Challenges of Information Management in Organizing Global Scale Events Using Technology in Government Establishments in Sri Lanka

Abstract

In the age of technology where information is constantly being produced, captured and analysed in many different methods for different needs that were never even imaginable would be possible to obtain. For the first time in entire human history, the growth and capturing of information had grown exponentially over the last decade. According to Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, the information that is being created in every two days is as much as the information that was produced since the dawn of civilization up until 2003. However, even when the world is at the technology revolution with the unimaginable amount of information, some organizations in the world are still very much disconnected with technology and uses legacy, traditional approaches for many projects. In large scale global events it is vital to use proper mechanisms to manage and update information as using the right information at the right time will make different tasks much cost effective and efficient. This study is based on one of the international events organized by a government organization in Sri Lanka and intend to discuss the effectiveness and efficiency of the processes had the proper mechanisms were used along with information management. It was also seen during the study that many challenges were posed when attempting to introduce technology for information management as many government employees used to work in legacy methods and reluctant to adapt technology even it eases the amount of work. Another important finding is that government employees were very rule abide and always think of working within the boundaries cross referring to the books and think if technology is being introduced the ways of tracking the work is not possible or is not legal. Therefore, before making every decision, it had become a habit of referring to the next level of authority till the highest level for approval even for a small task that is within the rule for employees to complete. Taking responsibility and accountability of work being done is greatly lacking in government systems. Hence using information and technology for special events such as the study analysed in this paper is greatly absent as employees don’t believe in electronic records even they are well valid in legal frame of audits. However, several sub bodies were seen making attempt to use technology for information management, but without the due support from its peers the effort is nothing but futile. Even when having top notch project scheduling resources like BaseCamp, it was hardly seen been used in this project. The information that was discussed and presented at meetings were widely ignored or people were only making notes of what is been assigned to them rather than looking into the project as combined effort, making it difficult to share information even through a tool such as BaseCamp. The objective of this paper is to discuss the challenges faced in organizing an international conference when there was lot of reluctant using technology and systems for information management.