By Thomas B Riley, Executive Director and Chair, Commonwealth Centre for Electronic Governance Reproduced by permission of eGov Monitor Weekly. The Knowledge economy is about how the new technologies have transformed the way we think and act. A typical far reaching effect is a shift away from top-down hierarchical systems to horizontal structures such as networks of semi-autonomous teams. The author outlines some of the structural changes needed to benefit from the knowledge economy and the role government has to play.

Collaboration between police and probation services and other agencies such as housing, health and social services, is providing better protection for the public. The collaborators operate under the umbrella of the Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements. The MPPA panels were set up in 2001 and they operate in each of the 42 police and probation areas.The panels provide mechanisms for sharing information to ensure accurate assessments of risk are made about potentially dangerous offenders so that plans to manage the risks can be drawn up. Currently some 52,000 offenders are covered by the arrangements, about 21,000 of whom are registered sex offenders.

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Seeking out new ways to exploit opportunities to increase productivity and enhance the performance of public bodies is at the heart of a new research initiative. AIM, the UK management research initiative, has appointed twelve academics to carry out what is claimed to be the first large scale public sector management research project. AIM is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).Anne Sigismund Huff, director of AIM, said: “Delivering better public services is an important focus of domestic policy debate. A long term investment in research on the public services is required, not least because of difficult methodological and data collection issues, especially for research involving international comparisons.”

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