Overview of GSSC and UNICEF

This document provides a brief overview of the Global Shared Services Centre (GSSC) and UNICEF. It discusses the objectives, structure, and operations of GSSC and UNICEF. It also explores the challenges and processes of knowledge management in these organizations.

Title Page

Executive Summary

Table of Contents
.

Introduction
Objective
Focus
Structure
Direction

Brief Overview of GSSC
Global Shared Services Centre (GSSC) has been established by UNICEF in the year 2016,
which is located in Budapest, Hungary and dedicated to managing the transactions carried out
by the various UNICEF offices around the world. GSSC operates under UNICEF across
different areas of operation including Master Data Management, Finance, Payroll, HR
Administration as well as the Global IT Help Desk. The vision of GSSC is to operate as a
world class shared service centre that drives their operational efficiency and business
innovation throughout UNICEF by means of adopting the best practices in both the public
and private sectors. Along with that, the strategy of GSSC staff involves introducing Peer
Support Volunteers at flexible working hours (Hislop, Bosua & Helms, 2018). Additionally,
there are facilitating policy amendments for the purpose of supporting child care and
encourage staff ideas through a platform or portal that can be accessed to obtain regular
progress updates. The GSSC Administration & Facilities Team is responsible for efficient
planning of certain global events such as conferences, workshops, meetings, trainings and
other events. These events are typically organized by the various other UNICEF offices.
Mark Beatty is responsible for overseeing the GSSC centre. He has over 20 years of
professional experience in UN and efficiently oversees the workforce of more than 300
employees (both local and international staffs) for delivering finance, payroll, administration,
IT services and master data to the 13,000+ staffs and 190 office locations across the entire
globe.
Brief Overview of UNICEF
United Nations International Children’s Fund (UNICEF) was established in the 1946 by the
United Nations General Assembly with an aim to provide emergency health care and food to
the mothers and children in the World War II affected countries. The organization works in
190 territories and countries in order to reach the most excluded and most vulnerable children
everywhere. UNICEF runs a special program under the UN that is devoted to help the
national efforts in terms of improving the nutrition, health, education and general welfare of
the children. In the year 1950, the organization decided to direct their efforts towards the
general programs targeted to solely improve the children’s welfare (Becerra-Fernandez &
Sabherwal, 2015). UNICEF has put efforts to the areas that potentially affects the lives of the
most deprived and disadvantaged children. For example, the treatment and prevention of
disease is something that UNICEF has dedicatedly worked on. UNICEF also significantly
supports the immunization programs for the purpose of preventing the spreading of AIDS/

HIV virus (Hislop, Bosua & Helms, 2018). In addition to that, it also provides adequate
funding for educational facilities, health services and other prominent welfare services. The
‘Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989)’ is responsible for guiding the UNICEF
programs, which in turn affirms the right of the deprived and disadvantaged children. The
activities of the UNICEF organizations are financed or funded by both the government as
well as the private contributions. UNICEF deals with ensuring adequate and effective
corporate partnership and corporate social responsibility, the Girl Star project by UNICED
depicts the stories of plight of the girls from the disadvantaged communities across multiple
northern states of India (Stern, 2017). The Girl Star project paves the way for girls to gather
courage and break the socio economic constraints for making their life successful and
becoming self-sufficient. The governing body of UNICEF includes 36 members in the
executive board, elected for three years by the Economic and Social Council of United States.
Their knowledge management issues
The main issue in Knowledge Management (KM) is regarding if it should be hierarchical in
nature and concentrate on the implementation and design of a set of structured and well-
articulated business process that implements knowledge production and knowledge
integration. These processes are handed down by the knowledge managers (Hislop, Bosua &
Helms, 2018). It is further a big question whether the knowledge management process should
be organic, which typically focus on the implementation of policies that support the
tendencies or inclinations towards the existing knowledge processing patterns. . What extent
does it meet the requirements, other KM tools should be heuristic and suggestive for
deducing the user knowledge needs and develop suggestions for knowledge associations. The
organic approach is associated with the scientific approach on the CAS (Complex Adaptive
Systems) (Geisler & Wickramasinghe, 2015). Apart from that, many researchers blame the
‘cultural’ barriers for the failures in the KM process in terms of the transfer and sharing of
knowledge in organizations. According to Becerra-Fernandez & Sabherwal (2015), the KM is
crucial in undertaking a difficult task of changing the organizational culture for achieving the
knowledge transfer and knowledge sharing required in order to realize the value of the
organization’s overall knowledge resources.
Another potential issue is with the security required in knowledge management (KM). The
technical efforts should be properly aligned with the right level of security for the
organization’s data (Webb, 2017). Therefore, it is essential to utilize the levels and
permissions of the various security specifications in order to ensure that important knowledge

is only shared through the right communication channels and reaches to the rightly intended
people.
Another significant challenge is to keep the information in an accurate and up to data fashion
and effectively interpret the information by ensuring adequate relevancy. In addition to that,
another serious point is regarding the acknowledgement of rewards to the active users. It is
crucial to choose how to reward the users. It is important to recognize the individual users
with respect to their knowledge contributions as the community can be built strongly with
users having a strong set of skills.
BC & S Process Framework
Becerra, Fernandez & Sabherwal (2017), has developed a framework for analysing the
knowledge management (KM) process. According to the study, the knowledge management
processes involve the following stages:
Figure 1: Knowledge management process
(Source: Geisler & Wickramasinghe, 2015)
Knowledge Discovery – The authors have termed knowledge discovery as “the development
of new tacit or explicit knowledge from data and information or from the synthesis of prior
knowledge” (Becerra-Fernandez & Sabherwal, 2015). It consists of two major components –
combination and socialization. Combination is the new and explicit knowledge where two or
more bodies of explicit knowledge are synthesized for creating a new and more complicated
sets of explicit knowledge. Socialization, on the other hand, deals with the integration of
more than streams for the creation of new knowledge captured through socialization
mechanism. Apart from that, many researchers blame the ‘cultural’ barriers for the failures in

the KM process in terms of the transfer and sharing of knowledge in organizations
(Raudeliuniene, Davidaviciene & Jakubavicius, 2018).
Knowledge Capture – Knowledge capture may be defined as “the process of retrieving either
explicit or tacit knowledge that resides within people, artefacts, or organisational entities”.
Therefore, the knowledge sharing can eventually take place for individuals, departments,
groups and organizations. According to Omotayo (2015), if the knowledge properly exists at
a particular location, knowledge utilization or knowledge sharing. It is further a big question
whether the knowledge management process should be organic, which typically focus on the
implementation of policies that support the tendencies or inclinations towards the existing
knowledge processing patterns.
Knowledge Sharing – “The process through which explicit or tacit knowledge is
communicated to other individuals” is the basic idea of knowledge sharing. The knowledge
sharing process enables an effective transfer of knowledge across the communication
channels so that the recipient of knowledge can typically understand it in order to act
properly. It is further a big question whether the knowledge management process should be
organic, which typically focus on the implementation of policies that support the tendencies
or inclinations towards the existing knowledge processing patterns. In addition to that, it is
essential to understand the essential recommendations that are based on the knowledge.
Therefore, the knowledge sharing can eventually take place for individuals, departments,
groups and organizations. According to Raudeliūnienė, Davidavičienė & Jakubavičius
(2018), if the knowledge properly exists at a particular location, knowledge utilization or
knowledge sharing
Knowledge Application – Knowledge application may be defined as “the process through
which knowledge is utilized within the organisation to make decisions and perform tasks,
thereby contributing to organisational performance” (Webb, 2017). These processes are
handed down by the knowledge managers. It is further a big question whether the knowledge
management process should be organic, which typically focus on the implementation of
policies that support the tendencies or inclinations towards the existing knowledge processing
patterns. Based on the tactic knowledge that is shared and exchanged in the socialization.
Application of knowledge essentially contributes to the organizational performance while
making important decisions for performing and executing tasks.

Evaluation of requirements against the wiki functionality
An efficient knowledge management system must have certain traits, which can be evaluated
based on certain criteria. For instance, the knowledge management system must be
potentially scalable so that it is able to support a large number of robust database of users. In
addition to that, the extensibility trait is based on the capability of expanding as and when
required in the organization. Apart from that, another requirement is to be compliant with the
industry standards in order to enable the companies for leveraging the existing resources. The
KM technology must further be timely, relevant, collaborative and secure. Even though the
evaluation of the KM technology requirements essentially include powerful offline analysis,
it also involves complex queries. Therefore, the system should be adequately flexible to be
able to handle the knowledge and information of any form, which should be easy and fast to
deploy and administer (Unicef, 2016). What extent does it meet the requirements, other KM
tools should be heuristic and suggestive for deducing the user knowledge needs and develop
suggestions for knowledge associations. The KMS requirements are evaluated in accordance
to the degree that satisfies the present conditions. In other words, the requirements are
evaluated based on ease of use, presentation of results, response efficiency, domain
independence, effective and efficient indexing support (automatic or machine aided),
database and user (knowledge base) services. Another crucial point that needs to be
adequately emphasized is the improvement of knowledge management systems as well as
information retrieval procedures. There are several issues that needs to be addressed for
knowledge management so that the process analysis becomes easier. The published
knowledge repositories are associated with the knowledge user database.

Recommendations
In my strong opinion, the

References
1. Becerra-Fernandez, I., & Sabherwal, R. (2014). Knowledge management : Systems
and processes. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral-proquest-
com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au
2. Becerra-Fernandez, I., & Sabherwal, R. (2015). Knowledge Management:
Management and the future of knowledge management. Routledge.
3. Geisler, E., & Wickramasinghe, N. (2015). Principles of Knowledge Management:
Theory, Practice, and Cases: Theory, Practice, and Cases. Routledge.
4. Hislop, D., Bosua, R., & Helms, R. (2018). Knowledge management in organizations:
A critical introduction. Oxford University Press.
5. Omotayo, F. O. (2015). Knowledge Management as an important tool in
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Practice, 1(2015), 1-23.

6. Raudeliūnienė, J., Davidavičienė, V., & Jakubavičius, A. (2018). Knowledge
management process model. Entrepreneurship and Sustainability Issues, 5(3), 542-
554.
7. Stern, R. T. (2017). Implementing Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of
the Child: Participation, power and attitudes. Brill.
8. Unicef. (2016). UNICEF data: monitoring the situation of children and women. New
York. http://data. unicef. org/child-protection/child-marriage. html. Accessed, 27.
9. Webb, S. P. (2017). Knowledge management: Linchpin of change. Routledge.