Planning and development, as a function of local government, is experiencing difficulties in KwaZulu-Natal as a province of South Africa. This is mainly due to the critical shortage of experience and skills, lack of up to date information and limited recognition of the importance of this function in government.

This discussion focuses on the question of information management and accessibility and identifies a concept which could be applied in improving the current situation. Comments would be of value to validate issues raised and improve on the concept that is being explored in this paper.

As noted, effective planning (strategic, spatial) and land use management in local government is being seriously hampered by poor access to good quality information. Key information often ends up with services providers who have completed work for municipalities and are reluctant to release it. This is due to concerns over the information getting lost in government offices and at the same time ensuring that it is not available to competitors in the market place.

As a result of the lack of a custodian for information, it (ie. Information) has attracted a value in the market place. This has led to the 'hoarding of information' which in turn has a 'knock on effect' in the form of re-cycling and duplication of, often, outdated information leading to escalating costs for services provision and poor quality planning and decision making. While the emphasis should be on improving the quality of technical service provided to government, owing to information difficulties, the focus in terms of time and cost has become one of securing accurate data.

The situation is compounded in government by:

• Disparate and sometimes outdated software
• Lack of capacity and know-how among staff to generate and maintain up to date information management systems
• Fragmentation of information between departments and municipalities - each arm of government has its own system.

In order to break away from this 'culture' of protectionism and lack of information sharing a 'bold' initiative is required. Internationally, the direction is to move towards 'open source' in a 'shared services' environment. Initial explorations in the planning and engineering sectors in this province have demonstrated the value of adopting the 'open source'- 'shared services' approach. However, incentives are required to encourage a culture of information sharing among service providers and officials to ensure accurate information is available to both. Incentives should be designed to encourage officials, departments and services providers to share data as a means of improving the quality of planning and decision making in this province.

To this end the current focus in state investment needs to move away from expensive software acquisition for each and every department and municipality.Those same financial resources could be 'pooled' and then freed up for to achieve the following:

• Identifying an appropriate vehicle for custodianship;
• Developing specifications for a provincial data warehouse also available at a local level;
• Adapting freely available software to underpin the functionality of the warerhouse;
• Updating and consolidating the numerous fragmented data bases from different departments, municipalities and services providers;
• Creating comprehensive cover for the entire province at both local and provincial levels;
• Establishing mechanisms for updating and maintenance of the information;
  Providing easy access for all end users;
• Identifying mechanisms for set up funding and self financing of the system.

The overriding aim would be to achieve effective 'open' information flows among services providers and government. However, this is contingent on the establishment of a centralized information system (termed data warehouse) easily accessible to a wide variety of end users. The warehouse should ideally be located under the aegis of a state department as custodian of information. However, owing to the skills shortage in government its operation and maintenance would need to be undertaken in partnership with the private sector. While under custodianship of government it would nevertheless need to retain a high degree of independence from any one organization. This is essential to ensure its objectivity in the ongoing provision of a high level of information for the planning and development sector in the province. To this end an entity would need to be established with an appropriate management mechanism (eg Trust or Section 21 Company) which is representative of all user groups.

Should this concept gain currency among information managers and users, then further discussions will have to be initiated on the detailed specifications for a wide range of user groups as part of the specification, budgeting and implementation process.