Military

246. Threaded through many parts of the present report are references to the need to better link the peace and security system together; to facilitate communications and data sharing; to give staff the tools that they need to do their work; and ultimately to allow the United Nations to be more effective at preventing conflict and helping societies find their way back from war. Modern, well utilized information technology (IT) is a key enabler of many of these objectives. The present section notes the gaps in strategy, policy and practice that impede the United Nations effective use of IT, and offers recommendations to bridge them.

247. The problem of IT strategy and policy is bigger than peace operations and extends to the entire United Nations system. That larger IT context is generally beyond the Panel’s mandate, but the larger issues should not preclude the adoption of common IT user standards for peace operations and for the Headquarters units that give support to them. FALD’s Communications Service can provide the satellite links and the local connectivity upon which missions can build effective IT networks and databases, but a better strategy and policy needs to be developed for the user community to help it take advantage of the technology foundations that are now being laid.

248. When the United Nations deploys a mission into the field, it is critical that its elements be able to exchange data easily. All complex peace operations bring together many different actors: agencies, funds, and programmes from throughout the United Nations system, as well as the Departments of the Secretariat; mission recruits who are new to the United Nations system; on occasion, regional organizations; frequently, bilateral aid agencies; and always, dozens to hundreds of humanitarian and development NGOs. All of them need a mechanism that makes it easier to share information and ideas efficiently, the more so because each is but the small tip of a very large bureaucratic iceberg with its own culture, working methods and objectives.

249. Poorly planned and poorly integrated IT can pose obstacles to such cooperation. When there are no agreed standards for data structure and interchange at the application level, the "interface" between the two is laborious manual recoding, which tends to defeat the purposes of investing in a networked and computer-heavy working environment. The consequences can also be more serious than wasted labour, ranging from miscommunication of policy to a failure to "get the word" on security threats or other major changes in the operational environment.

250. The irony of distributed and decentralized data systems is that they need such common standards to function. Common solutions to common IT problems are difficult to produce at higher levels — between substantive components of an operation, between substantive offices at Headquarters, or between Headquarters and the rest of the United Nations system — in part because existing operational information systems policy formulation is scattered. Headquarters lacks a sufficiently strong responsibility center for user-level IT strategy and policy in peace operations, in particular. In government or industry, such responsibility would rest with a "Chief Information Officer". The Panel believes the United Nations needs someone at Headquarters, most usefully in EISAS, to play such a role, supervising development and implementation of IT strategy and user standards. He or she should also develop and oversee IT training programmes, both field manuals and hands-on training — the need for which is substantial and not to be underestimated. Counterparts in the SRSG’s office in each field mission should oversee implementation of the common IT strategy and supervise field training, both complementing and building on the work of FALD and the Information Technology Services Division (ITSD) in the Department of Management in providing basic IT structures and services.

251. Summary of key recommendation on information technology strategy and policy: Headquarters peace and security departments need a responsibility centre to devise and oversee the implementation of common information technology strategy and training for peace operations, residing in EISAS. Mission counterparts to that responsibility centre should also be appointed to serve in the offices of the SRSGs in complex peace operations to oversee the implementation of that strategy.

252. Technology can help to capture as well as disseminate information and experience. It could be much better utilized to help a wide variety of actors working in a United Nations mission’s area of operation to acquire and share data in a systematic and mutually supportive manner. United Nations development and humanitarian relief communities, for example, work in most of the places where the United Nations has deployed peace operations. These United Nations country teams, plus the NGOs that do complementary work at the grass-roots level, will have been in the region long before a complex peace operation arrives and will remain after it has left. Together, they hold a wealth of local knowledge and experience that could be helpful to peace operations planning and implementation. An electronic data clearing house, managed by EISAS to share this data, could assist mission planning and execution and also aid conflict prevention and assessment. Proper melding of these data and data gathered subsequent to deployment by the various components of a peace operation and their use with geographic information systems (GIS) could create powerful tools for tracking needs and problems in the mission area and for tracking the impact of action plans. GIS specialists should be assigned to every mission team, together with GIS training resources.

253. Current examples of GIS applications can be seen in the humanitarian and reconstruction work done in Kosovo since 1998. The Humanitarian Community Information Centre has pooled GIS data produced by such sources as the Western European Satellite Centre, the Geneva Centre for Humanitarian Demining, KFOR, the Yugoslav Institute of Statistics and the International Management Group. Those data have been combined to create an atlas that is available publicly on their web site, on CD-ROMs for those with slow or non-existent Internet access and in hard copy.

254. Computer simulations can be powerful learning tools for mission personnel and for the local parties. Simulations can, in principle, be created for any component of an operation. They can facilitate group problem-solving and reveal to local parties the sometimes unintended consequences of their policy choices. With appropriate broadband Internet links, simulations can be part of distance learning packages tailored to a new operation and used to pre-train new mission recruits.

255. An enhanced peace and security area on the United Nations Intranet (the Organization’s information network that is open to a specified set of users) would be a valuable addition to peace operations planning, analysis, and execution. A subset of the larger network, it would focus on drawing together issues and information that directly pertain to peace and security, including EISAS analyses, situation reports, GIS maps and linkages to lessons learned. Varying levels of security access could facilitate the sharing of sensitive information among restricted groups.

256. The data in the Intranet should be linked to a Peace Operations Extranet (POE) that would use existing and planned wide area network communications to link Headquarters databases in EISAS and the substantive offices with the field, and field missions with one another. POE could easily contain all administrative, procedural and legal information for peace operations, and could provide single-point access to information generated by many sources, give planners the ability to produce comprehensive reports more quickly and improve response time to emergency situations.

257. Some mission components, such as civilian police and related criminal justice units and human rights investigators, require added network security, as well as the hardware and software that can support the required levels of data storage, transmission and analysis. Two key technologies for civilian police are GIS and crime mapping software, used to convert raw data into geographical representations that illustrate crime trends and other key information, facilitate recognition of patterns of events, or highlight special features of problem areas, improving the ability of civilian police to fight crime or to advise their local counterparts.

258. Summary of key recommendations on information technology tools in peace operations:

(a) EISAS, in cooperation with ITSD, should implement an enhanced peace operations element on the current United Nations Intranet and link it to the missions through a Peace Operations Extranet (POE);

(b) Peace operations could benefit greatly from more extensive use of geographic information systems (GIS) technology, which quickly integrates operational information with electronic maps of the mission area, for applications as diverse as demobilization, civilian policing, voter registration, human rights monitoring and reconstruction;

(c) The IT needs of mission components with unique information technology needs, such as civilian police and human rights, should be anticipated and met more consistently in mission planning and implementation.

259. As the Panel noted in section III above, effectively communicating the work of United Nations peace operations to the public is essential to creating and maintaining support for current and future missions. Not only is it essential to develop a positive image early on to promote a conducive working environment but it is also important to maintain a solid public information campaign to garner and retain support from the international community.

260. The body now officially responsible for communicating the work of United Nations peace operations is the Peace and Security Section of DPI in Headquarters, as discussed in section IV above. One person in DPI is responsible for the actual posting of all peace and security content on the web site, as well as for posting all mission inputs to the web, to ensure that information posted is consistent and compatible with Headquarters web standards.

261. The Panel endorses the application of standards but standardized need not mean centralized. The current process of news production and posting of data to the United Nations web site slows down the cycle of updates, yet daily updates could be important to a mission in a fast-moving situation. It also limits the amount of information that can be presented on each mission.

262. DPI and field staff have expressed interest in relieving this bottleneck through the development of a "web site co-management" model. This seems to the Panel to be an appropriate solution to this particular information bottleneck.

263. Summary of key recommendation on timeliness of Internet-based public information: the Panel encourages the development of web site co-management by Headquarters and the field missions, in which Headquarters would maintain oversight but individual missions would have staff authorized to produce and post web content that conforms to basic presentational standards and policy.

264. In the present report, the Panel has emphasized the need to change the structure and practices of the Organization in order to enable it to pursue more effectively its responsibilities in support of international peace and security and respect for human rights. Some of those changes would not be feasible without the new capacities that networked information technologies provide. The report itself would have been impossible to produce without the technologies already in place at United Nations Headquarters and accessible to members of the Panel in every region of the world. People use effective tools, and effective information technology could be much better utilized in the service of peace.