Mike McLean, Knowledge and Collaboration Manager at the Improvement Service, discusses how the Knowledge Hub supports cross-sector working in Scottish Local Government.
Part of my role within the Improvement Service has involved supporting public sector and community organisations to develop their knowledge management and collaboration activities. Over the years an increasing amount of this activity has taken place online, especially in the past three years as we faced the challenges of the Covid crisis.
For the last 13 years I have managed the Scottish Public Services Network on the Knowledge Hub platform, which is free-to-use for the public sector in Scotland. The Knowledge Hub is an open knowledge platform for public services, aiding collaboration across teams, organisations and communities, and within and between individual organisations. During this period, 20,000 Scottish community members have joined Knowledge Hub, collaborating in over 1,650 groups, large and small, and we have significantly reduced the costs for our partners by removing traditional organisational and geographical boundaries and by removing infrastructure and hosting costs.
One of the key benefits I see with Knowledge Hub is the directory of people and groups which, coupled with a comprehensive search function, allows any member to discover and connect to content and contacts at the point of need. This contrasts with many other collaboration systems that limit visibility and access on an organisation-only basis. As the public sector increasingly moves toward partnership working and community empowerment, we need platforms where we can come together and work on common problems and share knowledge.
As the Knowledge Hub has been running for many years, the site also acts as safe harbour for content that may have been developed for short-term projects or be limited to a specific region, but which might prove to be useful to others in the future. We have many groups that are no longer active, but they still serve as an important repository of knowledge.
Content is organised on a group basis which host forums, multimedia libraries and people finders, and every group is owned and controlled by facilitators who have access to extensive support materials. We have a wide variety of groups covering topics of vital importance to the public sector in Scotland. Examples of these groups include:
- Geospatial Community Scotland
- Change Managers Network
- Scottish Government Programme and Project Management Community
- NHS Scotland Procurement Community
- Scottish Local Government Response to the Ongoing Situation in Ukraine
- Sustainable Scotland Network
- Money Guiders Network
- The Scottish Leisure Network Group
- National Violence Against Women Networ
Knowledge Hub also provides a space for professional associations to engage with their members and advertise their existence to potential new recruits. The Improvement Service provides support to these groups by offering additional consultancy on knowledge management and communications activity to complement their own activities, building on our wealth of experience in this field. Examples of professional organisations active on the Knowledge Hub include:
- Society of Chief Officers of Trading Standards in Scotland
- Heads of Planning Scotland members forum
- Society of Local Authority Lawyers and Administrators in Scotland
- Society of Chief Officers of Transportation in Scotland
- Collective Leadership for Scotland
The Scottish Network is one of the largest on Knowledge Hub and sits alongside other networks from outside of Scotland, enabling collaboration to take place across the UK and beyond with one single sign-on. Users can connect with a broad audience of around 150,000 community members across 5,000 public sector organisations in the UK and even internationally, providing a fantastic opportunity to learn from and support each other. UK-wide networks include:
- LGA Network
- Government Security Function
- Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion
- Government Commercial Function Network
- UK Health Security Agency
- Historic England
- Civil Service Reform
- Royal College of Psychiatrists
- Money Guiders Community Hub
Knowledge Hub continues to grow and develop and recently underwent a major upgrade. In December 2022, Knowledge Hub welcomed more than 2,000 new members and 20 new groups. If you think your community would benefit from joining our Scottish Network, please contact mike.mclean@improvementservice.org.uk.