The Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) established in 2018 the Centre for Innovation in Parliament (CIP), intended to promote the knowledge exchange between parliaments around the world on the topic of innovation through parliamentary information technology, among others in areas such as parliamentary information management; engagement with citizens; parliamentary openness, transparency, and access to (open) data. CIP operates from the IPU headquarter in Geneva (Switzerland), where a secretariat team provides overall coordination and conducts knowledge management activity. The actual knowledge exchange work takes place through CIP hubs, of which there are two kinds: regional and specialist hubs.
The Regional hubs try establishing a regional exchange with promotion of regional best practices, lessons learned, and experiences. These hubs are based on the rationale that parliaments within specific region are often in similar ICT state or level, and can benefit significantly from learning from one another. The first regional hubs formed include for Latin America (led by the Chamber of Deputies of Chile) and Southern Africa (led by the National Assembly of Zambia). Others, for Eastern Africa and Middle East are being considered / established. Regional Hubs are led by a so-called host parliament from that region, who also establishes a direct working relation with the CIP secretariat in Geneva.
The Specialist hubs look at particular themes of interest, and work toward building and providing access to a 'vault' of relevant knowledge within that specific theme or area. Specialist Hubs are led by a 'thought-leader' in the specific area, and members include others at a similar level that have knowledge and expertise to contribute. The first Specialist hubs include the ´IT governance hub` and `ICT solutions hub` by the European Parliament, and the ´Parliamentary open data cloud hub´ by the Chamber of Deputies of Brazil.
This digital hub is an online learning platform to improve your IT governance maturity level. There are four ways to use it. The first one is to perform a self-assessment of your maturity and then to address the dimensions you expect to develop. Knowing that your organisation has not yet addressed IT governance has a topic, the second one is to walk through all the dimensions to set up. The third one is based on a user experience design process, using the "double diamond" approach if the IT staff capacity is very limited. If already in place for some dimensions with a high level of maturity, the fourth one is to explore some contents provided to gain understanding in the future challenges to face.
...a global network of expertise, grounded in subject matter expertise such as IT strategy, IT planning and IT efficiency, capable of mobilizing knowledge for where it is needed on a daily basis. Along the proposed exploratory path to frame the development of IT governance for parliaments, we will examine various dimensions of business and IT governance, described in 14 distinct modules.
