News from Jun 23, 2009

While the external environment has changed dramatically since the United Nations was founded in 1945, many of our internal ways of working are based on practices from the 1940s and '50s, supported, in some cases, by technology from the 1980s and '90s. As a result, we sometimes find it difficult to do our jobs as efficiently and effectively as we could.

As you are aware, the Secretary-General is committed to the continuous modernization and administrative reform of our organization. Umoja is at the heart of this Secretariat-wide effort. Umoja means "unity" in Swahili, and the name reflects its goals: to improve our business processes; to align them with commonly accepted best practice; and to support this with a global information management platform. All of which, will enable us to work together more effectively on behalf of our constituents and beneficiaries.

We have launched this website to provide you with general information about Umoja – the project mandate, background, purpose, progress and so on. More importantly, this website will be a two-way conversation, a virtual space for us to communicate with each other. In the coming weeks, we will add more content and launch exciting interactive features that will enable us to engage with you, the staff of the global Secretariat, in making the goals of the Umoja Project a reality.

The success of Umoja will depend to a large extent on the level and quality of engagement of the user community within the UN. The deployment of Umoja involves consulting with (and later training) staff, implementing streamlined and integrated business processes, and using modern technology to achieve greater efficiency and better service.

Welcome to Umoja. We hope you will visit us on a regular basis and participate in this exciting effort to improve the management of resources so that we can support the UN mandate more responsively and effectively. In the meantime, we invite you to learn more about Umoja and read some of the past articles published on iSeek.