IWMI'S Strategic Alliance with WorldFish

Home > IWMI’S Strategic Alliance with WorldFish

The CGIAR is currently engaged in major reforms to develop more effective and efficient structures of governance, research, research support, partnership and priority setting. Against this backdrop, IWMI and WorldFish pursued the integration of corporate services at the two centers.

As both centers are working on the modernization of processes and systems, both felt this could be done jointly rather than having each center invent the wheel on its own. Following meetings of the WorldFish and IWMI Boards at WorldFish headquarters in Malaysia, in March 2006, the two Boards agreed to further pursue their organisational alliance and took several decisions to align the management and operation of the two centers:

Shared Corporate Services for Organizational Efficiency

The two Boards approved the establishment of a Joint Venture, named “International Research Support Services”(IRSS), from which the two centers will source their finance, HR and ICT support services. They will align their finance and HR policies and processes and share joint applications of SAP for finance and hSENID for HR. Following successful implementation of the finance and HR services for the two centers, the intent is to expand the services and offer the same services to other Future Harvest Centers.

Programmatic Collaboration  for More Effective Research

Scientists from WorldFish and IWMI have also explored the potential of increased programmatic alignment between the two centers and recommended that the two centers grow such collaboration “organically” (bottom-up).

Identified Priority Areas for Collaboration
1. Wetlands, agriculture and fisheries in the Mekong basin.
2. Basin synthesis of multiple use water productivity and water poverty,
with a focus on the Nile and Ganges basins.
3. Integrated small-scale irrigation and aquaculture in Southern Africa.
4. Shared Geoinformatics support for WorldFish and IWMI research

Shared Information and Knowledge Group
The two centers also decided to merge their information and knowledge related services (corporate communication, publishing, libraries, knowledge sharing and knowledge management functions). To develop and implement a shared group a jointly appointed Head, Deputy Head and Librarian have been recruited and appointed. The two centers will jointly implement ICT-KM projects such as implementation of the new CGXchange (Aqualogic) platform, and e-publishing and virtual library projects.

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Home > IWMI’S Strategic Alliance with WorldFish