United Nations Public Service Awards Case Studies

The Wiki of Civil Servants Auxiliary Pension Fund (M.T.P.Y in Greek) (http://tqm.wik.is) [tqm stands for Total Quality Management] has been created by the Department of Productivity in order to enhance and enrich firstly the intradepartmental communication, problem solving, brainstorming, evaluating, keeping online records of work, project management tracking and secondly the intra-organisational communication between departments and Directorates. One of the main organisational problems is that the agency’s bureaucratic environment has proved to be stagnant for a long time causing decline of productivity and complaints of the employees that they are not aware of the ongoing organisational situation. Upon their leave due to retirement employees regardless their rank used to take with them their working knowledge and not disseminating to the others. Lack of knowledge transfer has caused many difficulties to the continuation of experience and every one has to learn everything from the beginning.
Furthermore, casual approaches to problem solving leaves no organisational memory of the event with the risk that only the people involved in creating the solution walk away with any new insights.
The Fund’s Administration and especially the President of the Board of Trustees having realised that free communication flows from and to all directions is necessary for information and knowledge, has created a formal intranet network under the name “M.T.P.Y Personnel Information” in which each one of the 3 Directorates of the Fund’s Management upload all documents, decisions, guides, studies etc for disseminating knowledge.
But our official intranet is a “top-down” approach and is more or less static, acting as an e-library, useful but not giving the opportunity to the personnel to comment on that, build and share knowledge.
The Administration is highly receptive to propositions. Hence, by knowing the communication gap and the possibilities of all directions communication we created the Wiki.

What is the initiative about? (the solution)
The communication gap has been bridged by the C.S.A.P.F Wiki which is an innovative knowledge management tool. Our Wiki is only for internal use. We believe that we will be able to provide space for the public (shareholders, retirees, other agencies) in the near future. Listening to our clientele needs and respond in time will make us a unique Open Learning Organisation capable of understanding the environmental trends and effectively and efficiently provide qualitative services and solutions as a socially responsible agency. Social software such as wikis, blogs, forums provide organisations with means to document and leverage the moments of innovation with relative ease. Furthermore, the Wiki contains an open source “forum” [http://csapf.forumotion.net/forum.htm] for giving more freedom to the C.S.A.P.F employees to participate in a collaborative way of work, joining forces, assist other departments problem solving, deposit their ideas and create a norm of cooperation, boosting in parallel the organisational productivity. Hence, by creating and working with a Wiki and a Forum as Knowledge Management Platform we wish to move from static information of Web 1.0 to collaborative intranet tools of Web 2.0. Apparently, we face difficulties as every public organisation of 20th century based on a mechanistic model of management. But the vision of adopting an organisational mentality -of an open ecosystem that functions as an open system, exchanging energy with the environment, using feedback from its members and the society, calculating profits and losses through the financial crisis-, based on a new paradigm gives us the opportunity to change norms, attitudes and the essence of our work. The benefits of use of collaborative network are: 1. Access to all organisational content. 2. Real time document editing, 3. Employee-generated content. 4. Low-cost data integration. 5. Connect people dynamically, 6. Superior Office Connectivity, 7. Collaboration enabled. 8. Innovation facilitated. 9.Monitoring enabled and custom metrics produced. 10. Dashboards Another crucial feature of the collaborative organisational network is that it will assist and facilitate in a self organising manner the implementation of the Greek Law 3230 (Management by Objectives) and prepare the implementation of the Common Assessment Framework Model of Quality Management.

Who proposed the solution, who implemented it and who were the stakeholders?
The C.S.A.P.F “Wiki” and “Forum” have been created, uploaded and implemented by the Department of Productivity (namely Mr Manolis Tzouvelekas MPA, Dr George Kozyrakis and Mr Zafeirios Pagiotas, BA). Our Knowledge Management System is based on free and at no cost MindTouch Core edition, a state of the art world open source project, one of the most popular wiki and collaboration platforms ranked #1 in collaboration by Sourceforge.net. MindTouch Core is licensed under GPL v.2 and is most suitable for do-it-yourself developers, technical enthusiasts and for use in non-critical environments. Its features are: - Email notifications of page and section updates - User groups - User and group roles - Advanced user and group permissions - SSL encryption support for secure data transfer - Source code access - Complete access to web-service extensions - Write custom web-service extensions - Write custom PHP plugins - Complete access to DekiScript application authoring - Downloadable for self install

Describe how and when the initiative was implemented by answering these questions
a. What were the strategies used to implement the initiative? In no more than 500 words, provide a summary of the main objectives and strategies of the initiative, how they were established and by whom.
We were asked by the President of the Fund to apply a strategy that will create and sustain the knowledge of the Organisation in a creative, open and collaborative way, giving the possibility to everyone to express their thoughts, agreements and disagreements on organisational transformation, everyday routines, processes and procedures. C.S.A.P.F is one of the oldest Pension Funds in Greece, established in 1867. Theoretically, there has to be stored a pile of cumulative knowledge of nearly one and a half century. Unfortunately this is not the case. It is anticipated that the implementation of this Knowledge Management System will deposit our knowledge in the fields of our business and services. This open source initiative will allow colleagues’ interconnectedness not only in the office but from home or on the road. The provision of a right tool and adequate transparency gives the opportunity to large and diverse group of people to add value that can complete even the most complex tasks with only a minimum of central control. The objectives are the development of mentality of knowledge transfer, measurement of knowledge, tacit knowledge storage, organisational understanding of knowledge as one of its main assets.

b. What were the key development and implementation steps and the chronology? No more than 500 words
The Knowledge Management System has been created in 25th April 2009 as an initiative of a servant (the Admin of the Wiki). Shortly after, the other members of the Department contributed and continue to contribute in the enrichment and content update of the Knowledge Platform. Phase 1: Decision of the Administration to implement a Knowledge Management System Phase 2: Implementation and use in the Productivity Department (pilot phase) Phase 3: Organisational application (initial steps) Phase 4: Continuous improvement and real time feedback Gradually, since April many colleagues have registered and participate in this collaborative platform.

c. What were the main obstacles encountered? How were they overcome? No more than 500 words
Initially some Heads of the Departments and Directorates reacted to this initiative due to lack of knowledge in regard to Web 2.0 technologies, their functionality and the advantages of these sort of productivity tools. As it is mentioned in last question of this query, C.S.A.P.F top management through an informative campaign managed to disseminate these new tools.

d. What resources were used for the initiative and what were its key benefits? In no more than 500 words, specify what were the financial, technical and human resources’ costs associated with this initiative. Describe how resources were mobilized
The building, feeding, use and feedback incomes of the C.S.A.P.F Wiki used in an optimal way the available organisational resources. Financially the cost is null. This is one of the advantages of the open source software we use. If in the near future appears the need of upgrading the Knowledge System due to its full functionality and contribution to organisational effectiveness the Fund will purchase the edition in need (approximately 5$ per user per month). The same goes for the Forum tool. It is free, flexible and the only necessary resource is time effort from the Administrator and the members of the Forum to write and share their ideas and solutions for boosting the productivity and collaborate openly in a democratic manner along with the middle and top management of the Fund for assure the Fund’s viability in the future.

Is the initiative sustainable and transferable?
This initiative is fully sustainable and transferable as a good practice in the public sector. Web 2.0 and specifically Gov 2.0 tools have altered the cause and role of e-government. Social Networking tools, such as Wikis, Forums, Blogs, Facebook, Twitter etc in cooperation with Web 1.0 tools such as Websites, intranets, e-mail can boost the creation and dissemination of knowledge and thus the productivity, transparency and organisational effectiveness. As we mentioned before the open software global community has provided the tools to create a new paradigm and a new vision for public administrations and citizens worldwide. The era that the prevailing motto “knowledge is power” is past. “Knowledge has to be disseminated” and “Knowledge adds value to the Organisation” are 21st century core phrases. If we want to change our organisational mentality as public servants and create an organisational culture prone to innovation, open administrative ecosystem trusted by its members and society beyond the bureaucratic and managerial model, we must start talking a new language, transfer the organisation to a more community of practice and knowledge body, accompanied the hierarchy with the knowledge network and assign new positions that do not exist in Greek Public Administration such as Chief Learning Officers, Chief Knowledge Officers and Knowledge Offices or Departments.

What are the impact of your initiative and the lessons learned?
After the on-line presentation to the Directorates and Departments of the C.S.A.P.F Knowledge Management System and the handling of user manuals, the personnel of the Fund showed great interest to participate due to knowledge collaboration and participation in intra-organisational issues. Additionally, the encouraging of decision–making and personnel suggestions for new ideas, innovations and improvement of the current organisational effectiveness and efficiency.


Institution Name:		CIVIL SERVANTS AUXILIARY PENSION FUND
Institution Type:		Public Agency
Contact Person:		Emmanuel Tzouvelekas
Title:		Public Servant
Telephone/ Fax:		00302131500073
Institution's / Project's Website:		00302103251011
E-mail:		mtpy@mtpy.gr
Address:		Lykourgou 12
Postal Code:		10551
City:		Athens
State/Province:		Attiki
Country:		Greece

The Problem

Solution and Key Benefits

Actors and Stakeholders

(a) Strategies

(b) Implementation

(c) Overcoming Obstacles

(d) Use of Resources

Sustainability and Transferability

Lessons Learned

Contact Information