This is certainly the goal of movers and shakers in this space, as explored in FastForward’s recent blog-hosted Webcast with Andrew Rasiej of the Personal Democracy Forum and Beth Simone Noveck, US Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government.  Greater collaborative and social networking services present new opportunities to not only open up government and make it more accessible, but also facilitate greater information sharing for addressing complex issues.

But we still have a way to go, as McKinsey and Company recently spelled out in a report that looked at the state of progress of e-government initiatives. McKinsey found that despite spending enormous amounts on Web-based initiatives, government agencies often fail to meet users’ needs online.

The report’s authors, Jason Baumgarten and Michael Chui, say that to succeed, e-government needs new governance models, smarter Web investment, and greater user participation.

There have been some impressive benefits seen from the early days of e-government in terms of services such as being able to file taxes electronically, responding to RFPs, or managing benefits online. But there has not been notable progress beyond these early efficiencies. “Many new e-government initiatives have neither generated the anticipated interest among users nor enabled clear gains in operational efficiency,” the report states.

Baumgarten and Chui recommend greater efforts in terms of adoption of new tools and methodologies, such as blogs, wikis, and social networking or collaborative platforms. In addition, government agencies need to develop capabilities in critical areas such as marketing, usability, Web analytics, and customer insights. Agencies need to proactively get citizens, businesses, and other agencies involved in contributing or creating applications and content.

Where can a well-governed highly collaborative e-government lead us beyond online drivers’ license registrations?  Opening up innovation to outside sources is a powerful tool. For example, the District of Columbia municipal government staged an “Apps for Democracy” contest to encourage developers to create applications that would give residents access to data such as crime reports and pothole repair schedules. Forty-seven applications were created in 30 days. McKinsey notes that “hiring contract developers would have cost approximately $2.6 million, whereas the cost of running the contest was a mere $50,000.”

Among other things John said that, “if you want to compete in a medium, you have to understand it.” They built a great web site with no SEO considerations and no one could find it. Another lesson: measure, measure, measure. The Web allows you to measure, take advantage of this. Perhaps most important of all he said that traditional media needs to do R&D to find innovative new offerings that take advantage of the new Web and not just try to get more money for current offerings.  The “us” versus “them” mentality needs to be trashed.

I was reminded of a session that I attended at Harvard’s JFK School of Government in early 2005. On one end of the long table were managing editors of several large papers, including the New York Times. At the other end were some of the big time bloggers of the time such as Dave Winer, Dave Weinberger, and Jay Rosen.  The newspapers said that they spend millions putting reporters out in the field and fact check extensively while the bloggers attract big followings hanging out in their basement in their pajamas writing on their laptop. Dave Weinberger objected to the comparison. He said that the bloggers were just having conversations about what the news reported, among other things.  It was not the same thing. I would agree.

Blogging has opened up a new channel of communication. If the older ones wake up to this they can see how to effectively take advantage of the opportunities. The New York Times has done as good a job as anyone in this area since that 2005 event.

The recent Technorati 2009 survey of the blogosphere also touched on this topic.  It said that, “despite being perceived by some as enemies of the traditional media, bloggers actually carry a journalistic pedigree. 35 percent of all respondents (bloggers) have worked within the traditional media… and the true overlap reveals itself in the 27 percent of respondents who both blog and work in traditional media.”

I actually got started blogging by pitching an article on the topic to a print trade publication early in 2004. I have to confess that I had only heard about blogs the week before. When I sold the piece I started a blog as part of my research and started attending Dave Winer’s blog evenings at Harvard law School. I got hooked and write for many blogs now and still occasionally for traditional media, as well.

Thierry Hubert, who also attended Webcom 2009 wrote, about the discussions I alluded to at the start this post in Webcom 09 – The Misplaced Fear of the Mainstream Media.  He wrote that “The battle is not one of formal versus informal, but one where formal content providers need to listen and engage in the dialogue.”  He adds that at the same time traditional media need to hold on to their charter as “leaders and champions of valued and verified information.” They need to participate in the new social media without losing site of what made them valuable in the first place.

There can, and should, be a symbiotic relationship between traditional media and the new social media.  Traditional media has given me a lot to blog about over the past five years. I look forward to more and hope that it takes the steps to survive by better engaging in the new Web.

The 2010 lists have started early. David Armano recently wrote “Six Social Media Trends for 2010“. I respect David’s contributions to the industry so I was quick to read and respond to his piece, noting first his closing question:

Thanks for filtering out some key items to focus on.

1. “Where do you see social media going next?” Social media doesn’t ‘go’ anywhere. Indeed, as others have said, it will simply become more ubiquitous. The comeback to requests for ROI on social media should be a request to see the ROI for the phone system, so you can use it as a guide for your response. It’s a channel.

2. Business is social. It turns out that the intimacy of the mom&pop era was all of the innuendos of the ‘persistence’ of relationships (the memory of the relationship transactions). Until the content that streams through social media is persisted, the intimacy will still be lacking.

3. Seems that the most common, high value use of social media mechanisms is to bypass bad operating designs (service models). At some point one will have to resolve to the other to relieve the schizophrenia (inconsistent identity).

So what do I mean in the second item by the “‘persistence’ of relationships”? To clarify, my use of the term “persistence” equals the “the continuance of an effect after its cause is removed”. A related term is “memory”. Many of the best recollections of great customer exchanges include some aspect of being remembered. Don Peppers used to give examples of hotels that remembered what your room service preferences were. These are the kinds of things that are part of ‘having’ a relationship. But a hotel doesn’t have a memory, and an international hotel  brand has to know you wherever you go. The only way an individual can have a persistent relationship with a company is for there to be a persistent memory, somewhere.

A common comparison is often made to the mom & pop business, suggesting that business is more personal when you do business directly with the owner. It’s a simple matter of memory. Even salespeople will tell you how important remembering personal details are for impressing customers/clients.

While social media introduces a new channel by which to interact with customers, as I pointed out in #3, these new mechanisms are often used as the ambulance network — helping injured customers, one at a time, just like mom & pop. Only mom & pop would remember who was injured and why. They may have even changed the way they did business to improve. But the distance between the knowledge and the corresponding action was minimal. Not so in modern enterprises. Building connections between the two requires technology.

As enterprises historically embraced information technology, they started first with a focus on the capture of transactions — the things that were directly tied to the flow of money that kept the business alive. In these technical systems, people were appendages to the transactions. This was most classically seen in the telecommunications industry. As a phone customer you weren’t a name or even an address, you were a phone number (BTN = Billing Telephone Number, does it get any more transactive than that?).

MCI brought new pricing pressure to the telecommunications industry by competing against AT&T. In the early 90’s the pressure was increased by a marketing campaign that capitalized on…human relationships: Friends & Family. The discounts provided by the relationships relied on data — making sure that the billing system knew which phone numbers you’d specified to get discounts on. Setting up and changing these numbers was all managed by one-on-one relationships — talking to a call center representative.

Everything was fine if nothing changed. But life happens. If you moved, your phone number would change and so did your history…it was gone, you started over.

Relationships are expensive to maintain. We can all relate to what we invest in personal relationships. The types of relationships we have or want to have with a business varies based on a variety of factors. Oddly, most of what we really want is to be able to get through a business transaction or receive the services we believe we contracted for with minimal inconvenience. And most of the problems businesses face is when this basic need is not met.

Companies engage in social media to increase the intimacy of their conversations. We have to ask ourselves, is it the channel that makes the difference or the rules that are applied via the channel? Why can’t the same thing happen via the existing channels? At what point does the pattern of exchanges across all channels come together to serve as evidence for change in the business?

Would the delight of getting help via social media channels be as meaningful if as a customer you didn’t have any problems to be resolved?

Shouldn’t the real question for 2010 be more focused on how businesses changed/improved as a result of all of their channels of interaction, social media being just one of them?

E-government can mean much, much more than mere online service delivery. For example, look at the impact on internal operations. Citizens and taxpayers aren’t the only ones that get frustrated with government. More often than not, government employees themselves feel stymied in their attempts to serve constituents and share information within one of the world’s largest and most complex organizations.

As Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, put it: “I’m sure many government employees and administrators are frustrated by their own systems that are built on 20th century models, and would love to see a better bird’s eye view of what the agencies are working on, where the budget is, how decisions are made as well as finding people within their own agencies that might have a solution that could work faster and better.”

Rasiej was recently joined in the FASTforward blog-hosted Webcast with Beth Simone Noveck, US Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government, moderated by Renee Hopkins of Strategy and Innovation.

Noveck says she is seeing examples of government employees becoming more engaged as collaborative and innovation opportunities arise. For example, she relates:

“The [Veterans Administration] launched a competition a couple of weeks ago to ask 19,000 employees how to reduce the backlog of veterans’ benefits claims. They are running an employee idea generation platform, essentially. And of those 19,000 eligible employees, 12,000 have already used the platform.  So the notion that central management sitting in Washington is going to know best how to solve a problem that’s occurring out across the country in dealing with people on a day-to-day basis is just ludicrous. It’s the people who are actually in the front lines of dealing with those problems who will know.”

Technology — particularly collaborative and social networking services — present new opportunities to not only open up government and make it more accessible, but also facilitate greater information sharing, Rasiej points out. “If we can get our agencies – let’s call them bureaucracies, our systems of government — to recognize a new collaborative era, we may actually find ways to save money, reduce waste and, most importantly, create transparency that provides for a very important byproduct which is citizen engagement and the dissolution of apathy.”

Then there’s the even broader implications for democracy and open society. We’ve come a long way in a short time, Noveck says. But the government is still only dipping its toes in the waters of collaboration and social networking. “The first generation of e-government was already a sort of Herculean step in itself,” she says. “The ability to deliver some basic things like forms to citizens, the ability then to transact with those forms so that you could, for instance, pay your taxes online.”

The potential impact of e-government extends well beyond simply delivering services online, she says. It will represent “a shift in how we conceive of government itself and, I think, fundamentally how we think about our democracy” — from a client-customer model to a forum in which important decisions are undertaken collaboratively.

Rasiej envisions a day when collaborative multi-stakeholder scenario planning will be available or created with the public to deal with complex public policy issues such as water management or adaptation to climate change. While he admits that theories around collaborative government and collaborative democracy are still “out of the box and not yet been fully understood,” there is potential for greater innovation in problem-solving:

“As more and more networks are built, and more and more data is available and the public itself gets used to be asking for input – which includes digging into data, tapping into personal or professional expertise, collaborating with others of similar interests – to solving long-standing problems, we’re going to see some very unique solutions, some efficiencies and, conceivably, a better governance system, that eliminates waste, creates more transparency and increases civic participation.”

This slide shows what happens to children’s language as they approach Emergence in the 3rd picture on the right.

I think our use of Twitter can track this trajectory. At first it was me and a few friends that I knew from my face to face or blogging life prior to Twitter.

Then in the last 3 years, I have added a few more friends from the Twitterverse. These in my case have come mainly from Pub Media and from the Bryant Park Gang that Morphed into the Planet Money Gang.

I exclude myself from the many who merely add thousands of folks indiscriminately. I have added several hundred of these but I find that only 1 or 2 have been people that I have learned to care about or interacted with in a good way. The Dunbar number is not a nice to have but a Rule!

What I have immediately seen from the new lists that are emerging around the two and related areas of my interest – the PM/BPP Gang and Pub Media – is that I have some real gaps. Those that created the lists whom I like care for and admire have people that I don’t know and who don’t know me.

But it is highly probable that we will get on – your friend is my friend!

So we move toward phase 3. When we get a critical mass of Trust – Affection – Attraction then don’t we get close to “Emergence” being possible?

Andy Carvin’s NPR News List would surely make an incredible starting point for more experiment – now add to it his Pub Camp list and you have the 300 Spartans!

This then is power.

A large, talented and also diverse group that has a large bond of trust.

Such a group can surely take on the “Persians” of our time?

What hit me as I watched was the attitude of the young people in the film – do you ever imagine that they will feel comfortable in an organization that does not allow access to social media?

So if you don’t allow this – what’s your plan?

I was pondering this over the weekend and I think I’ve found a way to explain it in a more satisfying way.

Emergent behaviors are unintended consequences that make you happy.

We are social animals that have evolved to operate optimally in small groups (check out Dunbar’s number). As social systems get larger, they exceed our capacity to make accurate inferences and predictions. Complex organizations and political entities represent design solutions that compensate for these limits and allow us to take on tasks and efforts beyond the grasp of small groups. Technology adds to the complexity and increases the capacity of the system at the expense of making the system still more difficult to predict.

‘Unintended consequences’ is a consulting term for ‘oops.’ It’s a belated admission that it’s difficult to predict all the ways in which a system will react to its environment. A typical response is to work more diligently to lock things down, usually by squeezing out opportunities for human judgment and adaptability. This leads to the TSA and zero-tolerance policies that suspend six-year olds.

A better response is to stop treating people like interchangeable components in a machine and start designing with an eye toward integrating human limits and human creativity into our systems. Assume that the new system will produce unexpected results. Focus your design effort more on swinging the balance toward pleasant surprises and less on eliminating surprises altogether.

I think this makes sense.  If you try to use performance incentives to promote enterprise 2.0 adoption, you need to be very careful that it does not reward the wrong behavior.  It certainly needs to be aimed at overall team success if used at all.

So what does Rex offer instead? He writes, why not fun.  Here I am completely onboard. I have often been involved in knowledge management implementations where we introduced fun as part of the awareness campaign.  This approach succeeds even more if it makes the work more fun, such as meeting new interesting people to collaborate with and finding out more about your colleagues.

Rex closes with a great video from Volkswagen that seals the deal. It shows how if you make one channel more fun it will trump the easier, formerly more popular,  one.  We should add the spirit of this approach to our enterprise 2.0 implementations. It could only help.

In a new post, ReadWriteWeb’s Jolie O’Dell describes how US Navy CIO Rob Carey wants to use social media is a resource for the US military to build trust and collaboration across all four branches.

However, the mainly unregulated, Wild West aspect to social media has put off a super security-conscious and disciplined operation such as the military. That’s doesn’t mean social media — with its powerful collaboration capabilities — doesn’t have a place in the military, Carey says. O’Dell cites a recent podcast in which Carey observed that “most social networking tools come with no rules of the road. As the Internet moves towards user-generated content, we thought there was a void we could fill… to mitigate some of the security risks associated with social media.”

Carey urges the military to engage social media full force:

“Social media is an inherent part of the toolbox for members of the millennial workforce, while baby boomers are just adopting it. Social media tools should become the standard by which we can share and collaborate on information inside and outside the network boundaries.”

Carey’s comments com eon the heels of last month’s release, by the federal CIO Council, of the Guidelines for Secure Use of Social Media by Federal Departments and Agencies. (PDF download)

The Guidelines address the information security risk head on:

“The decision to embrace social media technology is a risk-based decision, not a technology-based decision. It must be made based on a strong business case, supported at the appropriate level for each department or agency, considering its mission space, threats, technical capabilities, and potential benefits. The goal of the IT organization should not be to say “No” to social media websites and block them completely, but to say “Yes, following security guidance,” with effective and appropriate information assurance security and privacy controls. The decision to authorize access to social media websites is a business decision, and comes from a risk management process made by the management team with inputs from all players, including the CIO, CISO, Office of General Counsel(OGC), privacy official and the mission owner.”

The government breaks social media usage into four categories: Inward Sharing, Outward Sharing, Inbound Sharing, and Outbound Sharing:

Inward Sharing: “The sharing of internal organizational documents through internal collaboration sites such as SharePoint portals and internal wikis.”

Outward Sharing: “Also known as inter-institutional sharing, enables Federal Government information to be shared with external groups, such as state and local governments, law enforcement, large corporations, and individuals.”

Inbound Sharing: “Also known as “crowdsourcing,” is similar to conducting a large online collaborative poll.”

Outbound Sharing: “Federal engagement on public commercial social media Websites.”

The report makes the following recommendations for secure social media adoption by federal agencies:

Policy control: “The senior technology official at each federal agency should develop a social media communications strategy, with the support of their communication office, that accurately addresses the guidelines in this document in conjunction with government-wide policy.”

Acquisition controls: “Federal agencies should require enhanced security and privacy controls through contracted social media services, such as… supporting support stronger authentication mechanisms for federal employee and agency user profiles, including multi-factor authentication…. Ensuring social media websites consider basic security best practices, such as input validation, code security reviews, and strong cookie management.”

Training controls: “Often the best solution is to provide periodic awareness and training of policy, guidance, and best practices. The proper use of social media in the Federal Government should be part of annual security awareness training…  [such as providing] “specialized training to educate users about what information to share, with whom they can share it, and what not to share…. Providing guidance and training based on updated agency social media policies and guidelines, including an updated Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) specific to social media websites…. Providing guidance to employees to be mindful of blurring their personal and professional life. Don’t establish relationships with working groups or affiliations that may reveal sensitive information about their job responsibilities.”

Network controls: “The Federal Trusted Internet Connection (TIC) program provides a series of inspection, monitoring, detection, and blocking technologies that ensure additional security and visibility to defend against a wide array of attacks, including those discussed from a social media perspective…. Current technologies allow for increasingly granular control of web applications, data, and protocols, in accordance with departmental policy. Web content filtering technologies for all Internet traffic should be located in the department TIC or provided as an add-on for offices granted access to social media websites.”

Host controls: “The establishment of a hardened Common Operating Environment (COE) will ensure consistent and comprehensive host configuration and hardening policies across the Federal Government. Hosts may be configured using the Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC), and validated through a Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) compatible scanner….  Two-factor authentication reduces the likelihood an attacker will gain unauthorized access to an information system through a username and password…. Federal agencies should ensure they have strong patching for operating system and application vulnerabilities, and that updating anti-virus signature files and system logging is enabled to report to the SOC on workstations in real time.”