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Jinette de Gooijer: Jinette de Gooijer is the Director of Innovative Practice Consulting Pty Ltd, Victoria, Australia and also at the Faculty of Constructed Enivronment, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.
Introduction
A common theme in contemporary organisations is the concern of managers for achieving cultural change through radical management approaches. Knowledge management is one such management approach, and is portrayed in the popular business literature as an innovation with the potential to affect the whole of an organisation's business, especially its processes and information systems (Cole, 1998; Harvard Business Review, 1998; Myers, 1996). The issue of how to measure the success of a knowledge management approach is one which is still being explored by organisations, researchers and management consultants. Most of the solutions offered are geared towards profit-making commercial firms: measuring intellectual capital and the intangible assets on a company's balance sheet for example. (Edvinsonn and Malone, 1997; Sveiby, 1997) These solutions have limited application for public sector management, and especially when applied to measuring cultural change within an organisation.
In this paper, I will describe an approach for embedding knowledge management within the overall business performance management model of public sector organisations, and for discerning the degree to which people use knowledge management in their work. This latter point alludes to the adoption of knowledge management by an individual and tracking changes in her or his behaviour. I will use a case study of the Victorian Department of Infrastructure to illustrate the two models.
Knowledge management in the department
Public sector management in the state of Victoria, Australia is experiencing profound change as it adopts a contractual model of public service. Since 1992, when a conservative government was elected, a major reform of government agencies has occurred. This is manifest in large reductions in staffing levels and the amalgamation of several small departments into five mega-agencies whose roles are to develop policy rather than directly deliver services. Service provision to welfare recipients or users of public utilities, for example, is delivered from the private or community sector under contractual arrangements to the relevant government agency (Alford et al., 1994).
In Victoria's public sector, the knowledge worker is a policy-maker, strategic planner, contract manager, information processor and developer of performance management systems. With the separation of...