http://www.vny.com/cf/News/upidetail.cfm?QID=165679
Annan seeks virtual UN
Tuesday, 6 March 2001 21:53 (ET)
Annan seeks virtual UN
By WILLIAM M. REILLY
UNITED NATIONS, March 6 (UPI) -- Secretary-General Kofi Annan laid out aplan
Tuesday to transform the United Nations into a worldwide virtualorganization,
with information seamlessly accessed and exchanged both withinand beyond the
U.N. system.
The Secretary-General's strategy is contained in a report which said
thatwhile there has been major progress over the past 10 years, the
UnitedNations "must establish an aggressive plan to build its ability to
takeadvantage of new technologies and to keep up-to-date with the
rapiddevelopments in the field.
"By increasing the flow of information among its components, the
UnitedNations can be transformed "from an aggregate of departments and
officesthat are intellectually and often geographically separated, into
acommunity, sharing the same objectives and benefiting from the
collectiveknowledge of the staff-at-large, irrespective of their physical
location orof the department to which they belong," Annan said.
Without a global effort to focus on information and
communicationstechnologies, he said the U.N. Secretariat "will rapidly fall
behind, andoverall performance and program delivery will be affected."
Under the plan, the secretariat will expand access to its documents andpublic
information materials across all mediums and databases for staff,member
states, U.N. system organizations and other target audiences. Theplan also
calls for the implementation of systems to facilitate the searchand retrieval
of materials in all official languages and to enable theorganization to
exploit the interactive capabilities ofinformation-communication technology.
Under the plan, communities of staff will be created in all departmentsand
duty stations using web-based community-building and collaborationtools. With
such tools, "the secretariat can overcome the boundary ofdistance, and save
time and money in the process of bringing together peopleto work on various
projects.
"Online discussion forums and multi-point teleconferencing will enablestaff
engaged in similar activities to share information --buildingdatabases of
real world knowledge and helping each other regardless of theirphysical
location, the report said.
