causes extra work and delays as pertinent information or knowledge from other agencies is not accessible and, considering the partially paper based approach, is difficult. Principally, the attainment of network or infrastructure interoperability may be facilitated through taking advantage of the internet. Engendering an efficient, effective collaborative venture across distributed environments and ensuring integration therefore requires certain mechanisms and capabilities in a shared technical infrastructure, considered prerequisites, advantageous or critical, inclusive of:

 Contemporary technological support that assists in understanding the environment and value of content, requiring minimal human intervention.

 Enabling interoperation and integration between various participants, at assorted levels of granularity, from basic communications and information exchange to the organisational level, extending beyond boundaries.

 Expediting communication between heterogeneous information systems and software applications, to ensure the accurate, effective and consistent exchange of data, which is then utilised in a meaningful manner.

 The solution must incorporate and be applicable to unstructured and structured information systems.

Essentially, the infrastructure should provide support for a loosely coupled approach to account for cross-platform distribution, interoperability, scalability, integration of applications, and legacy systems across diverse, heterogeneous environments.

5.4.2.8 People

An absence of knowledge can result in a lack of insight, or awareness, which can affect participation and commitment in collaborative activities. Some stakeholders asserted that meeting their counterparts when the opportunity presents provides great benefits, relative to learning and sharing views on training issues. This is in addition to the need to avoid manual error-prone processes and the necessity for tools to make intelligent queries or reasonable inferences from data, given limited manpower. Staff turnover causes inefficiency, for instance, overloading or the over-extension of personnel.

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Therefore, it is necessary to facilitate collaboration, communication and knowledge sharing among the different parties within the process and network. The attainment of this could potentially be achieved through the inclusion of some or all of the following dynamics, aspects or components:

 Support for advanced synchronous communication, including voice and video, in addition to simpler forms, such as instant messaging.

 Utilising a shared workspace to facilitate user involvement, representation, cross- functional communication, and informal social interaction.

 Engendering the creation of a heterogeneous working group, comprising representatives from various departments.

 Enabling balancing the load of work, through employing role and responsibility auditing, and monitoring work distribution to prevent overload, which, in turn, ensures accountability.

 Providing a single point of access to shared spaces, which facilitates social gathering and interaction.

 Support role based access control.

5.4.2.9 Finance

Regarding funding, incidents may occur where the current task exceeds the monies available. Alternatively, the funding allocation may not be measured in terms of value return. For instance, continuous investment into storage devices is not a sustainable approach to solving unremitting growth in content information, whereas conjoint investment into shared, existing infrastructures that provide such services may be more cost effective and sustainable. To ensure effective monetary management the most crucial elements within the mechanism are:

 The need to monitor and track budget allocation.

 The exploitation of visualisation tools to support evaluation, forcasting and/or prioritisation.