Review of AID's information practices

Agency for International Development are ineffective and inefficient. While costly, they are not providing needed information to users on a timely basis. These conclusions emerge from a review of A.I.D. reports and personal interviews with information users that focused on two critical information areas: automatic data processing and evaluation. While A.I.D. is largely an information collection and processing operation, information systems are not satisfactory because senior officials have not been sufficiently involved to provide the necessary leadership and direction in developing them. The result has been: (1) the development and management of information activities by data processing specialists as opposed to information users; (2) redundancies and gaps in information activities; (3) a failure to ask the important "overview" questions, together with a failure to design information activities that respond to those questions. Meaningful improvements will not occur until senior management, in recognition of the cost and importance of information collection and processing activities to the Agency, takes back control over the development and management of information activities. To facilitate this happening, we recommend: (1) The establishment of a strategic planning unit, answerable only to the Administrator, with the sole responsibility of defining and addressing the "overview" programmatic and management questions facing the Agency; this unit should have a strategic, forward-looking focus, that is, it should ask how programs and management can be improved upon in a rapidly changing world. (2) The establishment of an information committee comprised of senior A.I.D. officials that represent the Agency's primary information users; this committee should painstakingly review the cost-effectiveness of all information activities as compared with users' needs; as a result of this review, together with a willingness to make tough bureaucratic decisions, and the existence of new information technologies, the committee should be able to increase user satisfaction and still reduce existing systems and costs by at least one-third. (Author abstract)