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I'm beginning to get annoyed with the attitudes I'm seeing both in the mainstream press and at many conferences discussing social media.
The discussion is still about how important social media is becoming, how if you don't get on now you'll be left behind and about the antics of celebrity and sports tweeters.
To me these are all signs of how early we still are in the process of adopting social media as one of the many tools in our toolkits - quite a versatile and flexible tool, but still simply a tool amongst others.
It's reminiscent of the coverage and conferences about the internet around ten years ago - where the internet was seen as a bright new toy that people had to use, even if they were not sure why.
To my recollection it took a dotcom bust and about three years of solid achievement in the online space before internet moved from a buzzword to a toolset - when people noticed that after all the hype there was a solid core of value in using the internet channel alongside, or replacing, existing communications, marketing and fulfilment channels.
Social media has been around as a term for around five years now - however for most of that time it was below the notice of the popular media and organisations were a little shy of the concept of 'social' being more than after work drinks.
I think we are seeing some solid achievements now in the area and hope that soon legacy (traditional) media, conference organisers and management will begin treating social media with no less AND no more respect than it deserves.
It's a tool - a good one for some purposes and a poor one for others - no more.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Waiting for social media to stop being the story and start being the medium | Tweet |
Monday, November 09, 2009
Collaboration within organisations increases productivity - new report | Tweet |
When I stepped into the public sector just over three years ago, in terms of workplace collaboration it was like stepping back twenty years.
I found that staff directories were merely lists of names, titles and phone numbers - without listing people's expertise, qualifications, experience, current projects and interests.
The only way to get to know and understand the skills of staff in most other areas was to discover them by word of mouth or meet them at work functions.
Collaboration was limited to face-to-face working groups, flying people around the country to attend meetings, or sending draft documents to others by email or on paper and asking for feedback. Sometime comments were returned written on document print-outs, in long-hand reminiscent of a doctor's prescriptions.
Even when document edits were tracked changes, compiling and reconciling the edits from different people in such a process could take days, if not weeks, before the document was ready to be recirculated for re-review.
While these collaboration systems were slow and clumsy, people - public servants - made them work. I worry about whether it also made best use of peoples' skills, departmental time and public money.
Recently Frost and Sullivan released a report which defined the productivity gains both public and commercial sector organisations can gain from more advanced collaboration techniques.
Reported in NextGov and titled Meetings Around the World II: Charting the Course of Advanced Collaboration (PDF), the report
surveyed 3,662 professionals in businesses and government agencies about their use of advanced collaboration tools such as voice-over-Internet Protocol, instant messaging or meeting via high-definition video to get their work done.The report found that these collaborative tools delivered a return of 4.2x the organisation's investment and that 60% of workers felt that the tools increased their performance.
Is a 4x ROI sufficient to encourage government departments to invest in better collaboration tools? I hope so - and look forward to more productive collaboration with my colleagues in the years to come.
Friday, November 06, 2009
Embracing serendipity in government - we now serve citizens best by collaborating with them | Tweet |
Government runs on rules. Policies, processes and procedures designed to address every contingency and plan for every possible risk in order to provide equity, stability and certainty.
However, as experience has shown time and time again, we cannot predict the future.
While we continually attempt to plan ahead, largely these plans are based on extrapolating past trends and experiences.
This has served us well in times of relatively stable and slow-changing societies and provides enormous capability to mobilise and focus resources towards a few large and separate goals.
However it doesn't work as effectively during rapidly changing conditions where there are a myriad of interlocking issues. The approach can also neglect large and important changes, which are often discontinuous and almost totally unpredictable.
History is littered with enormous societal, economic and cultural shifts brought on by unpredictable innovations; gunpowder, the printing press, steam-power, radio, television and, most recently, the internet.
Each of these - and other - innovations profoundly changed how societies operated, destroying industries and creating a stream of new inventions, professions and both political and cultural challenges in their wake.
In hindsight we can often see very clearly how these changes unfolded and they can appear historically as an evolutionary process. However when living just before or during these enormous shifts it is virtually impossible for most individuals or organisations to predict outcomes ten, five, two or even a single year ahead.
I believe we are living in this type of time right now. The invention of the internet, progress in nano and bio technologies and in alternative - hopefully sustainable - sources of energy is in the process of increasingly rapidly reshaping our world. At the same time we are facing the consequences of previous disruptive innovations - most notably climate change, fuelled by enormous levels of fossil fuel use over two hundred years and population growth, fuelled by improvements in food technology and medicine.
This becomes a time of enormous challenge for governments. How do we extrapolate trends, develop policies, acknowledge and address risks which didn't exist a few years ago?
How do we continue to serve the public appropriately when the time required to plan, develop and implement national infrastructure is greater than the effective lifespan of that infrastructure?
How do we let go of faltering systems to embrace new ways of developing and implementing policy without losing continuity of governance?
And how long can we continue to govern incrementally when living in an exponential world?
We're in a place where there are many more questions than answers. Issues are ever more complex and multi-faceted and can no longer be in silos. Our organisations need to be more flexible and adaptive in response to an increasingly assertive community who often have better tools and information than the government departments servicing them.
Fortunately the disruptive technologies we are developing also allow us to approach many of these challenges collectively on a national and international scale.
We have the means to mobilise the brainpower of a nation - or many nations - using the internet and simple crowdsourcing tools.
We've already seen communities emerge online where companies ask their insolvable questions publicly, allowing scientists, academics and the general public to discuss and provide suggestions.
We've also seen governments willing to ask questions of their constituents, rather than rely on traditional stakeholders, academics and bureaucrats to have all the answers.
I hope over the coming years we see Australian governments embrace serendipity rather than attempt unsuccessfully to chain it. I hope we see bureaucrats and citizens working collaboratively to address major issues, working in adaptive and flexible configurations rather than rigid silos, stepping beyond 'consultation' towards participatory policy development and evolution.
This will require courage on the part of elected officials and senior public servants alike. It will require different types of leadership and thinking, better communications and a broader focus on connecting people over managing fixed resources.
Can we achieve this step from where we are today?
I'm optimistic that we can, but it will take significant work and pain to achieve.
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
Positive and practical examples of online government engagement initiatives | Tweet |
I was chatting with friends on Twitter the other day regarding how useful it would be for Australian government to see positive and practical examples of online government engagement initiatives.
With fortunately timing, Crispin of Bang the Table recently posted about a new report from the US based Public Agenda's Centre for Advancement in Public Engagement which provides a number of examples of effective public sector online engagement initiatives from around the world.
The report also has some practical principles for constructing an online engagement strategy.
View the post, and the report, at Promising Practices in Online Engagement.
Monday, November 02, 2009
NSW government launches data.nsw.gov.au with over 400 datasets | Tweet |
The NSW government has released a catalogue of over 400 datasets at data.nsw.gov.au, making it probably the second largest government data catalogue in the world (after data.gov in the US).
From the discussions I've seen and taken part in, this is far beyond what was expected.
Many of the datasets are only available as PDFs or as tables in webpages and the copyright terms, however this is only to be expected in a first release of this type.
Overall it's a tremendous resource and will hopefully encourage other Australian governments to take similar steps.
