155.      A collective capacity to acquire and create knowledge and put it to productive use for the common good is as critical to the efforts of the UN system as it is to individual countries. This means, for the UN system, concerted action to deepen understanding and to manage and share knowledge much more purposefully. On the conceptual level, for example, while peace and development obviously have many interconnections, the exact linkages between them are far from being fully analyzed and understood. In the development area itself, UN system organizations need to reflect further together on how to advance and project to policy makers a holistic approach to economic and social development. That approach would emphasize the mutually reinforcing relationship between the pursuit of the Millennium Development Goals and the pursuit of the wider UN development agenda that has emerged from the global conferences. It would ensure that social objectives are effectively integrated into economic decision-making. And it would factor in the challenge of addressing the inequalities that exist within and among countries, both as an ethical imperative and as a practical necessity to remove a major impediment to growth and sustainable development.

156.      In our knowledge-intensive world, the efforts of individual organizations to become centres of excellence in their respective areas of competence will have to coalesce into system-wide action to become—and earn recognition as—a centre of excellence across those areas, particularly on multisectoral approaches that can best advance both security and development.

157.      In the follow-up to the global conferences and the Millennium Declaration, the UN system has intensified its efforts to more effectively manage and share knowledge, to use information technology and to produce reliable standardized data, all of which enable coherent support of decision-making and cogent system-wide strategies for public communication. The system agenda for further progress should thus focus on:

•       Common, more reliable and more accessible, user-friendly statistical and other data. This should be accompanied by a joint effort to significantly strengthen support for capacitybuilding in countries in both data gathering and analysis.

•       A common strategy for better employing information and communications technologies (ICT) in both management and operations.

•       Identifying and sharing best practices within the system and outside it.

•       Promoting a system-wide learning culture rooted in shared values and common objectives for all staff of the UN system.⁽²⁹⁾  The culture building effort must focus on staff as they enter the international civil service, joining not only one organization but also an integrated system of organizations. It should focus on staff as they assume management responsibilities and hence a greater role in steering the UN organizations towards One United Nations. And it should engage senior management, charged with providing leadership, momentum and policy guidance for these efforts.

^29. The UN system Staff College, established in 2002, pursuant to GA resolution 55/207 is a system-wide instrument that focuses on building a common culture across all areas of the work of the system.