Sunday, 15 August 2010

UNPAN a failed initiative since 2005 - OIOS recommended to DESA to shut it down

OIOS Report on Failure of UNPAN (DPADM Website) seem to be available on WIKILEAKS

The report suggest that UNPAN/DPADM have no control over the information uploaded by Partners and suggesting that UNPAN leadership (Ms. Qian) "had no means to verify the information being uploaded".

On Page 17, recommendation 15-21,

OIOS recommends that DESA make no further investment in the expansion of UNPAN until DPADM has taken steps to;
  • Clearly delineate its critical knowledge products (AN2004/540/01/015);
  • Take user interest into account in developing its knowledge products (AN2004/54001/016).
  • Select Partners who are aligned in terms of their relevance to DPADM's critical knowledge products (AN2004/540/01/017);
  • Reduce the number of databases and align the data storage structure to match user interest (AN2004/540/01/018);
  • Review its and the UN's exposure to reputational risk due to having inadequate control over the information uploaded by its Partners in languages other than English (AN2004/540/01/019);
  • Pay urgent attention to the development of UNPAN's interactive features-their design, usage and analysis to make the network effective(AN2004/540/01/020);
  • Review the volume of interactivity on its databases which reflect user interest in the contents of itsdatabases (AN2004/540/01/021).
In the spirit of transparency, maybe DPADM management who is pushing so hard to retool the division towards Knowledge Management, would like the staff of DPADM to actually read the OIOS report at the time on the matter and openly discuss its relevance to current ongoing activities and how the Division is trying to implement OIOS recommendations (if any).

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

In his bid to promote Ms. Haiyan over numerous other qualified candidates, Mr. Sha Zukang, the USG/DESA rootled DPADM's TOR and heavily oriented it to so-called knowledge development (incidentally at the time Bertucci retired Ms. Haiyan, a Chinese, was serving as Branch Chief of the Knowledge Management Branch).

Both of these decisions - retooling of DPADM's mandate and promotion of Ms. Haiyan to the Director's position- are clear example of flagrant if not wilfull distortion of mandate of DPADM and outright nepotism, respectively.