Jan 04

To provide technical assistance and developmental knowledge to fight poverty and disease, the World Bank first had to overhaul its antiquated I.T. system and build a global network.

Amidst the World Bank’s recent management brouhaha, a more significant event has gone overlooked—the bank’s dramatic transformation from a hierarchical source of low-interest loans to a decentralized organization that uses knowledge-sharing technologies to fight poverty and disease in developing nations. The enabler of this transformation: the bank’s overhaul of its antiquated I.T. infrastructure and construction of a truly global network.

Using I.T. to Fight Poverty

Last month, Robert B. Zoellick became the 11th president of the World Bank. A few days before he walked into the bank’s Washington, D.C., headquarters, he issued a short statement: “The Bank’s Board, staff, and many stakeholders know we face large challenges,” he said. “The world has changed enormously since the creation of the Bank some 60 years ago. This accomplished institution of development, reconstruction, and finance not only needs to adapt: It must lead the way to achieving sustainable globalization, founded upon inclusive growth, opportunity, and respect for personal dignity.”

It’s clear Zoellick knows what he’s getting into.

The World Bank has had more than its share of turmoil, particularly in its senior management ranks. In addition to the June 30 resignation of Zoellick’s predecessor, the controversial Paul D. Wolfowitz, the bank’s former vice president and CIO Mohamed Muhsin, who retired in November 2005, has come under a cloud of suspicion.

But amidst all the recent management brouhaha, a more significant event at the World Bank has been largely overlooked. This is the dramatic transformation from what was a top-down, hierarchical Washington, D.C.-based source of low-interest developmental loans and grants to emerging countries, to a decentralized, front-line, matrix organization that’s using information and communications technologies to fight poverty, AIDS/HIV and other diseases, and environmental degradation.

At the core of the bank’s strategy has been its hugely ambitious effort to empower its clients—many of then technically disenfranchised—with the tools and knowledge-sharing capabilities they need to improve their lives and bring them into the mainstream of the world economy.

It hasn’t been easy. In order to create a working knowledge management system, the bank’s information infrastructure and communications network had to be completely overhauled.

Muhsin, the World Bank’s first CIO, led the revamping of the bank’s antiquated I.T. infrastructure into what is now the foundation of the bank’s knowledge-sharing network, which has been highly praised by noted I.T. management luminaries such as Tom Davenport and F. Warren McFarlan.

After 17 years, Muhsin retired from the bank in November 2005. But then two months later, Wolfowitz, who had just become World Bank president, told The Washington Post that while most bank staffers were honest, “I’m aware of a particularly serious set of allegations involving a senior bank official.”

At the time Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary and one of the principal proponents of the war in Iraq, charged that “staffers had become too comfortable” with the anti-corruption unit, which he claimed had been run with “very puzzling negligence” in the past. That was when he dropped a bombshell, noting that one of the bank’s senior officials was in the Department of Institutional Integrity’s crosshairs.

Wolfowitz wouldn’t name the individual, as the investigation was ongoing. Soon after, however, the Post said it obtained internal bank documents that indicated the official in question was none other than Muhsin, the head of the bank’s Information Solutions Group (ISG) and CIO.

According to The Washington Post and U.S. News & World Report, Muhsin was being investigated for having been given stock in one of the bank’s key I.T. contractors, which U.S. News named as outsourcer Satyam Computers. Satyam didn’t respond to e-mails and calls regarding the matter.

While Muhsin wouldn’t comment on the matter, his lawyer, Joshua Hochberg, told Baseline that the retirement had been planned. “I think it’s unfair and highly distasteful that unfounded rumors have circulated at the end of [Muhsin’s] 17 years of dedicated service during which his integrity was never questioned,” Hochberg said. He added that Muhsin expects “full exoneration.”

Ironically, Wolfowitz resigned his post, effective June 30, after an internal panel tasked with investigating the lucrative pay and promotion package Wolfowitz arranged in 2005 for his partner, Shaha Riza, found him guilty of breaking bank rules. Wolfowitz was replaced by Zoellick, former deputy U.S. secretary of state, while Muhsin was succeeded as CIO by Guy-Pierre De Poerck, previously CIO of corporate business informatics at the International Finance Corp. (IFC), a bank affiliate.

Sharing Knowledge

The World Bank is a major source of financial and technical assistance to developing countries around the world. It isn’t a bank in the conventional sense, but is made up of two unique development institutions: the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), which aims to reduce poverty in middle-income and creditworthy poorer countries by promoting sustainable development through loans; and the International Development Association (IDA), the part of the bank that helps the world’s poorest countries.

Owned by 185 member countries, the World Bank has about 10,000 employees—7,000 of them in the organization’s headquarters, the remainder in field offices in 80 member countries. It also retains thousands of consultants, many of them retired bank officials. The Bank Group, which includes the IBRD and IDA as well as other affiliated entities such as the IFC, loans out about $20 billion annually, making it one of the world’s largest sources of development assistance.

Founded shortly after World War II, the bank was established initially to focus on European reconstruction projects. Beginning in the 1950s, it began financing mega-projects like dams and roads. Its focus changed dramatically, however, in 1996 when James Wolfensohn (not to be confused with his predecessor, Paul Wolfowitz) was named president of the bank.

An Australian-born investment banker, Wolfensohn, who didn’t respond to requests for an interview, is characterized as “brilliant and a highly persuasive speaker” by several former bank officials. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen, made a fortune on Wall Street and agreed to head up the World Bank in July 1995 after being nominated by President Clinton.

Almost immediately he set about changing the behemoth of global developmental economics from a centralized, “headquarters-driven” organization to a decentralized, matrix-networked operation that relied on member countries to carry out and supervise their own project development and make their own decisions. To facilitate this, Wolfensohn told the World Bank Board of Governors in an October 1996 speech: “The revolution in information technology increases the potential value of [the bank’s development] efforts by vastly extending their reach. We need to invest in systems that will enhance our ability to gather information, and experience and share it with our clients.”

One of the pillars of Wolfensohn’s vision was knowledge management, or knowledge sharing. ” … [W]e will build a world-class knowledge management system throughout the bank to capture and organize our knowledge, make it more readily accessible to the staff, clients and partners, and strengthen the knowledge dissemination and capacity building efforts,” he said in an internal bank document. ” … It will connect with universities, foundations and other world class sources of knowledge so that the bank becomes a clearinghouse in knowledge about development.”

In order to support a global decentralized organization that was close to the bank’s constituency, and deliver, as a Harvard case study (Enabling Business Strategy With I.T. at the World Bank, Dec. 22, 2003) noted, “more comprehensive and integrated (and therefore more effective) development solutions by increasing collaboration, consultation and knowledge sharing both within the organization and with partners and shareholders at all points in the process,” the bank had to completely rebuild an out-of-date I.T. structure and construct a far-flung global network from the ground up.

To carry out this mission, Wolfensohn, in 1997, appointed the bank’s first-ever chief information officer, Sri Lankan native Mohamed Muhsin, who had worked as the director of the bank’s information-technology services but came from a largely business background. Before joining the bank, he had worked in Zambia, where he served as finance director for the state-owned mining and industrial corporation and eventually became an adviser to president Kenneth Kaunda. In 1988, he joined the World Bank as a country officer for the Eastern Africa region. Wolfensohn made Muhsin vice president of the Information Solutions Group and told him to revamp the bank’s I.T. infrastructure.

Though Muhsin, through his attorney, declined to be interviewed for this story, in a September 1997 bank newsletter, he described ISG as “the newly consolidated information management organization headed by the CIO [himself].” The information systems units of six different bank groups, Muhsin said, “have been brought together to support the [bank’s] business strategies… We are integrating our work around four Strategic Partnership Programs.” These were:

• Support for decentralization and field office operations

• Support for knowledge sharing and knowledgemanagement

• Comprehensive renewal of bank information systems

• Implementation of cost effectiveness review recommendations

In a subsequent interview with Asia Pacific Development Technology, he described his mission as follows: “We position ourselves at a major intersection of the network economy where we help to connect global learning opportunities with investment assistance to governments. Put another way, it’s about having two currencies: the currency of money and the currency of knowledge. We believe our work in bringing knowledge and information to developing countries is as important as the capital and investments that we provide as an engine for development.”

The bank appointed a program director for knowledge management, Stephen Denning, who reported to Muhsin; created a $55 million budget for knowledge management for fiscal 1998, 3% of the bank’s entire administrative budget; brought in Arthur Andersen to prepare a report as to how this initiative should be managed; and by March 1997 had a sign-off on the project from Wolfensohn and the bank’s board of directors. All systems were “go,” on paper at least.

“My goal is to make the World Bank the first port of call when people need knowledge about development,” Wolfensohn said at the 1997 annual meeting. “By the year 2000, we will have in place a global communications link, videoconferencing and interactive classrooms, affording our clients all around the world full access to our information bases—the end of geography as we at the bank have known it.”

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Pembahasan :

Disini dilihat bagaimana President WorldBank komit terhadap visi WorldBank untuk mensejahterakan dan mengurangi kemiskinan didunia, salah satu strategy dengan mengimplementasikan Knowledge Management.

WorldBank menggunakan sumber external knowledge selain interbnal knowledge dengan merekrut Mohamed Muhsin sebagai chief information officer yang memilki knowledge yang besar dalam hal pembangunan Information System di berbagai organisasi keuangan, perubahan besar setelah bergabung dengan WorldBank antara lain :

  • Mendukung Desentralisasi dari kantor operasional World Bank
  • Mendukung Knowledge Management dan Knowledge Sharing
  • Mendukung Bank Information System yang meliputi seluruh aspek perbankan.
  • Mendukung pembiayaan yang efektif

Dengan knowledge yang dimiliki WorldBank, WorldBank mengharapkan agar setiap orang ataupun organisasi yang ingin mendapatkan knowledge tentang Pengembangan dengan menyediakan fasilitas belajar seperti konfrensi video, kelas yang interaktif, mengunjungi client di seluruh dunia aga client mendapatkan penjelasan yang sebaik-baiknya.

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