Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Karl Kendrick Chua (File photo)
MANILA – As the coronavirus pandemic has increased the need to improve on knowledge management and digitalization of processes, Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Karl Kendrick Chua said now is the right time to push for this to help future policymakers.
In his remarks during the last day of the three-day virtual Asian Development Bank (ADB) Knowledge Forum 2021 on Friday, Chua said many processes in the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) are still done manually and in silos, thus, this proved challenging following the work-from-home arrangement implemented since last year to address the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19).
He, thus, vowed to “give the next administration a stronger NEDA foundation in the areas of organizational improvement, human resource, the use of data science, technology, innovation, innovative business processes, digital transformation, and knowledge management.”
“We are currently facing an unprecedented crisis and we need to document lessons learned to help policymakers today and in the future. Hence, we need to have a system in place to keep and share this knowledge more efficiently and effectively,” he said.
The ADB has teamed up with NEDA, which was formalized through a memorandum of understanding signed in December last year, to strengthen the agency’s knowledge-generation, dissemination, and management services and capacity.
Chua said the lender has assisted the agency “in defining the functions of our new Knowledge Management Division under the Development Information Staff.”
“These will be key in making our systems more efficient,” he said.
He said the pandemic paved the way for the fast-tracking of needed reforms in the agency and the government in general.
“For the country to reach its next stage of development, and to sustain it as an upper-middle-income country, we need to innovate. And for this to become a national policy, we need to set an example within NEDA and within our agencies,” he said.
He said NEDA is currently in the process of creating “dashboards and enhancing our data repositories so we can have a “single source of truth.”
This move, he said “will allow us to monitor programs, projects, and internal processes more efficiently and give us more time to focus on the more value-adding aspects of our work.”
“While more work is needed, we are glad to have taken the first step towards institutionalizing knowledge management. I am optimistic that our partnership (with ADB) will pave the way for NEDA to become an even more future-ready organization and set the example for the rest of the public sector,” he added. (PNA)
