Intranet Innovation Awards come to Canberra

Step Two will be running a free information session discussing the winners of the 2008 Intranet Innovation Awards in Canberra on Tuesday 11 November from 2-4pm.

According to James Robertson of Step Two, the event will include a look at,

• Transfield Service's uniquely effective approach to rolling out
  SharePoint team spaces.
• Highly successful collaboration amongst cabin crew at British Airways.
• The rich suite of functionality delivered by this year's Platinum winner, Fuller Landau (Canada).
• The Competitor Wiki at Scottrade in the US.
• An intranet that speaks the news when postbus drivers ring an 0800 number in Swiss Post.

Registration for the event is available online at: www.steptwo.com.au/seminars/iia-canberra

Read full post...

View summary...

Putting Australian government web traffic in perspective

In August I analysed traffic to our agency's website in July 2008 using Hitwise's data measurement service, comparing our share of web traffic against the total to Federal government websites, other government websites and the top websites visited by Australians.

The results provided me with a view of how important government websites are in peoples' online lives - not very. Less than 2.5% of website visits were to government sites.

It also helped me form some ideas as to how Australian government departments can make their online channels more effective means of engaging citizens.

Reviewing Hitwise's reports from July 2008, tracking around 2.95 million Australians' visits to over 647,000 websites (using ISP logs), the total government sector (6,634 sites) accounted for only 2.26 percent of all tracked website visits by Australians.

Of these,

• Federal government's 2,094 sites accounted for 57.61% of all Government traffic and 1.3% of visits to all tracked websites,
  
• State government's 2,183 sites accounted for 30.82% of all Government traffic and 0.70% of visits to all websites,
  
• Local government's 1,596 sites accounted for 6.51% of all Government traffic and 0.15% of visits to all tracked websites,
  
• The other 761 sites (often foreign government agencies) accounted for 11.4% of all Government traffic.

In comparison, Google.com.au and Google.com  together  accounted for 9.64% of Australian visits to all tracked websites, four times as much as the total government sector (Google.com.au, the number one site visited by Australians, accounted for 7.85% and Google.com for 1.79% of visits).

Facebook, the fourth most visited website, received 2.36% of total tracked visits - slightly more than the entire Australian government.

MySpace, the seventh ranked site, received 1.78% of total visits - almost 50% more than Federal government sites.

Only one government website regularly reaches Hitwise's Top Twenty list of Australian sites, the Bureau of Meteorology (coming in at 16th position with 0.51% of traffic in September 2008). In fact, this site alone accounts for almost a quarter of the visits to the total government sector.

To put these figures into perspective, I roughly estimated from my Agency's actual web traffic that each Australian web user in July 2008 made 270 visits to Hitwise tracked websites (note that at an average visit duration of 10 minutes, this is significantly less that the figure reported by Netratings in March 2008 (PDF) - of 13.7 hours/week online).

Of these estimated 270 visits,

• 26.6 visits were to Google,
  
• 6.3 visits were to Facebook
  
• 4.8 visits were to Myspace
  
• 3.5 visits were to Federal government sites,
  
• 2.4 visits were to State government sites,
  
• 0.4 visits were to Local government sites.

Even if you discount my estimate and take another measure of the average number of website visits per Australian each month, the proportion based on Hitwise's tracked websites remains the same.

What does this mean for government?
Even a few visits per month by Australia's estimated 11 million plus regular internet users users adds up to a significant online audience for government in Australia.

However my conclusion is that Australian government departments should not rely on reaching our citizen audiences simply via our official websites.

We need to reach out and engage our customers via the websites they choose to use.

These non-Government websites account for over 97.5% of regular internet usage by Australian (per Hitwise's July 2008 figures).

If Australian government wants to effectively communicate with citizens online, our departments need to invest in understanding where our audiences spend their time, reaching beyond our official sites to engage them in the online communities they choose to frequent.

How do we engage citizens on their own turf?
There are many different ways that private organisations reach out to user communities, and government can learn and use many of these approaches, such as

• using search advertising to promote Australian government services prominently across top search engines and community sites,
• providing web feeds (RSS, Atomic, etc) that other sites can merge into their own information channels,
• providing data feeds that can be mashed up into widely used sites and new functions (as the Bureau of Meteorology does so well),
• creating, and promoting, useful portlets and widgets on popular platforms (Google Gears, Facebook, Blogger, Ning) that can be added to  individual and group social sites,
• white-labelling services that can be embedded in other sites (Slideshare, Youtube),
• reaching out and participating sensitively in forums, blogs and wikis relevant to our communities,
• engaging online advocates and supporting them as we do media representatives (as US consumer goods firms engage 'Mummy Bloggers' and US political parties engage political bloggers),
• creating and supporting themed community spaces for citizens (as Huggies has done in Australia for mothers).

Note
Hitwise checked the numbers drawn from their web reporting service (thank you Alex and Rebecca). The idea for this post, the conclusions drawn and any calculation errors are mine alone.

Read full post...

View summary...

Are IT departments and web professionals their own worse enemies?

Forbes magazine has asked whether IT departments are their own worst enemies, in an article, The un-marketing of IT, citing examples such as,

• Promoting e-mail use but limiting inbox storage and file attachment sizes.
  
• Touting the Internet as a data goldmine, then blocking people from visiting so-called non-business sites.
  
• Providing people with a PC as a tool to make their job easier, then locking it down to stop them adding programs or even choosing their own wallpaper.
  
• Warning people of the dire consequences of not using an application properly, threatening them with legal action every time they use the application or start their PC.
  

I've seen IT teams engage in this type of behaviour time and time again over my career and the usual outcome is to reduce the business's trust and respect for IT practitioners - not because these actions are necessarily wrong, but simply because they are not explained well to business users.

As the article suggests, if IT teams committed to explaining clearly to users why these types of actions were necessary and provided alternate ways to meet business needs it would be easier to build bridges in other areas.

Extending this to web design and development, I've experienced many websites where unusual navigation or rigid processes are used to move users through a web service to their desired outcome.

These situations meet business requirements and allow the user to achieve their outcome, but are often painful and offputting journeys, which do not lead to repeat usage or goodwill.

Often the user feels like they have survived an obstacle course rather than had a pleasant walk in the sun.

When developing websites (or applications) it is as important to consider the journey - the user experience - as it is to consider the destination.

Simply adding contextual support, removing unnecessary steps and modelling navigation on well-understood models can do wonders to smooth the user's journey and vastly improve the user experience.

Read full post...

View summary...

Gershon report released

The Gershon Review of the Australian Government's Use of Information and Communication Technology report has been released by the Department of Finance, and it makes for an interesting read.

Peter Gershon's key findings were that,

1. There is weak governance of pan-government issues related to ICT.

2. Agency governance mechanisms are weak in respect of their focus on ICT efficiency and an understanding of organisational capability to commission, manage and realise benefits from ICT-enabled projects.

3. The business as usual (BAU) ICT funding in agencies is not subject to sufficient challenge and scrutiny.

4. There is a disconnect between the stated importance of ICT and actions in relation to ICT skills.

5. There is no whole-of-government strategic plan for data centres. In the absence of such a plan, the Government will be forced into a series of ad hoc investments which will, in total, cost in the order of $1 billion more than a coordinated approach over a 15-year period.

6. The government ICT marketplace is neither efficient nor effective.

7. There is a significant disconnect between the Government’s overall sustainability agenda and its ability to understand and manage energy costs and the carbon footprint of its ICT estate.

Some of the key activities outlined will have major impacts on the way in which ICT is managed in the public sector, such as,

• reducing the use of contractors (by 50%),
• having CEOs responsible for capabilities setting for ICT,
• standardising business processes and architectures,and
• focus increased scrutiny on effective funding of ICT BAU activities - in areas from desktop computers through to financial system costs per transaction - in order to reduce costs on legacy systems.
  

There were some very interesting points regarding the vulnerabilities of the Federal government in the IT area, partially due to the concentration of power in Canberra. For instance,

• Federal agencies largely have a Canberra-centric IT model, with 79% of IT staff based in the city.
• This exacerbates the IT skills shortage, leading to the greater use of contractors (23% pof the workforce) - who cost significantly more (average $186,000 per annum) than ICT staff ($92,000 per annum) based on fully loaded costs (includes equipment, training and other costs)),
• It also places enormous reliance of Canberra's single power grid, for which 85% of the power comes from a single feed.

There was considerable discussion of how to create professional IT career paths, to better manage the ICT workforce, improving staff retention and corporate knowledge.

Also discussed was cross-agency planning and purchasing, where already slow, out-dated and complex procurement processes lead to sub-optimal outcomes and do not take best advantage of government's buying power. That's not to mention the need to revisit data centre management to also take advantage of central buying power.

I also particularly welcome the recommendation to strengthen AGIMO's role to be a proactive lead in Government ICT to help realise efficiencies and reduce duplication.

The next step is for the government to have a think about the report's recommendations and take some actions in a reasonably short timeframe.

I await with anticipation.

Read full post...

View summary...

Do public social networks have a place in government offices?

Some departments block them totally, others just monitor usage, is there a case for allowing or even supporting public social network use in government offices?

The other day the Sydney Morning Herald published an article on The pain and potential of Facebook in the office where Nick Abrahams, a Deacons law firm partner provided his personal view on the use of public social networks within a corporate environment together with some statistics from the Deacon Social Networking Survey 2008 on usage in nearly 700 Australian organisations.

Without giving clear conclusions, Nick raised some interesting points around the commercial risks of allowing these networks, including potential over-use, harassment, discrimination and the release of private or corporate in-confidence information.

He also flagged the risks of blocking these networks - such as reduced collaboration, unattractiveness to younger potential employees and being seen as out-of-step with accepted social conventions.

A couple of the findings Nick highlighted were that 20% of organisations blocked access to public social networking sites, only 14% of employees (currently) use social network sites during office hours (including lunch!) and that 76% of employees believed that organisations should allow staff to access these sites in the office.

Demographically only 4% of employees over 35 used social networks at the office, whilst 25% of those 25-34 and 33% of those under 25 years did. Also 46% of respondents who used social networks stated that, given the choice between two job offers that were otherwise roughly equivalent, they'd pick the organisation that did not block Facebook.

There is clear evidence that social networks provide benefits. The experience of many organisations now using internal social networks bears out that they do support collaboration - where they are supported by an appropriate organisational culture.

The efforts by the US intelligence services (an internal facebook equivalent) and the work by software providers such as Microsoft to develop social networks for organisations indicates that in the future more online social networking in organisations is likely to be the norm, rather than less.

However internal social networking is different - easier to manage and control than public social networking. Once it goes public an organisation relies on each and every individual involved to conduct themselves responsibly at all times where their comments are visible.

Is the situation with public social networking any different to where we are with telephones, letters, emails and even online forums (which are not commonly blocked)?

With these mediums we put appropriate policies in place, sometimes train people on acceptable conduct and rely on trusting individuals to do the right thing, to act in their own self-interest (continued employment) and back these up with potential legal options (scaling up from disciplinary action) to ensure usage is appropriately managed.

Should government agencies treat public social networks differently to other mediums, as people are behaving in a less formal manner but may still be indirectly representing the organisation?

Or should they use the same principles of policy, training and actions as for other mediums?

Read full post...

View summary...