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Last year my agency participated in the Global Intranet Survey for the first time.
The report from the survey has proven very useful in our intranet planning and given me a number of ideas that we've been able to apply in the ongoing management of our intranet.
The survey is on again this year, we're participating again and I'd recommend the same to other intranet managers.
Sign up for the Global Intranet Survey 2008
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Participate in the Global Intranet Survey | Tweet |
International view: government mostly failing online | Tweet |
Earlier this year The Economist released a special report on egovernment, entitled The Electronic Bureaucrat.
The report's conclusion was that whilst there were a few good examples of egovernment initiatives, most could not be considered successful.
It's a fascinating read regarding international views and experiences in the area and flags changes that government needs to make to be effective online, including;
- personalising services for citizens, storing preferences to make returning easier,
- delivering 24/7 availability,
- making online services at least as easy to use as the equivalent offline processes,
- being as well designed and easy to use as online services provided by the private sector - as this is what customers expect, and
- engaging with other online services - making content findable in search engines and cross-publishing with online news and social media tools to leverage reach.
Key points in the report include that technology is only half, or less, of the picture. As much time is required to review and redevelop government strategy, structures and processes as to put in place enabling systems.
One big lesson is that e-government is not just about computers; it involves redesigning the way government works.The report also suggests that competition is important, and huge scale centralised projects are much less successfully than smaller ones.
Still, the experience of the past ten years suggests a common pattern of which all countries, rich and poor alike, should take note. Centralised schemes tend to work much less well than decentralised ones, and competition is vital.My key takeaway from the report was that while government around the world sees the importance and value in moving service delivery and citizen interactions online, few have made the structural, cultural and process changes required to fully embrace the channel.
This reflects my own experiences as to why government is slow at embracing social media.
What's your takeaway?
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Do you practice what you preach? Personal use of online services | Tweet |
As the business manager of my agency's website and intranet I see it as part of my responsibility to understand what is happening in the medium and use the same tools being used by our website audience.
It's similar to the concept of walking 1,000 miles in another person's shoes.
For instance, this blog. One of my goals in writing it is to better understand bloggers - their motivations and
I'm also an avid user of LinkedIn (for professional networking) and Facebook (for social networking), not to mention Del.icio.us (collaborative bookmarking), Twitter (micro-blogging), Gmail and Hotmail (web-based mail), Google Apps (collaborative documents), Friendfeed (social streaming), Flickr and Photobucket (online photo storage), Slideshare (online presentation storage), Basecamp (project management), Digg (user-rated news) and a number of other services.
These systems are generally complimentary and often work together extremely well.
In fact on any given day I'd probably interact with roughly half of these services.
Each week I look at a new tool - such as The Awesome Highlighter or Timetoast - to help keep me current with what is possible in the online space - some of it is mindblowing.
How about you?
Considering using Microsoft SharePoint for government websites and intranets? Consider your options carefully | Tweet |
I've seen a lot of hype about SharePoint, Microsoft's solution for, well, just about anything related to online.
The product has been promoted as a Information Management system, as a Web Content Management system (Web CMS), as a replacement for shared drives and file systems, as an enterprise search tool and even as a platform for enterprise applications.
Amazingly enough it can fulfil all of these roles. However like other jack-of-all trades, it's not necessarily the best product for any one of them as detailed in this post, Advice for (prospective) SharePoint customers.
I've particularly been seeing a lot of push for SharePoint in the public sector.
Where agencies have selected a Microsoft technology path there's many good reasons to consider SharePoint as well - less complex environments to maintain, easier to train and recruit staff, there's plenty of synergies that can be leveraged with other Microsoft products.
However when considering any product for a role as important as being the engine of your online channel it's valuable to understand your options and undertake appropriate due diligence before investing public funds.
For instance, the initial purchase price of a Web CMS solution is a very small part of the picture, there's the lifetime cost to consider as well.
Generally I'd expect to use the same platform over a 3-5 year window at least, with substantial ongoing development to meet changing organisational needs. The cost of this development can be substantial.
Another major consideration is the staff costs related to content authoring and publishing. This is the real cost to staff in terms of the time required to use a system in the workplace. While a Web CMS might be cheap to purchase, if it is difficult or time-intensive to use that will seriously compromise the success and the viability of your online channel.
Other factors to consider include content migration, the split of responsibilities between IT and business areas, the cost of extensions to the system and the overall network and hardware costs of the system.
So while SharePoint is one options - and I've seen excellent implementations of the technology in agencies (such as in DEWR) - there are over 140 Web Content Management Systems available for purchase in Australia.
Many of them work very well within a Microsoft environment.
Google to release a web measurement tool to track target audiences | Tweet |
Google looks to be entering the market Hitwise and Neilsen are already competing in - audience tracking online, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, Google to Offer a Tool To Measure Web Hits.
This differs from web log reporting in that it tracks website visitors across different websites to provide a behavioural picture of audiences by demographics.
I've used the Mosaic audience profiling tool within Hitwise to gain a good idea of whether my agency's site was effectively targeting the correct audience (it is) and to look at other websites with which we shared our audience.
This benchmarking has allowed us to identify appropriate press and magazine channels to target for communications activities, to identify websites that we may consider partnering with and to get a clearer picture of what our customers want and do to improve our publications and services.
It will be interesting to see how effective Google's service will be in the same area. With over 130 million unique visitors per day the organisation already has a wealth of data on what people do online and where they go.
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