Posts
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's climate change blog is now live and already attracting many well-thought out comments at the Prime Minister's website.
Like the Department of Broadband, Communication and the Digital Economy's Digital Economy blog, the PM has opted for a topic-based blog with a limited lifespan - in this case 5 days. The blog is also pre-moderated and only between the hours of 9 to 5 on week days. While there are good reasons for organisations to manage online media within their operational hours, one potential outcome can be more disjointed conversations and less spontaneous interactions than in a post-moderation environment.
The PM's blog has some additional restrictions comments are limited to 300 words and does not allow links to other source material or websites.
Unlike the Digital Economy blog, there are indications that the PM will operate the new blog on an ongoing basis, targeting topics sequentially, but only posting occasionally.
The Sydney Morning Herald has reported that the PM is writing his own blog posts (Blog standard approach brings PM to the people).
What is already clear is that there is a large pool of people willing, ready and able to interact with Australian government via the online channel.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Australian Prime Minister's climate change blog | Tweet |
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Websites dropping support for Internet Explorer 6 - does your department need to upgrade its web browser? | Tweet |
Over the last few weeks several major websites have sent the signal that they are progressively dropping support for Internet Explorer 6, the nine-year old web browser from Microsoft that has been the staple web browser in many government and corporate environments.
First was Digg, with the message on 4 July, Much Ado About IE6, that,
Based on the amount of activity and the relative rate of its decline, we’re likely to stop supporting IE6 for logged in activity like digging, burying, and commenting. Users of IE6 would still be able to view pages — just not logged in. This won’t happen tomorrow, but we’re thinking about doing it soon.Today (Tuesday US time), YouTube sent a similar message, turning on a message advising IE6 users to upgrade, as first reported by TechCrunch in YouTube Will Be Next To Kiss IE6 Support Goodbye.
This builds on a European campaign, Stop Living in the Past, where websites have been progressively warning IE6 users to upgrade, or blocking them from accessing content, reportedly even supported by Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer.
In my view this is great to see happen. Many organisations are restricted to testing on the web browsers they allow internally, which tends to result in online services which work superbly in IE6, but fail to meet modern standards and present poorly in modern browsers less - effectively failing accessibility hurdles.
However it presents an interesting conundrum for organisations still relying on IE6. While the browser may still meet their internal security model, it may be no longer 'fit for purpose' due to declining support by websites.
Fortunately there are no software licensing charges for upgrading to a more modern web browser - which are more secure and robust as well as being more standards compliant - so the main costs are security testing, configuration and rollout.
Proactive security teams may have already done the work required - Internet Explorer 8 has been available for security testing since March 2008 and Firefox 3 has been around since May 2008 (with 3.5 released recently).
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Prime Minister pre-announces Climate Change blog on Twitter | Tweet |
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has pre-announced the launch of his new Climate Change blog with the following Tweet via the KevinRuddPM Twitter stream,
Starting my blog tomorrow on Climate Change. Like to hear your ideas on practical action. KRuddAnother step for the Australian Government into the online consultation space, it will be interesting to see how the blog will operate - stay tuned!
Digital economy paper released | Tweet |
Senator Conroy has released the Australia's Digital Economy: Future Directions paper.
The paper provides a current view of the digital situation in Australia and provides indications of the platform that the country will need in the future to be a leader in the digital space.
It provides a number of examples of Australian digital success stories and hints at some of the strategies the government intends to explore in order to drive future success.
This includes consideration of whether to expand the 'safe harbour' provisions in copyright, the government's role as an enabler of digital content and as an enabler of digital connections (via the National Broadband Network) and its role in education and cybersafety.
For me the paper re-emphasised how important the internet and other digital tools are to Australia's economy and development.
I'm going to have to reflect further on what the paper means for the government's role.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Operating web and IT in an abundance mindset | Tweet |
Chris Anderson, the owner of Wired, recently wrote a very thought-provoking article about the need for organisations to consider how to operate within an abundance mindset rather than a scarcity-based one in his article, Tech Is Too Cheap to Meter: It's Time to Manage for Abundance, Not Scarcity.
Chris uses one example of how Wired used to restrict the email and file space provided to every staff member, with the IT team prompting staff regularly to delete files so as not to fill up the server.
One day he asked his ICT team how much file storage space Wired had for staff and was told that they had 500Gb - half the size of the 1 Terabyte hard-drive in the home computer he had recently bought for his kids. As he said,
My children had twice as much storage as my entire staff.I have had a similar experience in various organisations I've worked at. Despite falling storage and computing costs, organisations often place heavy restrictions on staff computing power - for what reason I'm not sure.
Cost probably isn't a good reason for this scarcity mindset. If, for example, a 5,000 person organisation only allowed each staff member 200Mb in file and email space, that would mean the organisation had limited itself to 1,000Gb (1 Terabyte) of storage for staff.
Looking quickly at hard-drive prices, a 2 Terabyte commercial quality hard-drive costs about AU$500.
In other words, now you can buy twice as much staff file storage as the example organisation above for only $500 - and the price is going down.
Now consider the staff side of the equation. Files keep getting larger, as do emails. If you assume that each staff member spends 10 minutes each month reorganising their file space to prevent them from going over the organisation's limit, that's a cost of 50,000 minutes or 833 hours each month.
Assuming that each hour of staff time is worth around $50 - including wages, equipment and overheads - that lost time costs the organisation $41,650 in productivity, or $499,800 each year.
To put this in perspective, if the organisation removed the limit on file space and compensated by spending $500 (2 Terabytes) on extra storage it would save $41,650 in staff productivity costs - each month.
That's an ROI of 833% - each month.
Naturally there would be some other costs - servers, redundancy, electricity and the need for effective search technology. However the outcome would remain the same, the organisation is better off investing in more storage than in enforcing a 'scarcity' mindset.
File storage space is only one example.
I've also seen organisations struggling on low bandwidth, slowing down applications and internet services - therefore hindering productivity. With the ability for ISPs to provide adaptable bandwidth there's not really much excuse for this type of approach.
Equally organisations often provide their staff with outdated equipment and applications, which also reduces productivity. In many cases staff now have cheaper and more powerful systems and software at home.
While sometimes software is 'held back' to older versions due to security concerns (or lack of staff to check and approve security), the reality is that most modern software is more secure than older versions of applications.
Restricting software and hardware for security purposes can result in the opposite effect - reducing the organisation's security. If staff are forced to send work home to finish it, or go home to view websites and use online applications, this can raise the risks to the organisation.
Again this type of approach reeks of scarcity and cost-focused thinking, rather than an abundance and productivity-focused approach. It probably costs less for an organisation to employ contract staff to security-assess vital applications than it costs the organisation in lost productivity. Even though upgrading the applications may be expensive the net productivity and security gains for the entire organisation can be significant.
Another example is around the use of web services, which are extremely low cost and easy to test and trial. Organisations need to allow staff to experiment with these tools in appropriate ways, rather than requiring them to always follow tender-based processes to procure expensive custom-built alternatives, or have them coded in house (also at significant opportunity cost).
Finally organisational websites are often managed on a scarcity approach, with limited bandwidth and storage space, or with information cut-down from what is provided in print publications.
Again this applies a scarcity mindset. Domains are cheap, storage is cheap, bandwidth is cheap and an appropriately organised website can have great depth of content at relatively low delivery cost (certainly much lower cost than phone, mail or face-to-face).
So, in conclusion, at least in web and IT matters organisations need to consider an abundance mindset rather than a scarcity one.
They have to consider whether their policies and procedures aid or harm staff productivity and whether the cost of managing and policing some restrictive policies (such as file storage) is worth the productivity hit.
