Evaluating the Status of Information and Knowledge Management in a Large Municipality

In modem society, municipalities and cities are accountable for various societal service missions. In addition, cities and municipalities are expected to take a responsible role in solving the wicked problems such as climate change and ageing of population, coupled with sudden challenges, like the COVID-19 virus, together with the government. This kind of development has increased the role of municipalities and cities as decision-makers in global and social challenges and their ability to use information has become a critical success factor in modem society. By systematically exploiting information use possibilities in the public sector, it is possible not only to make more informed decisions, but also to serve the citizens better and use resources more effectively. The purpose of information and knowledge management is to collect, process, organize, store, share and utilize information in a way that enhances individual and organizational decision making and operations. The current trend of digitalization in the cities and municipalities is changing the way these activities can be carried out. At present, public organization's ability to manage its information and knowledge resources is critical and there are still many lessons to be learnt in taking the best out of digitalization. In this study, a maturity evaluation instrument (Jaaskelainen et al., 2019) based on Choo's knowledge management model (2002) is used to evaluate the status of information and knowledge management in a large municipality organization. The aim of the study is to increase our understanding on the status of information and knowledge management practices used in the digital era governance of public sector. Theoretical part of the paper analyses and combines research literature related to digital era governance and knowledge management in order to find out connections between these research areas for the empirical analysis of this study. The empirical context of the study is a large Finnish municipality that has gone through a large scale administrative and managerial system reform a few years ago. A survey will be used to gather the empirical data for this study. Around 300 responses representing all the branches of the municipality were received. The results show that organizational information and knowledge management requires improvement especially in relation to organizing and storing knowledge, knowledge acquisition and information products and services. However, performance benefits of information and knowledge management can be obtained only through successful knowledge usage.