Strategic Realignment Program

Under the leadership of  the Director General, Mr. Francis Gurry, WIPO has embarked on a comprehensive Strategic Realignment Program. The aim is to ensure that WIPO's goals, structures, programs and resources are  focused and streamlined in such a way as to enable the Organization, as the lead intergovernmental body for intellectual property, to fulfill its mandate effectively within a rapidly evolving external environment. 

A three-stream approach

The realignment process seeks to address, in parallel, the following three overlapping “streams” of organizational improvement:

Stream 1: Changing the corporate culture

This stream will focus on:

• instilling shared, core values;
• promoting a high performance culture, through the introduction of improved results-based management, evaluation and appraisal processes at all levels;
• establishing a customer service and stakeholder focussed corporate culture.

Stream 2: Re-engineering horizontal business processes

In order to improve service levels and efficiencies, and to prepare for the introduction of an IT-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, the core administrative and management processes, which underpin WIPO's ability to function efficiently, will be reviewed and re-engineered. These include notably:

• human resources processes
• IT systems
• procurement
• budgetary and financial processes

Having re-defined the medium-term strategic goals, all of WIPO's programs, organizational structures and resources need to be realigned to those strategic goals. Each WIPO unit will be reviewed in turn, following a published timetable, in order to:

• clarify the mission, objectives, targets and performance indicators in relation to the strategic goals;
• define the staff, skills and budgetary resources needed to achieve these results.

Start up actions

The Director General has identified a number of rapid start-up actions and adjustments which are needed in advance of the sector-by-sector realignment process.  All preliminary reorganization carried out in the context of these adjustments will also be subject to the systematic review process in slower time. Early actions have included:

• preliminary streamlining of the finance and budget department;
• identifying skills gaps in certain key strategic positions (e.g. Chief Economist, Chief Information Officer, Director of Human Resources, Director of Global Challenges) and launching open competitions to fill them;
• establishing a Development Agenda Coordination Division.