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Long-serving public servants are familiar with the challenge of balancing customer, agency and political wishes, with a clear understanding that the role of the public service is to implement the policies of the government of the day and not to be customer advocates or lobbyists.
In the commercial sector similar challenges are often faced between customer, management/board and shareholder interests, however often the choice of master to serve is less clear. Without customers a business fails, thereby failing to meet the goals of management or shareholders.
This influence doesn't exist in most of the public sector - citizens are not able to pick and choose their service provider, the government makes that decision for them, providing many services in a monopoly environment.
This monopolistic model has worked well for government over the last century, ensuring that the bulk of citizens have a consistent experience - whether by phone, print or face-to-face.
However the effectiveness of the monopolistic model doesn't fully hold in the online world. Suddenly governments are not the only organisations with universal reach, and suddenly citizens can create services that fill gaps left by government.
This has given rise to a multitude of sites where, for little or no cost, citizens are providing better and more cost-effective services than can the slow moving and cumbersome wheels of government.
These citizen-provided services are also totally citizen facing, without any need to answer to political masters, making them often better attuned to community needs.
How should government address the challenge of these 'competitors',
by crushing them out of existence (an easy task for legislators)?
by ignoring them (as often seems to currently be the case)?
or by embracing, supporting and encouraging them?
Personally I feel governments should embrace and support these 'competitors', helping them access government data in order to improve their offerings and aiding them in reaching broader audiences - even at the expense of the government's own sites.
Of course, this willingness to be transparent and collaborative doesn't occur over night - as discussed government agencies are not acclimatised to competition, and the skills of most agencies do not reflect the skills useful in a competitive environment.
However I hope that this changes over time and government begins to support and foster these competitors, learning from them how to better meet the needs of customers.
Here's a video about some of the work of these citizens in filling service gaps that government had not yet either seen a need for, or been funded to address.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Balancing customer, agency and political needs in an online world | Tweet |
Saturday, November 08, 2008
Digital swarming - distributed collaboration and decision making | Tweet |
JD Stanley of Cisco has published a very interesting initial paper on 'digital swarming', an approach towards the use of collective intelligence to generate higher quality and faster decisions - with particular relevance to the public sector.
To quote,
Digital Swarming is about a digitally connected human and machine world. A world where dynamically forming, scaling, reconfiguring and disbanding collaborative communities swarm for a cause, learning from each other, lowering cost and cycle times, and producing outcomes and effects that are greater than an individual or small group could produce on its own.
I think this approach has huge relevance for the public sector, given the complex interrelated problems it faces where they relate to the economy, sustainability, education or public safety. The opportunity to accelerate public/private/people partnerships to achieve results is the effect we all are seeking. The Digital Swarming framework is meant to contribute to this goal.
He's looking for comments over in The Connected Republic
Friday, November 07, 2008
Federal government to trial public consultation via Web 2.0 in 2009 | Tweet |
Following up from AGIMO's 'consultation blog consultation', The Australia has reported that the Finance Minister has indicated that the Federal government will be trialling public consultation via Web 2.0 tools in 2009.
The article, Tanner eyes web 2.0 tools, begins the process of setting a direction for the Federal government, with Minister Tanner stating,
"The rise of internet-enabled peer production as a social force necessitates a rethink about how policy and politics is done in Australia," he said.
"In the longer term, governments will have to adapt to information's new online centre of gravity.
"This is not an undesirable thing; there are significant opportunities for government to use peer production to consult, develop policy and make closer connections with the citizens it serves."
I agree that it is not undesirable - in fact in my humble opinion it's a highly desirable approach, allowing more people to get involved with the decisions that affect their lives and helping educate people to the machinery of government.
Done well it may even help offset the people crisis the public service is facing, by encouraging people into the public sector.
I also believe that the government will be best served by drawing on the expertise of Australia's social media experts to achieve fast success.
Relying on traditional government communications and IT teams presents, in my view, a greater risk as they may not have all the relevant and necessary experience to effectively use social networking approaches in the online channel.
Obama becomes the first internet President | Tweet |
With the conclusion of the US Presidential race, commentators are turning their attention to an analysis of how a relative newcomer could first defeat a more experienced contender for the Democratic nomination (Hillary Clinton), and then achieve a victory over an even more experienced Republican candidate (John McCain), albeit on the back of extremely low approval ratings for George Bush and some missteps by the Republican camp.
One of the key factors being identified, as was identified earlier in the campaign, was the polished use of the internet by Obama's team to build voter engagement and raise funds. Drawing on the experience of people such as one of the founders of Facebook, Obama was able to utilise online social networks to create the largest electoral machine in history.
For instance, as reported in Wired Magazine, Propelled by Internet, Barack Obama Wins Presidency,
Both Obama and Republican rival John McCain relied on the net to bolster their campaigns. But Obama's online success dwarfed his opponent's, and proved key to his winning the presidency. Volunteers used Obama's website to organize a thousand phone-banking events in the last week of the race -- and 150,000 other campaign-related events over the course of the campaign. Supporters created more than 35,000 groups clumped by affinities like geographical proximity and shared pop-cultural interests. By the end of the campaign, myBarackObama.com chalked up some 1.5 million accounts. And Obama raised a record-breaking $600 million in contributions from more than three million people, many of whom donated through the web.
The Australian also commented on this in Obama surfs the web to the White House, where it states,
"No one's going to say Obama won the election because of the internet but he wouldn't have been able to win without it," said Julie Germany, director of George Washington University's Institute for Politics Democracy & the Internet.
"From the very beginning the Obama campaign used the internet as a tool to organise all of its efforts online and offline," Ms Germany said. "It was like the central nervous system of the campaign."
This type of campaign is not limited to political ones - it could as easily be used to build a sustained movement on topical issues such as global warming.
I wonder when we will see these tools used in Australia to influence a political outcome - or when government will begin to use them to its benefit (maybe next year).
US Navy CIO encourages and endorses use of Web 2.0 technologies | Tweet |
FCW.com has reported in, Navy encourages use of Web 2.0 tools, that the US Navy's CIO Robert Carey, the first government CIO to publish a public blog, has endorse the use of Web 2.0 tools to improve communication and collaboration.
Tools that include wikis, blogs and Web feeds will give warfighters seamless access to important information, Carey said.
“Web 2.0 tools are useful in a global enterprise, such as the Department of the Navy, as they enable widely dispersed commands and personnel to more effectively collaborate and share information,” he said.
In my humble opinion this approach applies equally well to any public sector organisation with multiple locations.
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