If you can't join them, at least counter them - US Airforce devises 'counter blogging' guide

Nextgov has reported in the article AF Counter-Blogs with Trolls that the US Air Force has developed a comprehensive 'counter-blogging model' to help Air Force blog commenters categorise the type of blogger and respond appropriately to negative feedback.

While I'd suggest that it's better to join the conversation, as a fallback strategy it's a good idea to have this type of framework to help agency staff understand the tone of the blogs they are reading and guide their responses. The Air Force model isn't a bad one to start with - and is available publicly online.

According to the Air Force's model,

if an Air Force member wants to respond, the model suggests he or she consider five things, which are always good advice to follow:

1. Be transparent. (Disclose that you are a member of the Air Force.)
2. Site sources. (Use links to video, documents and images.)
3. Take your time to create meaningful responses.
4. Be aware of your tone. (Respond in a way that "reflects the rich heritage of the Air Force.)
5. Influence. ("Focus on the most used sites related to the Air Force."

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It's time for government to consider the mobile internet

What do the Apple iPhone, Nokia N97, T-Mobile G1, Samsung Omnia, Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1, Blackberry Storm and Palm Pre have in common?

     

Yes they are all sleek, carefully-designed handheld gadgets with a focus on usability.

Yes they're also all 3G smartphones - meaning they provide mobile access to email, web and video as well as voice - most supporting free wi-fi as well as mobile telephone networks. 

They are also all relatively new - either released in the last two years, or in the process of release now (with Sony Ericsson investing in a very innovative campaign).

The Independent likes most of them too (Just how smart are smartphones).

However none of them can load a mobile friendly version of most Australian government websites.

Across Australia.gov.au, ATO, Centrelink, Business.gov.au and more - most government departments simply haven't invested in creating a mobile version of their site. 

After a good look around, the most prominent government website I could find with a full mobile version was Multimedia Victoria - try it out on a mobile device.

Is mobile internet actually important?
I'll admit that for a very long time I was a mobile internet skeptic.

I was involved in developing a mobile platforms around the turn of the century, finding at the time we were too far ahead of the market (despite being showcased at several Olympics and winning international mobile awards).

I watched the WAP fiasco from the sidelines - predicting correctly that Australians would not be interested in taking up a service that provided slow and basic access to selected web content at a relatively high cost.

However since the release of the iPhone and others began scrambling to catch up with Apple inthe mobile phone market, I've become more optimistic about the future of the mobile internet.

It is still early days - only 7-16% of mobile phones in Australia were smartphones in October 2008 (depending on whether you believe Telesyte or Gartner). That's between 1.5 and 3 million  phones.

However with improving designs, usability and battery life and falling phone and data costs, Telesyte predicts that 30% of new phones sold in Australia in 2009 will be smartphones, as reported in The Courier-Mail article, Australia braces for the smartphone revolution.

For a country that buys 9 million mobile phones each year (and has more mobile phones than people), that means that another 3 million Australians will be using smartphones by the end of 2009. That's a total of around 6 million smartphone users - or 29% of the market.

Following the same trend, by 2012 the majority of Australians will be using smartphones with full internet connectivity.

Or maybe even sooner if you believe the more bullish figures from Gartner, as reported in the SMH article, Mobile Revolution: It's the year of the Smartphone.

What does this mean for government?
It's clearly still early days for the mobile internet market, however most major commercial news and portal sites already have a mobile version.

Why so? Not because they see a mass market ready to go. 

It's because they want to be prepared for the mass market when it arrives (in 12-24 months), having already established their position and gained the experience to avoid expensive mistakes.

It's also because most content management systems make it relatively easy to offer a mobile version. It's simply a matter of developing a few additional templates, tagging content and using simple scripts to detect they type of user device and serving up the right template and content. If you're more dedicated (or have deeper pockets), content and navigation can be custom-developed for mobile access.

Mobile versions of websites can also be created on-the-fly using services such as Mofuse (see my mobile blog here)

Now I'm not saying that now is the time to throw millions investing in a mobile version of your site. Just as mass market isn't there yet, neither is critical mass for most government departments.

However it's a great time to begin cheap experiments with the medium. Such as finding out how your website looks on mobile devices (ask friends with smartphones), and dipping in a toe by mobile-enabling part of your site - such as media releases.

You can also monitor smartphone use of your website via most website reporting systems - just in case your agency does have a large consistent group of mobile internet users that need special consideration.

This type of experimentation is good preparation for the day in the not-too-distant future when your Minister is asked, or asks, why your department isn't mobile ready.

It will ensure that at least you'll have an intelligent answer, the experience to back it up and the knowledge to implement a full mobile solution when needed.

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Using teleworking to drive outcomes-based governance

I keep a watch on events in the teleworking world as an adjunct to egovernment - it is a move away from geographically restricted service provision and a strategy for betters managing recruitment and retention outcomes.

If much of a government's business is conducted online and by phone, and widespread broadband access allows teams to be in constant communication by video, voice and chat, the reasons for co-locating teams diminish.

This type of change requires leadership at the top to fully buy into the model and make it part of the organisational culture.

Over in Virginia in the US, led by the Governor, they've run the state since 2005 on an outcomes-focused model of governance, with the emphasis on results rather than traditional time-based measurement methods.

Reported in The Teleworker, one of the key initiatives Virginia has implemented was a teleworking program that is,

...enabling state agencies to improve productivity significantly, slash turnover rates and excessive leave time, and save money.

Quoting from The Teleworker,

"Governor Kaine immediately acknowledged that when it comes to managing by outcomes, the very natural question is: ‘Why do we care where you work?'" [Aneesh] Chopra [ecretary of Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia] recalled, noting that one of the Governor's very first actions was to create an office to promote telework, managed by Karen Jackson, and he set an ambitious goal of enabling 20 percent of the Commonwealth's workforce to telework on a regular basis by 2010. "Telework became a very natural priority for us as we thought about outcomes-based government."

The outcomes have been amazing, from the article,

"This has rocked our culture," Chopra stated. "Prior to this, the attitude was, ‘Yeah, telework is important for the agencies because those people process paper, but we're really important people in the Cabinet. It's going to be hard for us to telework.' Gov. Kaine said, ‘Not in my administration.' Now, I must report weekly who teleworked and how many days, by name. That's leading by example."

The Tax Department, meanwhile, volunteered to conduct a telework pilot program, and the effort effectively illustrated telework's benefits - but with a few surprises, Chopra noted. Teleworkers who do mail processing achieved an 80 percent improvement in productivity when compared to the standard by which they're supposed to perform, while data-entry workers at home showed efficiency rates of 110 percent above the standard. In addition, employee turnover is considerably lower among full-time teleworkers at the Tax Department, just eight percent versus the overall agency average of 58 percent. This retention rate, coupled with productivity gains, translates into $141,000 in measurable decreases in retraining and job vacancy costs.

Today, the Virginia Tax Department's top executive teleworks, as do 62 percent of its eligible workers. All of this shows, Chopra told his audience, that telework "is not a nice-to-have but a need-to-have - especially in this budgetary environment. It's why more and more agencies are looking to telework as a strategy to meet the tough goals."

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How to save $2.6M in government by spending $50,000 - engage the community

I've been reading an interesting article about Vivek Kundra, the CIO for Washington District and an advocate for using new technology to cut government costs.

The Washington Post article, D.C.'s Kinetic Tech Czar, talks about how Kundra has re-energised Washington's government IT approach. As described in the article,

Kundra has introduced popular consumer tools to bureaucratic processes, runs his office like a tech start-up and works by the mantra that citizens are "co-creators rather than subjects."

Where in many governments around the world this would lead to him being shown the door, in the US it had led to him being invited to be one of President Obama's Technical Policy Advisors and his approach may be copied by the incoming US Chief Technology Officer.

Why has his approach been successful?

It's saved money and empowered both government employees and citizens.

One example illustrated in the article was his contest 'Apps for Democracy',

In October, he launched a contest called "Apps for Democracy" to encourage developers to create applications for the Web and cellphones to give District residents access to city data such as crime reports and pothole repair schedules.

"I expected to get maybe 10 entries, but we got 47 apps in 30 days," Kundra said. He said he spent $50,000 for the contest and prize money, and estimates he saved $2.6 million over what it would have cost to hire contract developers.

He also stays in close personal touch with what is happening across the commercial sector, regularly consulting venture capitalists and computer science professors, and spending time visiting the research labs of top companies such as Apple, Cisco and Google.

Kundra's approach is one I'd like to see adopted in Australia. An approach which aims to harness innovation and open the doors to government data. One that acknowledges that to maximise customer outcomes collaboration is at least as powerful a tool as control.

To give the final words to the article,

Arun Gupta, a partner at venture capital firm Columbia Capital who often joins Kundra's brainstorming sessions with District employees, said "there's normally a dividing line between the public and private sectors -- a different culture and mindset." A government agency could take years to make changes a start-up would do in weeks, Gupta said. "Vivek is someone who can bridge those sectors to really unleash innovation."

That strategy is likely what Obama is trying to replicate in the federal government, Gupta said. Giving citizens access to government data and letting entrepreneurs and other firms develop new technologies are considered cornerstones of Obama's agenda.

"You have to have the confidence to say, 'I don't need to control everything,' " Gupta said. "That's very much a Web 2.0 mentality. Is that the panacea to everything? Probably not. But it's a step in the right direction."

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How long does it take to adopt new ideas in government?

Often those of us within government, and those on the outside, can form an impression that the process of change, innovation and the adoption of new ideas in government can be very slow.

However sometimes it is worth a reality check - while the world appears to be moving extremely fast, in some ways really it isn't.

A great case in point is this article from Harvard Business publishing, The Greatest Product Demo Ever and What to Learn From It.

It talks about the first presentation of the mouse, hyperlink, hierarchical lists and other concepts that most of us now use regularly - 40 years later.

Most of these ideas, demonstrated by Douglas Engelbart, took at least a generation to become popular. Some, such as the chord keyboard (must faster and easier to use than the QWERY keyboards we use use from the earliest days of typewriters), have never become popular.

So when we look at the speed of internet development compared to the speed most of the world is moving, perhaps organisations aren't moving that slowly.

After all organisations are made up of people and people can be very slow to change.

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