Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 17th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview II. Working Group on E-government Author(s) Yana Stoeva Technical University of Sofia Sofia Bulgaria Lina Stoeva Title K- government – Taking e-government on the next level File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract The world is changing around us at an incredible pace due to remarkable technological progress and innovation. The knowledge-based economy, we now live in, poses some challenges but also opportunities before us. There is an ever growing need for the Governments around the world to keep up and respond to this process. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Knowledge Management (KM) has for some time been at the core of government tasks. Nevertheless, indications are that the public sector has been falling behind in these practices, compared to the private sector. This realization is the compelling reason why we choose to concentrate our efforts in addressing this high on the policy agendas issue about KM in the public sector. Hence, the title of the proposed paper is about K-Government and the application of Knowledge Management /KM/ in Government organisations. The herewith presented survey on the aforementioned topic will be organised into four major interconnected sections following a logical sequence. The main objective of the First section – the Introduction – will be to introduce the idea of the Knowledge based governance, to briefly give the evolution of KM in the Public sector because in fact, without the widespread application of ICT, e-government, e-learning, and knowledge management would not be possible. The aim of the Second section – Transforming Government with KM – will be to address some of the practical applications of KM as a tool for good governance. In this part of the research the need for change in the bureaucratic culture will be assessed in connection with its transformation from “One size fits all” to more “Citizen-centric” delivery of the public services. The Third section, namely – Benchmark approach – will try to present and assess wherever possible, real-life public sector cases and examples used to illustrate good practice, as well as some of the pitfalls of poor application. In this section, a comparison between public and private sector`s applications of KM strategies may be useful in order to provide some benchmark examples for the public organisations to learn from the private ones which are, as mentioned at the beginning, ahead in the realisation of KM techniques. The irony is that the public sector may already have more of the answers to its own problems than it thinks and the most natural conclusion of this is for the public organisations to learn not only from the private ones but also from themselves. The final Fourth part of the paper – the Conclusion – will seek to summarise the core findings of the previous three sections and to give some practical suggestions on how the present situation may be improved based on the analyses of the literature and on the prevailing views of the world gurus on this hot topic. In conclusion, one may say that the chosen topic of the paper proposal about the application of KM in the public sector, which is globally the largest employer of people and repository of information, managing information and knowledge is an extremely problematic area to address. The essence of both resources is that they are intangible yet they are also, paradoxically, where the greatest value and potential for improvement is located. By bringing issues of connected governance through the use of KM strategies, the proposed paper intends to debate around an important issue: that K-Government has great potential for public sector transformation.
