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The characteristics of new public management and new public governance are well known, but their impact on managerial knowledge needs and the implementation of knowledge management in local government remains unclear. The purpose of this paper is to elaborate the key elements of a public organization’s knowledge strategy and shows how knowledge management can support public management.

A case study on the application of an action research process was conducted to study how the City of Tampere in Finland aimed to overcome challenges in utilizing performance information by applying the ideas of knowledge management.

The study suggests that a holistic knowledge management strategy promotes the use of performance information by providing a systematic management framework for gathering and utilizing the information.

Four factors appear critical for strategic knowledge management in local government. First, it should be driven by the city’s strategy. Second, it should be carefully integrated into the general management system. Third, clear processes and responsibilities for refining the data are needed. Fourth, the quality of the data must be guaranteed. The results also emphasize the roles of management culture and continuous performance dialogue.

This paper makes two contributions. First, it extends the analysis of a knowledge management strategy to public management, and second, it provides a practical illustration of the development process, where knowledge was put into prime focus in developing public management.

This article analyses a major healthcare and social welfare reform establishing new regional and integrated wellbeing services counties in Finland. The authors approach the reform and service integration as a knowledge management (KM) issue and analyse how KM appears and contributes in the context of integrated care, specifically in the process of integrating social and health care.

The article analyses the case organisation's KM initiatives in light of the integrated care literature and recognises the tasks and requirements for effective KM when building integrated health and social care system. The empirical research material for this qualitative study consisted of the case organisation's strategy documents, the results of an external maturity assessment, KM workshop materials and publicly available documentation of the Finnish health and social care reform.

This study identifies the mechanisms by which KM can support health and social services integration. At the macro level, national coordination and regional co-operation require common information structures. At the meso level, a shared regional strategy with shared objectives guides both organisational decision-making and collaboration between professionals. At the micro level, technology supported and data-driven planning of service chains complements the experiences of professionals and may help remove obstacles to integration.

This study contributes to the literature on integrated care by providing a more comprehensive view of the role and tasks of knowledge and KM when reforming health and social services than approaches focussing solely on health informatics and internal efficiency.

This paper aims to understand performance management as a social phenomenon by investigating the challenges of performance dialogue, a phenomenon where participants jointly interpret performance information and discuss it while identifying the actions needed to manage the performance according to this information.

The research aim is achieved by conducting an interview study. Empirical data were collected by interviewing 30 public managers in three Finnish municipalities and subjecting it to content analysis using inductive category development.

The research provides empirical evidence from challenges in engaging in performance dialogue. It moreover derives a comprehensive conceptual model categorizing factors inhibiting performance dialogue.

Difficulties in conducting organizational performance dialogues are better explained. The findings support the management of performance dialogue by helping practitioners to identify challenges associated to these dialogues.

This study contributes to current conversations on performance management by showing that performance dialogues are no miracle cure for problems in performance information use. Moreover, the authors demonstrate that complications in performance information use are intertwined in many ways.

The literature acknowledges the importance of interpretative processes, discussion, and organizational learning in public performance management, but a knowledge gap remains concerning the mechanism of performance dialogue. To fill this gap, the purpose of this paper is to study the principles of performance dialogue and collaborative performance management in public administration.

The study utilizes a longitudinal research setting and analyzes the evolution of performance management practices in one city organization in Finland.

The study suggests that performance dialogue needs to be integrated with management practices and explains how this can be done. Three guiding principles of performance dialogue and collaborative performance management are derived. These underline the role of “referees of the information game”, a supportive and encouraging environment and a focus on the use of performance information.

Performance information is too often provided as a back-office function, and dialogue with information users is either completely lacking or somehow disturbed. The performance dialogue provides a platform for collaborative sense making and helps managers to better understand the complex phenomena and processes they are responsible for.

The literature dealing specifically with the change from centralized and vertical performance management practices toward decentralized and horizontal practices is still scarce. This paper provides a new perspective on management control and organizational learning in public administration based on performance dialogue.

This paper considers the potential of social media for developing public services. The paper approaches social media as a context that can provide information that might otherwise be unattainable. The focus of analysis is on a special hard-to-reach group of marginalized youths who appear to have isolated themselves from society.

The authors answer the question: How can the experiences of socially withdrawn youth as shared on social media be used to enrich the knowledge base relating to the initiation phase of co-creation of public services? The data retrieved from the Finnish discussion forum are analyzed using the combination of unsupervised machine learning and discourse analysis.

The paper contributes by outlining a method that can be applied to identify expertise-by-experience from digital stories shared by marginalized youths. To overcome the challenges of making socially withdrawn youths real contributors to the co-creation of public services, this paper suggests several theoretical and managerial implications.

Co-creation assumes an interactive and dynamic relationship where value is created at the nexus of interaction. However, the evidence base for successful co-creation, particularly with digital technology, is limited. This paper fills the gap by providing findings from a case study that investigated how social media discussions can be a stimulus to enrich the knowledge base of the co-creation of public services.

Lack of knowledge and performance information sharing between actors is one manifestation of fragmentation in public performance management. This study aims to understand what managerial means are used for connecting performance dialogues and how these means affect fragmentation in performance management.

In this cross-sectional research design, the authors reviewed documents, interviewed public managers, observed workshops and held thematic discussions with public managers in one Finnish municipality. To analyze the empirical data, the authors used thematic analysis and both inductive and deductive research approaches.

The analysis revealed nine managerial means that public managers use for connecting performance dialogues to decrease fragmentation. These were (1) defining the division of labor between different dialogues, (2) assigning resources for performance dialogues, (3) generating convincing narratives for promoting collaboration, (4) providing the same performance information to collaborators, (5) building joint information systems, (6) establishing integrative performance dialogue hubs, (7) naming the gatekeepers, (8) offering training for dialogues and (9) synchronizing performance dialogues. Based on our findings, most of these means can preserve, increase or decrease fragmentation depending on their design.

The results of the study are valuable because the performance management literature has not investigated what managerial means are used to connect performance dialogues and how these means can preserve, increase or decrease fragmentation.

The purpose of this study is twofold. First, it suggests that knowledge management (KM), as an academic discipline and managerial practice, provides valuable perspectives and tools to help health and social care management cope with both existing and future challenges. Second, it reviews the existing evidence on the effects of KM on the management of health and social care. Based on the results of the review, an evaluation framework for the effects of KM is proposed.

The literature review was conducted using the guidance of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses statement to search the Web of Science and SCOPUS databases. The search terms included “knowledge management”, “healthcare” and “effect.” Academic articles published between 2010 and 2020 were included.

The study identifies six main categories among the effects of KM on the management of health and social care as follows: enhanced understanding of customer needs, improved organizational performance, better targeted decision-making, improved quality of service, behavioral or cultural change and improved risk management.

This study contributes by summarizing the literature on the effects of KM on the management of health and social care and proposing avenues for future research in this area.

The article seeks to explain whether and how value-based healthcare principles lead to hybridization. The public management literature has been increasingly interested in hybrid forms of governance and hybrid performance management, but empirical studies are still rare. Further, the article studies the design of performance management and accounting systems as healthcare organizations reorganize their care processes applying value-based healthcare principles.

This article first connects the theoretical discussions on value-based healthcare and performance management for hybrids. The conceptual understanding of performance management in hybrid healthcare uses a case study of a Finnish healthcare organization with documentary data and transcribed interviews with healthcare professionals from both the strategic and operative levels of healthcare.

The article illustrates and analyses how new policy-level objectives and principles of value-based healthcare led to hybridity in healthcare, manifest in mixed ownership of a particular care path and new forms of social and financial control. Further, the article provides empirical evidence of how increased hybridity necessitated new organizational modes and roles, new managerial tools for performance management and created a need to develop the capability to account and measure entire integrated care processes. Important enabling factors for the integration of care and hybrid performance management were commitment created in dialogue, voluntary-based trust and technology to generate factual shared information.

The study is informative for stakeholders, funders and managers of healthcare organizations, namely new knowledge for the discussion of hybrid governance in healthcare, including a critical account of the applicability and impact of a hybrid service model in healthcare management. Moreover, the article illustrates what needs to be reconsidered in performance management and accounting practices when reorganizing care processes according to the principles of value-based healthcare.

The article extends the analysis of performance management in hybrids and sheds new light on hybridization in healthcare. It also provides much-needed empirical evidence on the processes and practices of accounting and performance management after implementing a value-based healthcare strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a definition for dialogic performance management and investigate the managerial choices that dialogic performance management necessitates from public managers.

The research strategy was based on a narrative analysis grounded in relativism and constructivism. Multiple data collection methods were used in this case study to examine a local government in Finland.

The paper proposes a definition and provides practical illustrations of the concept of dialogic performance management. The empirical findings are a set of managerial choices used to orchestrate dialogic performance management.

The concept of dialogic performance management encourages practitioners to ask themselves whether their current performance management practices are based on managerial monologues, rather than dialogues that incorporate staff into the performance management. The results also show that managerial choices shape the form of dialogic performance management.

The previous accounting and performance management literature has not examined the managerial choices that are used to shape dialogic performance management. In this research, the authors identify these types of managerial choices in the case organisation. The research is valuable because only after explicating managerial choices can one start to examine why dialogic performance management either fails or succeeds when public managers orchestrate it.