What's the digital IQ of public sector organisations?

If organizations that used Facebook to disseminate their message were actual people, NASA would be the captain of the football team and the class president, the White House would be his cheerleader girlfriend and the the Department of Commerce would be the nerd they both pushed into a locker...
Technews Daily 

Digital IQ Index: Public Sector cover
Source: George Washington University

The George Washington University in the United States has released a report ranking the 'Digital IQ' of 100 government agencies, political and nonprofit organizations.

Based on the effectiveness of their websites, use of social media and other online tools, the ranking shows some stark differences in the performance of public sector groups seeking to understand, participate in and influence public discussions.

More than 80 percent of the organizations in the study had a presence on at least one social media platform, 63 percent hosted a blog and 20 percent had some presence on mobile platforms.

The report states that social media use is already demonstrably bearing fruit in politics, with 74 per cent of the US House of Representatives and 81 per cent of the US Senate candidates elected in November's midterm elections having more Facebook likes than their rivals.

The report also suggested that most public sector organisations have yet to unlock the power of digital platforms, with over 50 per cent of the organisations indexed registering Digital IQs in the 'Challenged' and 'Feeble' ranks.

Despite these low rankings, 85 per cent already had a Facebook presence, 87 per cent were on YouTube and 83 per cent used Twitter, with 73 per cent on all three. However many had not focused on building large audiences - with 46 per cent of public sector organisations having fewer than 10,000 Facebook 'Likes' (previously Fans) and the median Twitter audience being 5,000.

Only 25 per cent of organisations engaged in two-way dialogue on Facebook and only 35 per cent on Twitter.

President Obama's weekly YouTube videos have apparently 'taken off', with the White House YouTube channel having been viewed over 34 million times. The report states that,

Analysis of views of Obama’s speeches and public events reveals that the public is increasingly turning to the White House channel rather than to traditional news outlets, suggesting a key transformation in the media ecosystem.

Eight of the President's top officials have taken to the social media sphere as a channel to engage with citizens and amplify their message. In particular,

Secretary of Energy Steven Chu gets kudos from his fans for his personal approach on Facebook. In the midst of the obligatory energy-related news, Chu posted his review of the latest blockbuster, “The Social Network.” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs answers questions from his Twitter followers on the YouTube Series “First Question with Robert Gibbs.”

Mobile use still appears to be lagging, with only 28 per cent of the public sector organisations evaluated having a mobile site, smartphone app or iPad platform. The US Military led in all of these categories, with each of its six branches present on mobile.

The report showcases a number of US public sector social media successes, from NASA's 'golden ticket' lotteries, through the National Guard's 'show us your arms' recruiting strategy to the General Service Administration's real-time dashboard of all executive branch and Federal agency notifications, which citizens can sign-up to to receive alerts across a range of categories.

The report can be downloaded as a PDF from www.l2thinktank.com/publicsectordigitaliq/

I wonder how Australia's public sector would rank.

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How do public sector organisations hire for social media talent?

Most organisations wouldn't hire unskilled people to manage their financial accounts.

They wouldn't (normally) allow untrained staff to respond to customer phone calls or be interviewed on a television chat program.

However how much experience and training do they expect their social media leads to have before they begin commenting online publicly?




That is - if they allow them to comment online at all. Whether they hire social media leads with experience or not, do they give them the tools to succeed?

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The ongoing struggles to balance IT security and staff empowerment

Governments around the world are struggling to manage the dual challenges of maintaining IT security while also enabling their staff to do their jobs in a digital world.

The Australian government has endorsed social media engagement by staff in its Open Government Declaration, stating that;

Agencies are to reduce barriers to online engagement, undertake social networking, crowd sourcing and online collaboration projects and support online engagement by employees, in accordance with the Australian Public Service Commission Guidelines.

Meeting this remains a challenge in many agencies. It takes time to assess services, mitigate risks, adjust processes and policies and train staff.

This week we've seen just how hard this balance can be - with one large Australian Government department cutting about 700 staff off from an online service experiencing very rapid growth.

The service was Yammer, a social media network designed to be used within enterprises.

Yammer allows organisations to establish an internal network allowing micro-blogging (like Twitter, but for staff only), file sharing, direct messaging and communities - with every message stored and searchable for knowledge management and security purposes. It supports tagging, integration with third-party applications and has a strong security focus - if Yammer's messages were not secure it would not have a business.

Over 100,000 organisations use Yammer, including large internationals such as Deloittes and Cisco. At least 39 US government agencies are signed up to use the service via Apps.gov and the Flemish government in Belgium uses it as well.

Closer to home the service is in use, to my knowledge, in QLD, NSW and Victorian governments as well as at Federal levels.

Examples include the Victorian Department of Justice, with over 550 members on Yammer as of May 2010. The NSW Department of Education and Training uses Yammer and established a community for teachers to provide feedback on the Australian Curriculum. Queensland Transport has apparently been astounded at the rapid growth of the service amongst staff.

Federally, I'm aware of use of the service in at least six agencies on a trial or active basis.

However Yammer, and other social media services, still face enormous challenges gaining IT acceptance.

In the federal department mentioned above (with 700 or more users, including senior managers), the growth of the service was extremely rapid. Presumably this is because it provided functionality that staff could productively use in their jobs.

However, after a short consideration, the service was banned and blocked from the department. I've heard several versions of why this occurred, with the most common view being that introduction had not followed the correct process and usage was growing too fast to be manageable.

The use of social media in a number of other agencies remains strictly controlled or blocked altogether. I am aware of several other agencies who have been threatened with or had to shut down trials of services such as Yammer due to ICT security concerns.

Security concerns are real. So is the value of online services to government employees.

Where an online service is adopted very quickly it has clearly met a staff need that existing ICT services do not.

However it also poses a fast growing challenge for security people, who must ensure that an agency's network remains secure.

How do we balance these needs to secure organisational networks while empowering staff?

This quandary places senior management in a difficult position. If they take a straight 'block' approach to online services they could face employee dissatisfaction and diminished productivity. If they take an 'allow' approach, they could see networks compromised, data lost or stolen.

With new highly useful online services emerging almost every month, senior management need to educate themselves on the potential risks and benefits and make the most appropriate decisions quickly.

Staff need to be supported with appropriate guidance on how and where to use online collaboration tools.

Sharing information between agencies more actively would also help build a base of experience in the secure management and effective use of online services.

It would also be very beneficial to have centrally secured and approved services through a platform such as apps.gov to help mitigate individual agency risks.

However ultimately ICT security and business areas need to work very closely together, having open and frank discussions to build a mutual understanding of the concerns and benefits surrounding online tools.

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Storming the gates of the policy makers

On a recent visit to Melbourne (for pleasure) my partner and I stayed in a hotel near the curious sculpture pictured below.

Great Petition by Susan Hewitt and Penelope Lee. Burston Reserve, Melbourne.

Photo: Diana Diiorio   Source: Arts Victoria

Reading the plaque, we learnt the sculpture was a representation of the "the great petition", a document signed by 30,000 Victorian women and presented to the Victorian government in support of allowing women to vote in the state.

The petition was presented in 1891. However Victoria didn't grant women the vote until 17 years later in 1908.


Following this, while we were attending TedxMelbourne on Saturday, one of the speakers used a slide depicting Rosa Parks who was arrested, tried, and convicted for disorderly conduct and violating a local ordinance after refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to make room for a white passenger on 1 December 1955.

Rosa Parks sits in the front of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1956 after the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled segregation illegal on the city's bus system.
Behind Parks is Nicholas C. Chriss, a UPI reporter covering the event.
Source: United Press photo. Location of Original: New York World-Telegram &
Sun Collection.

This event was a trigger for the African American Civil Rights movement. Rosa's act and the subsequent Montgomery Bus Boycott led to a change in the local ordinance within 381 days (by cutting bus revenues by 80%).

However this was a local change only. The Civil Rights movement is not considered to have ended until 13 years later, with the passing of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 (excluding the Black Power Movement which lasted until 1975).


Another TEDxMelbourne speaker, Tania Major, mentioned the long struggle of Indigenous Australians to be fully recognised as Australian citizens. From Federation to full voting rights in 1965 took 64 years, with full recognition in the Constitution occurring only after the referendum of 1967.

Source: New Matilda, The Myth of Aboriginal Voting Rights

In these and other cases of major social change, while some individual members of established authorities were sympathetic, institutions were bound by precedents and processes which made change slow and, in some cases, torturous.


On Wednesday evening (24 November), there was an event at the University of Canberra about Employee 2.0, featuring a panel of speakers including Mike Higginbotham, the Senior Social Media Advisor for Telstra (via Skype), Simon Edwards, Microsoft, Director Corporate Affairs, John Sheridan, First Assistant Secretary, Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) and chaired by Michael de Percy, Lecturer, Faculty of Business & Government, University of Canberra.

Panel at Employee 2.0 event (#emp2au)
Photo: Leigh Blackall

Following the twitter feed for the event, several of the comments struck me:

• leighblackall: #Web2, #gov2, #emp2au should be considered more as social movements (#webism) than techno determined 
• leighblackall: Question to #emp2au: if #web2 is a social movement, like feminism or even socialism, seperate from technology, how would you comment?... 
• M_Hickinbotham: @leighblackall I think it's a populist movement #emp2au #web2 
• iseit_uc: Web 2.0 may be as big as the Industrial Revolution? #emp2au Better get into it!  

Web 2.0 as a social movement?

In many respects I can see this being a fair view. To quote the wikipedia definition,

Social movements are a type of group action. They are large informal groupings of individuals and/or organizations focused on specific political or social issues, in other words, on carrying out, resisting or undoing a social change.

In this case the social issue might be the equitable access to information and to the capability to create and share content fairly in support of social (and organisational) goals. Gov 2.0 could be looked at as the right to increased participation in government processes (engagement and collaboration), an improved understanding of how governments operate (transparency and openness) and greater capability for individuals and communities to choose self-determination (government as a platform - empowering, but not controlling citizens).


When thinking about Web 2.0 and Gov 2.0 as a social movement, it is useful to reflect on how long it took for other major social movements to effect real change.

The examples I've given above took, respectively, 17, 13 and 64 years to reach a, more or less, final resolution.

Given that the term Web 2.0 was coined in 2004, and Government 2.0 in 2005, the fact that these terms are already on the lips (and in some cases in the hearts) of our politicians and senior public servants is a sign of how far the 'Web 2.0 social movement' has already come.

To speak emotively, the 'Web 2.0 movement' has stormed the gates of policy makers. The rising tide of internet users have already had a profound impact on how businesses operate and how nations are governed.

For everyone already engaged with this 'movement', you can be proud of the degree of change that has taken place in such a short period of time, effectively 5-6 years.

However storming the gates is only the first step. We need to work together to define a long-term vision of what the world beyond the gates should look like.

• What should a 'Net-empowered society' look like? 
• How do individuals and businesses operate successfully within it? 
• How do we govern ourselves effectively, adapting digital tools to best serve the needs of citizens?

This need to 'image the future' is, in my view, a pressing and necessary step if we wish to collectively choose a path towards a future that we collectively want, rather than stumble blindly into a future which marginalises or limits our choices.

That's one of the main reasons why I'm involved with the Australia's Government 2.0 Futures project, collecting and collating the views of a desired future from a broad international group of thinkers and practitioners to provide input into the most important debate the internet faces:

Now that we've stormed the gates of policy-makers, what do we tell them we want for a collective future? 

What do you imagine the future should look like?

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What is Australia's Government 2.0 future? Contribute to the website & book

What do you think Australia's Government 2.0 future will look like?


Today Kate Carruthers and I have launched a new project; one we'd like you to be part of.

Government 2.0 is gaining momentum around the world. Not a fad management approach or minor adjustment to policy and processes, Government 2.0 is underpinned by one of the most fundamental changes in communications technologies since the introduction of the printing press: the internet.

The pressure for change is coming at all levels. More than 90 per cent of Australia's adult population access the internet on a regular basis. More than 50 per cent of all Australians now use social networks to share their ideas, build their knowledge, collaborate on causes and comment on policy debates.

In the words of Clay Shirky, we are living through the greatest outpouring of community creativity in history. Every individual who joins the internet gets a free printing press, television channel and radio station. Individuals have the opportunity to influence governments on a greater scale, with fewer barriers to participation, than ever before.

Many of Australia's governments are already actively introducing Government 2.0 tools and practices into their policy, operational and service delivery processes. While there are many successful examples, most have been the efforts of small teams executing good ideas without an overall vision of what Government 2.0 will mean for Australian governance in the future.

Looking around the world, there are as yet limited sources of strategic thinking or research into how Government 2.0 will shape governance over the next 10, 20 or 50 years.

Therefore Kate and I have launched the Government 2.0 Futures project to provide public sector policy-makers, practitioners and academics with a collection of views on Australia's Government 2.0 future.

Through Gov2au.net we are asking Australian and international Gov 2.0 experts, commentators and practitioners - and the Australian community - to reflect and contribute their views on three questions:

• What does Government 2.0 mean for Australia’s governance?
• How will Government 2.0 change the culture and practice of Australia’s public servants and governments?
• What will Australia’s Government 2.0 future look like?

We hope to release a selection of these contributions under Creative Commons next year as a free ebook. We also hope to release a paper version to sell in bookstores and online. Any profits from the sale of this book will go to support Government 2.0 initiatives from not-for-profit organisations in Australia.

We invite you to be part of Australia's Government 2.0 future by contributing your views, ideas and suggestions via the website.

You may also follow the progress of this project on Twitter at @gov20futuresau.

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