DESA outnumbers all UN Agencies and Departments for the number of Consultants and Corporate Agreements issued as of 2009

Recommendations

Recommendation 1

29. The Secretary-General, in developing the modalities for sharing information contained in consultants’ reports on management-related issues, should consider including a requirement that all reports prepared by the Secretariat and presented to legislative bodies that include information extracted from consultants’ reports must also include an explanation of the background of the related consultancies and how the information has been used.

30. The Department of Management accepted recommendation 1.

Recommendation 2

31. The Department of Management, in developing an information security toolkit to provide hands-on guidance for applying Secretary-General’s bulletin ST/SGB/ 2007/6 on the classification and secure handling of confidential information, should require heads of departments and offices to develop criteria that are unique to their operations to guide the categorization of information according to its sensitivity.

32. The Department of Management accepted recommendation 2, stating that its Archives and Records Management Section would be available to assist departments and offices in identifying resources, including practice toolkits and guidelines, to implement a records management system meeting the requirements of ST/SGB/2007/6 for handling consultant reports and executive summaries.

Recommendation 3
33. The Department of Management, within the context of the Working Group on Knowledge Management, should initiate a taxonomy for consultants’ reports to organize their storage and easy retrieval.

34. The Department of Management accepted recommendation 3.

Recommendation 4

35. The Department of Management should define the requirements to develop a platform that would serve as a central repository for storing consultants’ reports within the Secretariat.

36. The Department of Management accepted recommendation 4, stating that the Office of Information and Communications Technology would be requested to develop a platform that would serve as a central repository for storing consultants’ reports within the Secretariat. However, once the platform has been developed, each individual department or office shall be responsible for the maintenance of effectiverecords systems to ensure that executive summaries and full reports of consultants on management-related issues are filed properly and can be accessed in a timely manner in response to requests from a Member State. A decentralized approach for storing consultants’ reports based on a common technological platform is the most efficient way to handle this problem.