For the uninitiated, ‘information and knowledge management’ sounds like a fairly nebulous concept. Indeed, the handling of data is a very broad and diverse field – but it’s one that lies at the heart of many civil service reform programmes.

Evidence-based policy? Success here depends on policymakers getting the facts and figures to inform their thinking. Joint public service agreements? Civil servants will only be able to ensure such targets are met if they pool data with their counterparts in other departments, the wider public sector and beyond. Want to make it possible for a bereaved family to have minimal contact with the authorities, as in the ‘Tell Us Once’ project? That will require some serious thinking about the way personal information is shared across organisations.

Those are just the benefits. The Information Matters strategy, published today by the Knowledge Council (see box, right), also highlights some of the costs of not using public sector data in the right way. One tragic example is the death of Victoria Climbié, an eight-year-old who died following months of abuse by her guardians. Lord Laming’s inquiry into her death showed that she was known to four social service departments, three housing departments, two child-protection teams and two hospitals but, because they failed to talk to each other, was left with her guardians – and ultimately murdered by them.

Andrew Stott, the government’s deputy chief information officer and chairman of the Knowledge Council, says the Bichard Inquiry into the murders of two Soham children by a school caretaker who was also known to social services highlighted similar problems. “They were both failures of sharing information,” he explains. “In aggregate, the public services knew the information that could have prevented those crimes, and yet it wasn’t shared effectively with the people who needed to know.”

It is disasters like these – not to mention the losses of personal data that have blighted the government over the past year or so – that have resulted in government taking a much more structured approach to information. Natalie Ceeney, chief executive of the National Archives and head of the information and knowledge management profession, sums it up: “This strategy is about recognising that information is not peripheral, it is core. Government knows that people and money matter – it would say that its core assets are HR and financial management. We are saying that there is a third core asset, and that is information.”

Ceeney likens it to the developments in HR and, more recently, financial management, which have seen the civil service rank both fields much higher on its list of priorities: motivated employees equals more productive employees equals money, for instance. A recent report from consultancy Capgemini put the financial cost of mismanaging public sector information at £21bn. “If the government does the same report three times because individuals don’t know someone else has already done it, that’s money wasted,” Ceeney points out.

Although the web is now well ensconced in business and society, and Lord Laming’s inquiry reported in 2003, Ceeney does not believe that the government is behind the times by only now publishing its first strategy on information and knowledge management. “The UK government is ahead of every other government in its thinking about information as an asset,” she insists. “The commercial sector are equally just starting to get their heads around these concepts. I think the UK government is doing quite well at staying ahead of the curve.”

Ceeney adds that a lot of the work has already been done: the Knowledge Council was set up 18 months ago; in the last couple of years, most departments have appointed a head of information and knowledge management at the senior civil service level; grades six and seven are being trained in this area; there is a Senior Information Risk Officer (SIRO) on every department board; the National School of Government runs a course on information risk for non-executive board members; and permanent secretaries and chief executives have been made personally responsible for information as they are for budgets. What’s more, the 2008 review by the prime minister’s security adviser Robert Hannigan of data handling has led to tighter rules and a better understanding of individual responsibilities. “Government has already gone a long way to professionalise. We have now got to cement that,” says Ceeney.

There are two things that the archives’ chief executive emphasises time and again. One is how information is on a par with HR and finance; the other is how the civil service will only be successful in this endeavour if it completely changes its culture. Ceeney is ambitious: “We have got to make sharing knowledge the way we do things, as opposed to thinking that knowledge equals power and should be held on to.” And that attitude has to be universal. “It is not about [each department] having a skilled team ‘over there’; it is about understanding that information runs government,” she explains. “We’ve got to make it part of the culture of the civil service and build it into what they do.”

At a recent conference the chairman of the advisory panel on public sector information, Professor Sir David Rhind, proposed a statutory obligation to share information, to prevent civil servants erring on the side of caution. Others have suggested that the various new information roles that departments are introducing should be new positions, rather than being given to people who already have busy day jobs. But Stott says a prescriptive stance would be more of a hindrance than a help.

“There is a danger where you just set a tick-box system of compliance and people don’t think how best to fit it into their organisation,” he says. If everything is about compliance, Ceeney adds, “people tick the box and say ‘thank God that is over’.” And that, she continues, is the kind of attitude which leads to repeated data losses.

“If nobody is thinking about information as an asset and is just thinking about respecting rules and procedures, mistakes will happen because you’re not thinking. The Hannigan Review said we have to think of information as you would think of money.”

So it is not just about rules, and neither is it just about technology. In fact, massive technological innovations don’t necessarily transform the landscape, Stott says, arguing that email simply turned paper-shufflers into email-shufflers. “We’re moving documents around in the same way we did 10 or 20 years ago. We haven’t really thought about how we can exploit the new tools.”

Ask the pair for examples of good practice (see box) and the design of workplaces comes up several times. The Treasury’s refurbishment, Stott says, with a big coffee area right in the heart of the department, “has created a culture of ad hoc meetings where you bump into other people. It is not just about smart IT; it is about getting people talking to one another.” The Information Matters strategy lists the new GCHQ building as another example of where communication, accidental meetings and face-to-face time have been made the norm. “It is compelling,” says Ceeney, “they have very consciously changed their whole culture from one of ‘need to know’ to one of ‘need to share’.”

The Department for Children, School and Families’ (DCSF) new home in Sanctuary Buildings is another case, Ceeney says. “It is made around work spaces that are vibrant and where people talk to each other. They are also thinking about it holistically – they’re doing social networking on their website, and looking at their record-management tools. They’re thinking about it systematically, not as a little department over there doing ‘stuff’.”

In the strategy, the Knowledge Council has promised to set out an action plan by April 2009. Looking ahead, Stott and Ceeney already have some idea of what they expect to see in place by the end of next year. One thing, says Stott, was raised at WWW’s Civil Service Live (CSL) event: the difficulty of identifying and building links with colleagues working in other departments. As a result, the civil service is developing some experimental technology to help people search for the right person amongst the thousands of people across government.

“We will be piloting over the winter, and that will be visible by the time of the next CSL,” reveals Stott. Another programme that should be ready by the end of 2009, Ceeney adds, is the Web Continuity project, to make sure that links to government documents are maintained instead of getting broken when items are moved.

“The public has a perception that government is trying to hide information; actually, it is just the nature of the web,” Ceeney says. She is also keen to see easier-to-use public services – such as being able to fill in just one form, instead of the current two, to get free school meals. “In a year’s time we should see citizens’ services far easier to use because behind the scenes we are doing really clever stuff with the information,” Ceeney predicts.

There are also innovative ideas that need to be followed up by other departments – such as the Department for Innovation, University and Skills’ use of ‘wiki’ technology that records and displays all the contributions to consultations. “We’ve got lots of examples like that; we will have been successful if that is mainstream in a year’s time,” she says.

Most importantly though, Ceeney and Stott want the very ideas behind ‘information and knowledge management’ to become mainstream. That would include having really capable, senior civil service-level heads of knowledge and information management in every single department, says Ceeney. It would also mean “boards talking about information in the way they talk about money and people”, she adds. “At the moment they’re increasingly doing that, but they’re doing it in order to comply with the rules set by government. A year from now, we will have been successful if the discussions are not about how to meet the rules, but an excited conversation that asks: ‘what are we going to do with this information we have?’.”