“I am pleased to return as GTEC’s Honourary Chair for a third year,” said Corinne Charette. Corinne was appointed to the position of Chief Information Officer of the Government of Canada in 2009.

“GTEC is a great event, which has evolved over 19 years to become a major force contributing to innovation and change in the Government of Canada”, said the CIO of the Government of Canada. In this role, Corinne Charette will set the agenda for the event and identity themes that will inform and inspire public servants across Canada for the next year.  During the event Charette will host key GTEC functions and deliver a keynote presentation on opening day.

2011 Theme: Connected Government – Working Together to Better Serve Canadians

Download full theme document.

The pressure on governments to provide more and better services within diminishing budgets continues.  GTEC 2011 will continue to push the discussions forward and will examine this evolution in government service delivery.  Within the theme, ‘Connected Government – Working Together to Better Serve  Canadians’, GTEC participants will collaborate and participate in discussions on:

• Collaboration through connections – connectedness within the public service at large and with the public they serve

• Completing the service loop – working together and collaborating within the public service and with external partners to satisfy citizen and business expectations to provide better and a more seamless service experience

• Embracing the technology – Leveraging and renewing the technology and information infrastructure and deploying new and emerging technologies that promote more collaboration and connections

• Protecting the individual and government – adopting and reinforcing the information policy and practices that are necessary to balance the demands for more connectedness, convenience and transparency while at the same time protecting the privacy of the individual

• Examining the communities and organic organizations that are emerging in response to a more connected and mobile service provision environment

• Understanding the people and the relationships – our communities, our employees and our cross-functional, cross-jurisdictional, public-private partnerships that are emerging to provide better more seamless service

Note: We’re currently accepting speaking proposals that fit into our theme. If you’re interested, you may submit your proposal here.

New Venue: The Ottawa Convention Centre

In the absence of a convention centre, the Westin has been a great location for the event but after a couple of tours during construction, we’re excited to stretch our legs in the new venue. The larger space and state of the art design will provide new opportunities for the event and make it easier for delegates to collaborate on better serving citizens through technology innovation.

New Website: Launching End of February

Our web team is currently developing an all new website around the 2011 theme. We are targeting a late February launch for the new site and event registration.

New Sister Event: GTEC Washington DC

Some of you have probably seen communications about GTEC in Washington DC. No, we haven’t moved; we’ve expanded. Like the Canadian event, the show in Washington will be focused on the use of technology to improve service delivery to citizens with the focus being on the issues faced by those in the US Government.

If you have any questions about this year’s event or just want to talk government technology, feel free to contact us here on the blog, on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. We’re listening and always interested in talking shop.

Wow. Just saying those words conjures up images of wildly successful business models that disrupted industries, technological prowess that stole market shares, visionary products or services that relegated competing and highly capitalized companies into shells of their former self, and even the creation of mega-millionaire pop star phenoms overnight.

How can people tasked with transforming or innovating in their respective organizations perform under this kind of weighted expectation? Indeed, they probably don’t.

I just finished reading a book called “The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home” written by Dan Ariely. In it, Ariely, a professor of behavioural economics at Duke University, recounts a number of experiments he has crafted which lend insight into human behavior at work, and at home. One of these insights is particularly relevant when considering the often daunting task of transformation and innovation.

Ariely ran several social experiments to test an individual’s inclination to donate to a cause. He varied, however, the stimulus presented to individuals to elicit a behavioural response. One group of individuals were given a broad stimulus request such as “help the millions of people below the poverty line in Africa” (in our context this would be the dazzling innovator’s ambition) while others were given a specific, and personable, stimulus such as “help Andy, a young boy living in poverty, this is his story”). No surprise, that those in the latter experimental group donated more than those in the former.

What this tells us is interesting. In the face of a large scale problem, people can’t identify with the problem nor contemplate how their small actions contribute to a solution, so they balk under the expectation and don’t act. But, broken up into more personable, and less sizable problems, people will persevere and perform – they will react with a feeling that they can indeed make a difference. The transformation and innovation buzz – the discourse surrounding innovation’s criticality to organizations and the examples used to define what they mean – has done a disservice to the people who are tasked with doing the transformation and innovation. It has placed sizeable expectations on them, increased the distance between today and the goal, and placed the yardstick so high that taking the first step en route to improvement seems futile. The mumblings of “where do I start?” are audible.

The broad domains of service and product innovation, new product development, service transformation and service improvement – call them what you will – need a new image. In almost all cases, transformation or innovation represents “incrementalimprovements to ” or the introduction of something “different”. Indeed, when you look at the synonyms for transformation or innovation, words like “alteration”, “modification”, and “deviation” are supplied which provide a more palatable ambition to strive for. These ambitions are more practical, and more achievable. What is required to succeed is discipline in terms of business analysis rigour, strong leadership of people, direction underpinned by thoughtful road-maps, and the execution of plans. Individuals viewing their ambition in these small steps will look back on their efforts and realize that, from where they started, they have more than likely made significant transformation progress. The significant barrier of a huge expectation will have been removed.

For the Government context, this is a worthwhile thought exercise. Innovation in the public sector context is difficult, oftentimes due to the consequences of failure and the lower tolerance for risk. But this is likely a function of the ambition of innovation being akin to those dazzling examples which I referenced above. Well of course, when viewed in that light, failures can be big because the goal was commensurately large and virtually unattainable under the best of circumstances. When considered in a more more practical context, innovation and transformation efforts can become the byproducts of a disciplined approach to “tinkering”. Yes, tinkering.

So, this is a call to tinker. Tinker with your processes. Tinker with your assumptions. Tinker with your business model. Tinker away in a planned and disciplined way, and when you’re done tinkering, add the tinkerings up. And then tell me about your transformation success story.

Candy and Aspirin… managing government obligations while enabling collaboration … could this really happen?

WHY YOU SHOULD ATTEND:

In the years that we have discussed Government 2.0 at GTEC, the use of social media - within public service organizations and by the public sector to improve service delivery – has been an increasingly “hot” topic. Social media makes some public servants eager to do more, to push the boundaries of work styles and to increase organizational collaboration. Social media is more than a generational communication issue for the public sector. It has the power to create powerful connections, but it also pushes the envelope of how systems, processes and communications are structured within government organizations.

Regardless of your personal exposure to social media, sessions like this one and a few others at GTEC will explore the impacts that social media is having on the business world. These sessions will encourage a healthy discussion on boundaries – the boundaries social media expands to create opportunity, and the boundaries of accountability and governance that are at the heart of public service values.

SESSION ABSTRACT:

Today’s modern workplace requires mass collaboration.  Whether it be new digital born generations of employees joining the traditional workplace, or new mandates crossing traditional jurisdictional boundaries, technological collaboration is here to stay.  Web 2.0, wikis, blogs, instant messaging, social media, etc. all of these have blurred the lines between what was once a clear distinction between corporate governance and consumer media, one could even argue that this line will only continue to blur, to a point of non-existence.  During this session, you will hear about the emerging collaboration and social media trends surrounding mobility, 3d visual representations, gaming and avatar management.   As well, you will hear about how government institutions are merging the existing 2.0
collaborative methods with strong corporate governance and management in an effort to manage collaboration and strike a balance between the collaboration needs and enterprise obligations around information management, security and access.  In this new world of technological collaboration, let us show you how to achieve a balance between your social media needs and corporate compliance and governance.

SPEAKER PROFILE:

Alex Benay, Senior Strategist, Canadian Public Sector

Open Text Corporation

Alex has acquired a vast range of experience in the information management and public sector management sectors, ranging from policy development and program management to solutions development and implementation. Having spent the first eight years of his career in the Canadian Federal Government as an executive in such organizations as Library and Archives Canada, Natural Resources Canada, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade and the Canadian International Development Agency, Alex then proceeded to help establish Enterprise Content Management capacities in several small to medium sized enterprises in the Ottawa area. Currently, Alex is the Senior Strategist for the Canadian Public Sector within Open Text, where he is responsible for setting strategic direction and policies for all three levels of government throughout Canada.

]]> http://blog.gtec.ca/government-20/session-profile-alex-benay-enterprise-account-executive-canadian-public-sector-open-text-corporation/feed/ 0 http://blog.gtec.ca/government-20/session-profile-alex-benay-enterprise-account-executive-canadian-public-sector-open-text-corporation/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GtecBlog/~3/BFIXK3gxoVw/ http://blog.gtec.ca/government-20/speaker-profile-%e2%80%93-rick-webb-chief-technology-officer-canada-state-local-health-public-service-accenture/#comments Wed, 07 Jul 2010 14:36:56 +0000 Kevin dEntremont, GTEC http://blog.gtec.ca/?p=694 SESSION TOPIC: CIO Role: Enabling the Government of the Future

WHY YOU SHOULD ATTEND:

State/Provincial and local points of view are important when considering the topics of innovation and performance in government. A significant amount of leadership has come from the US state level of government. As delegates from GTEC 2009 will remember, one of our banner keynotes from the event was from Teri Takai, the CIO of California, a state with a similar population to Canada, and about the same size budget as the federal government.

Rick Webb is a former state CIO now with Accenture, and he brings a wealth of experience and relevance to GTEC 2010’s theme of high performance government. As a former CIO, Rick can speak to the notion that for the CIO and IT Teams to be engaged as business partners, they need to move beyond the traditional systems view to one that balances policy, and value-driven objectives.

We think the combination of Rick’s background and Accenture’s depth in high performance research will make this presentation and exceptional one on the 2010 program.

SESSION ABSTRACT:

The business of government is never going to be the same. But what does that mean for public sector CIOs? And where should they focus to ensure the government’s success – and their own.

Governments across the world are caught in a perfect storm — and are being pummelled by the economic crisis, major demographic and political shifts, technology innovations, and citizen demands for greater transparency, accountability, and efficiency. In the center of this storm stands the CIO. Now, more than ever before, CIOs have the opportunity to enable government performance by leveraging and managing technology. But this will require new thinking, a new approach, and a new definition of the role of CIO. Time is now- The successful CIO must evolve to become both a ”business partner” – an executive who is able to engage agencies and business units in their language and understand their needs – and a ”value creator” – an executive who finds innovative ways to improve citizen service, not just the owner of a cost center. This session will explore key performance levers CIO’s can do to weather the storm, including best in class case studies.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES:

Rick Webb, Chief Technology Officer, Canada, US State and Local Government

Rick Webb is a senior executive at Accenture where he serves as the Chief Technology Officer for Accenture’s US State and Local Government practice. Rick joined Accenture in August 2003 and brings a wealth of experience from both the public and private sectors. He has worked extensively with state officials throughout the United States to carry out government transformation by implementing better IT management and e-government practices.

Beginning in September 1997, Rick served as Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the State of North Carolina for three years. In that capacity, he oversaw the State’s Office of Information Technology Services (ITS), which is responsible for managing the tactical, operational arm of technology and setting the offices strategic direction.

Prior to serving as State CIO, Rick was appointed by Governor James B. Hunt as the Assistant Secretary for the North Carolina Department of Commerce and led all economic development and business recruitment for the state as well as the President of the North Carolina Economic Development Partnerships.

Rick has been a featured speaker throughout the United States on both economic development and enterprise management of IT infrastructure, e-Government and IT transformation. He has worked with several states including Massachusetts, California, Kentucky, Texas, Oregon, and Virginia in development of enterprise IT strategies and e-government initiatives. He is former Chairman of the Corporate Leadership Council for the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO).

We develop the conference with the support of our Honourary Chair, the CIO of the Government of Canada, Corinne Charette. We also vet the program through our board of governors, a public-private group of senior executives who are actively engaged in government.

The sessions at GTEC 2010 will be focused on a theme of “High Performance Government” which is a very timely theme for federal decision makers, in the wake of the Spring 2010 Auditor General’s Report and the current Administrative Review.

Canada is not alone. Globally, there is pressure on governments world-wide to provide more and better services and to do so within diminishing budgets; doing more with less, while not a new phrase is an accurate one. Doing more with less requires optimal performance. GTEC has traditionally explored the use of IM and IT to enable service delivery, this year we will consider these but look at them within the context of optimal performance.

Through our keynotes, seminars and workshops, we’ll also explore 5 basic approaches to high performance in government:

1. How technology enables high performance – How is technology leveraged at each phase of the management cycle: from planning, to execution, measurement, monitoring, talent management, and procurement?
2. How information enables better decisions – Governments must manage information and data horizontally across departments and between jurisdictions. How must governments address the issues of open data, security and privacy, to make more informed decisions?
3. High performance work cultures – High performing organizations require creativity and leadership from people at every level. What role should the CIO play as an advocate of high performance, and how can the IT/IM communities become agents of change?
4. What makes organizational transformation work – How can people and technology create new organizational structures that permit adaptability and change?
5. How to mitigate risk – If leveraged strategically, IM/IT can be a valuable tool for the public sector to evaluate and mitigate risk. If technologies can lead to better informed policy and service delivery strategies, then how do high performing governments quantify and measure risk?

History has already shown that technology can enable better service delivery, but high performance governments in the web 2.0 world must find new ways to address the human and organizational dimensions of public sector service delivery.
It’s important to note that there are a wide range of sessions you can attend at GTEC, including:

• Free Workshops (no charge) http://www.gtec.ca/conference/gtec-2010-workshops.pdf
• Cloud Camp (no charge) http://www.gtec.ca/conference/educational-programs.php
• Networking events (no charge, TBA)
• Unconferences and Sessions in the Demonstration Suites (no charge, TBA)
• Keynotes and Breakout Sessions (paid program) http://www.gtec.ca/conference/conference-by-day.php
• CIO BootCamp (paid program) http://www.gtec.ca/conference/cio-bootcamp.php

This year, I will be posting a number of speaker profiles, including the session abstract, speaker bio and notes from GTEC on why we believe the speaker is an important addition to the program. I hope these previews provide some useful context for your agenda planning during the event.

The sessions on the program include private and public sector speakers and the real value of the program comes from the significant level of the speakers and the blend of private and public sector perspectives. GTEC has always offered a level platform for dialogue on the issues that matter to government. Our hope is that innovation will come from sharing multiple perspectives, as the solutions to the complex challenges of service delivery can only come through collaboration and partnership.
Please look for our first conference session profile on…

CIO Role: Enabling the Government of the Future

Rick Webb,Chief Technology Officer, Canada, State & Local, Health & Public Service, Accenture

]]> http://blog.gtec.ca/government-20/why-gtec-2010-a-preview-series-on-the-conference/feed/ 1 http://blog.gtec.ca/government-20/why-gtec-2010-a-preview-series-on-the-conference/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GtecBlog/~3/WeusmjC_H_o/ http://blog.gtec.ca/government-20/a-planning-formula-for-senior-managers-in-federal-government/#comments Wed, 30 Jun 2010 13:25:01 +0000 Stephen Karam, Partner, Systemscope http://blog.gtec.ca/?p=682 Government managers are heading into a key planning period. What should be top of mind when they sit down to chart out this fiscal year?

There are three key themes that management should focus on before initiating large business transformation projects: engagement, framing the problem, and defining specific tools as drivers of transformation.

Let’s first look at engagement. Many times, we have observed managers who have an idea and try to push it up the chain alone without engaging with their colleagues first. Frame your issue it so it engages your peers and their ADM or the DM. Tie yourself to a hot political item in the organization and demonstrate how your plan brings the greatest value internally and to your clients.

How should a manager start the planning process for a new project?

That question brings me to the second theme: not only framing your business problem in a way that engages executives and builds a peer community in support of your vision, but doing so in a way that can be measured.

Have you noticed that a lot of recent Treasury Board initiatives are internally focused? Examples include the upcoming Service Strategy, initially focused on internal service improvement, as well as efforts on improvement of Grants & Contributions (Gs&Cs), looking to reduce administration costs by 10%. I recommend that managers quantify their improvements in the same way. The more you can demonstrate what you want to achieve and how you plan to do it, you are better positioned to receive your ask.

In terms of framing projects, you also want to align with your organization’s Program Activity Architecture (PAA), the Management Accountability Framework (MAF), and the Federal Accountability Act. A common pitfall of a lot of initiatives is that they can articulate how external clients will benefit from transformation, but they do not specifically map outcomes to the machinery of government. When an executive has to prioritize within their portfolio of projects, you must make it easy for them to choose your initiative – both from the client perspective but also from the bureaucracy lens.

Is what you’re describing typically referred to as a business transformation project?

People want to label anything transformation. A common misconception is that business transformation is the same as service transformation. Business transformation is focused on an improved way of doing business and fulfilling strategic policy; it’s truly a change in business and culture. It’s not only a set of projects, but an ongoing program of change.

Executives have to be very clear about what they are trying to transform. How is the business going to be better? When talking to the ADM or DM, rather than touting a technological platform as being better, talk about how it can make the business run better – using measurable improvements to sell your case. Show how the proposed solution can reduce errors, improve throughput and by how much. Now you’re talking about performance metrics. Now you’re starting to align with MAF and PAA. Apply the transformation label only if it truly transforms or enables that process.

Many clients still tend to lead with technology when labeling a transformation project. Does this work?

The challenge is that tools are part of “engineering” a solution; effectively planning focuses on the architecture of an outcome. For example, GC organizations who are Microsoft-based are saying they will invest in MOSS as part of their evergreening process, yet they will label the project as a transformation initiative. It can be, only if the organization focuses on why, what and how it wants to transformation from the perspective of business, process and data/information. Only then can it be determined how to engineer a solution to support the transformation.

One of our clients has fully integrated their systems with MOSS so it is the interface where users have to log in to all their systems, acting as a Business Process Platform. In order to make this successful, the client did a lot of upfront work in the way of business, process and information architecture previous to MOSS being installed and configured. MOSS enabled but did not change the way they do their core business.

What supporting skill sets are needed to plan big projects effectively?

One of the significant gaps in government now is the ability to effectively capture and translate business requirements into actual functional and system requirements that will enable programs’ business needs, both external and internal facing . There must be a group in the organization to bridge that gap. Some departments have a group in the CIO called portfolio management or a similar name. These teams are designed to enable their clients to fulfill business goals. But the missing ingredient is often solid business analysis skills. True business analysis is driven by a deep understanding of business outcomes. Building that business analysis capability represents a fundamental internal challenge that senior managers still need to address. While there has been advancement in this area by some departments, we are observing a critical lack of capacity and capability for these resources across organizations to keep up with the demand of the business.

Social media brings people together. It adds a new layer of interaction not seen before in society; the impacts are such that social media even managed to elect the United-States’ first black President. It accomplished this because it destroyed typical Republican vs Democrat landscapes, and it forced the country to rethink its traditional views on geopolitics. Therefore, one could argue that social media not only brings people together, but that it also breaks down geographical barriers in a way not seen since the invention of the telephone.

In such a large country as Canada, with multiple levels of government, social media can facilitate and help the governance process like no other technology offering ever experienced. It can help citizens in rural British-Columbia get employment insurance (EI) answers online through instant messaging conversations with a representative from Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, who himself is located in Ottawa. Social media can connect a Newfoundland constituent to her federally elected official’s office directly, through the use of a wiki located on her MP’s own personal website.

Even more significant… this same citizen in St-John’s, who was actually asking her MP’s office a question concerning EI in her region, and after stumbling on a federal government collaboration site, has discovered that the exact same question she was posing her MP’s office, was actually being asked by a fellow citizen in BC; the St-John’s resident even saw the HRSDC response online as the entire instant messaging conversation between the BC resident and the Ottawa federal employee was published within the EI QA section that same day… A BC resident assisting a Newfoundland resident without direct government involvement… a picture of efficiency emerges… a self-serve government body operating in a government cloud.

2. Decision making speed and transparency can be increased

As previously discussed in other blogs, government entities are hierarchical in nature. This very hierarchy often causes significant delays in responding to citizen needs, whether it be access to information requests, questions around travel warnings, etc. Additionally, emails and telephones perpetuate this structure because these are the technologies which are the most widely used in governments today and over the past 20 years; this fact does not help to break the mold as they are non-collaborative technologies and are ultimately restrictive in nature. Lastly, these hierarchies date back to a pre-information age society where the rules could afford to be rigid because the information flow was much slower than it is in today’s knowledge economy.

Today and in the foreseeable future, the foundation and essence of these rules are still required. However, how they are administered requires some investigation. For example, the emergence of social media can effectively flatten typical government hierarchies as the transmission of information is drastically increased and the collaboration factor brings people and content together in a way never seen before. In a true social media savvy government, citizens can actually contribute to the body of knowledge of a particular federal, provincial or municipal program, not simply receive information. Once an answer has been provided to a citizen once by a public sector representative, it can be shared and communicated in such a way where citizens can themselves educate their fellow citizens, effectively reducing the information burden on government institutions. People want to help and be helped, and often social media is the answer. Such an ecosystem could drastically reduce the information burden on both public sector organizations themselves and on citizens seeking answers from a typical hierarchical system, which itself has relied on emails and phone calls to obtain answers for the past twenty years.

Essentially, new ways of designing and delivering government programs are required; this new place must be one where a balance is struck, a place where our society’s legal and policy building blocks continue to be respected, and a place where collaborative and open government is available to all citizens through social media.

3. New generations of employees do not ‘do’ email and telephone

My brother is 25, if I send an email, I get an answer within 3 days… at best. If I send him a Facebook posting, I get an answer within an hour… the point here is younger digital natives are used to these ‘new’ collaborative platforms. Texting is replacing phone calls, Youtube, Facebook and/or LinkedIn are replacing emails… the media types which we have been typical government staples have already been replaced within younger generations of professionals, and it is inevitable that they will enter the public sector workplace at some point or another, the key to this is managing this entry into the public sector workplace in a strategic fashion, where a balance between policy compliance and collaboration is respected.

Private sector entities have already adopted these technologies in many instances. Therefore attracting and maintaining young talent through technology usage is less of an issue than in the public sector, which still relies heavily on email and telephones as its primary means of communication. However, should the public sector actively engage these new communication and collaborative methods, it would find that young professionals would most likely feel more engaged and able to make a difference in the workplace and could even contribute to longer term strategic program planning as a result of their acuteness to these types of communications platforms. But beware, it is not simply a question of having this type of media available to younger generations of public sector employees, these new professionals are used to the essence of collaboration and are more challenging of typical government hierarchies. Hence a warning, involve the young professionals in program design and delivery as you are designing tomorrow’s government 2.0 programs for them.

4. Open government is possible with social media

How the public sector perceives itself in the information age is in need of a radical transformation because most public sector organizations have not quite fully understood that they have effectively lost the information battle; content is everywhere and is everything, it is produced within and outside firewalls, information consumers are now generators and generators are also consumers. Realizing that the information war is lost, versus conceiving new management frameworks which operate within this new context are two distinctly different elements.

Today, information is available to public sector employees and citizens alike outside of governmental firewalls at a much quicker rate and broader range than ever before. Additionally, the line between the corporate web vs the personal web is ever blurring, to a point where it will cease to exist in the very near future. These factors, to name a few, create an unprecedented level of stress on both the access to information and the privacy spaces. While social media is often seen as a key source for these new stresses, it may also represent the cure for this ever increasing information burden ecosystem that is the public sector cloud or web.

A social web experience means citizens can manage their own content, their own access and their own personal and private experiences within a government information cloud in ways never available until recently. Yes, rules and policies are still required as they are key building blocks of Canadian society. Such is the case for access to government information for example… no one is suggesting we part ways with our core values, simply that we incorporate our core values into a social media reality.

Consequently, one should investigate how social media can increase open government, how the concept of opening government data can be exploited to feed a knowledge economy as well as a knowledge society from St-John’s to Victoria. This type of study has never occurred. But such an undertaking should be conducted with a broad range of representatives around the table, from youth to senior bureaucrats, from academic thought leaders to business leaders… and this type of representation should be representative of all major geographic entities throughout Canada. The public sector applications are endless : opening public policy debate throughout the vast expanse of Canada’s territory, program funding discussions occurring with constituents and stakeholders from all walks of life, communicating government priorities, etc., all these activities could be a part of an opening up of Canadian government, and this, at all levels of government.

5. A mobile government is an agile government

Why is social media different? Because unlike the web, it has leveraged the potential of mobility, almost from its arrival, whether it be Facebook and Myspace, social media has meant mobile media. Reading any analytical study on this topic, one will notice that the mobility domain is one of the fastest growing industry in the world. Mobile devices are even found in shanty towns in South Africa or in extreme poverty environments in Bangladesh; mobile devices are everywhere regardless of social status, and equally present are Facebookers, Twitters, etc. Essentially, social media has expanded its reach to include all levels of society by leveraging mobile platforms throughout the world.

How is it then, that mobile social media penetration in a public sector environment is proving so difficult? An interesting question, especially when one considers the key concepts developed by social media platforms around instant alerts, integration of typical communication medias such as email into their platforms, leveraging text capabilities, etc. , all of these elements lead to a social media experience that is both work enabling and increasingly mobile in nature. Consequently, because our society is increasingly mobile itself, social media is becoming increasingly class agnostic, which in return should only increase the efficiency of open government; but why the slow adoption? Is the reason funding, policy related or simply that social media has no such place in a public sector setting?

Essentially, governments should be developing their mobility strategies of tomorrow, today. Imagine, reducing costs by eliminating the need for landlines… if you have a mobile device, why would you even need a landline? Imagine a world where government employees can collaborate on projects from home or at the airport or the cottage… do I really need to be at my desk utilizing costly office space? A place where Canadians can access government online services through their iphones or blackberries?

The needs for ‘heavier’ infrastructures and physically needing to be at one’s desk are disappearing… yet government seems to be the last place where some of these new realities are embedding themselves, even though this is exactly the space where the most returns could be obtained : a program employee being able to answer citizen related texts or wiki posts via his blackberry while on the bus ride home, email notifications about new and emerging discussion threads from employees’ personal iphones, etc. If true cost savings are to occur, we need to investigate these new ways of doing business, and do this soon… using a ‘let’s just do it’ approach.

Posted by abenay at 12:04 PM 0 comments

Labels: corporate governance, public sector, social media

Here are the top 5 reasons why 2.0 collaboration will not easily be accepted by government:

1. Open Government is Scary
Public sector employees, at all levels, are simply ill equipped to interact with citizens and businesses in such an open forum. Providing citizens and businesses with online collaborative means and access to government isn’t as easy as it sounds. This is a new frontier for our public sector, one that has not been adopted anywhere else in Canada. Imagine a world where employment insurance discussions could be settled online via instant messaging, where blogs of the latest policy surrounding the government’s foreign aid policies was readily available for critique by citizens from Iqaluit to Vancouver? This type of openness shakes the very core of the public sector as we know it today and it instils fear in most employees to think they could be called upon to collaborate en mass with Canadians throughout the country; and rightfully so. Something like this calls for new ways of designing programs, outreach strategies, technologies, new outlooks on the role of government, etc. No one has started to plan for these types of processes and new-age programs and actually began delivering on a modernized public sector program delivery strategy, yet we now have the tools to do so… just not the framework to proceed.

2. Hierarchy still prevails
True story… someone I recently met (let’s call him John) outlined how they were asked to put together a blogging forum for their department. They did so with great anticipation and were even aloud to post the first comment on this great new collaborative tool. So off John goes and posts a blog on a topic of great interest to him within his organisation, a process he sees as needing modernization, John wants to highlight this to all who wish to read his blog… this process sucks. Off he posts. The next day, his supervisor instructs him that this particular process isn’t really that bad, but that it is a challenge and the wording should have read as such. John is perplexed and confused, but leaves it at that. Now the following day after that, John’s CIO crosses him in the hall and informs him to change the tone to reflect the fact that this particular process he outlined, really is not a challenge, but rather is an opportunity… ??? … Now John is lost and simply does not understand … thought this was supposed to be MY blog page?

This outlines a critical paradigm conflict of web 2.0 in a public sector setting… 2.0 crushes typical government hierarchies that have been in place for centuries… are we ready for this? Because the newer generations of employees coming in, they will not be shy about posting things on a blog or wiki that do not make sense to them within their institution, they will be digital natives used to the Facebook and Twitter phenomenon… CIOs and ADMs out there…. are you ready to hear what the team has to say? Every day of the week? And is this new professional generation ready to accept a combination of ‘old world’ rules and dilute their appetite for mass collaboration? Tough questions… no clear answers yet…

3. Youth not Engaged
I am 29, left government at 27 because I was lucky in reaching a Director position at 24 but got disenfranchised very quickly. When I was in government and complaining (yes complaining I will admit it ) about how it simply is not fair to have competitions outline requirements such as ’15 years of experience in this’ and ‘need 20 years of experience in that’… I simply did not have a forum to be heard. When we wanted to do projects well but trim down on the timelines, I was told there were processes to follow; again no one to turn to that would act. So I left. But now that I am outside of the public sector, I can blog more freely, tweet more freely and participate in conferences and speak my mind, people actually want to hear what I have to say… how twisted… and sad really. All you senior Deputy Ministers out there please take notice, you have thousands of bright young minds within the public sector today who get this Facebook thing, please include them when possible in how you design your programs, how you integrate 2.0 technologies into the workplace and how you can expand the reach of your activities outside of Ottawa, Toronto, Québec City and other traditional centres of power; and please do so before they do what I did, and leave government all together. This new generation is a digital-native one, they are used to this type of environment and could bring much value to the discussion… reversely, this new generation also needs leadership and guidance as to why these public sector rules exist and why they must be respected… both parties could gain so much from such an exchange, yet they rarely happen because today’s government focusses too much on hierarchy and rank, not on innovation.

4. Processes not suited for mass collaboration
Government processes are linear, and they are designed this way for transparency and reporting reasons, please do not argue that they are for efficiency’s sake Collaboration on the other hand, creates more of a ‘bubble’ environment, where processes are not as linear and do not necessarily require such rigour, as a result of the fact that collaboration environments rely on the intellect and power of a large community as opposed to relying on a linear process and a typical industrial age production line system. Now there are good reasons why government processes must be linear, but again we introduce online collaboration to the equation and it begins to pose a paradigm conflict, yet again, as both of these worlds are conflicting in many ways. How to maintain transparency and reporting capacities while introducing more ‘free wielding’ mass collaboration platforms to the public sector workplace in order to drive efficiency? That is the challenge in today’s 1.75 public sector world.

5. Unclear path
One of the biggest issues we face in modernizing our public sector and introducing more 2.0 technologies, is that no one has had the leadership to do it. GC Pedia is a first step, a humble one, but a first one. However there is no policy rigour against GCPedia (IM, Security, etc.), but at least it can start to connect federal government employees. What is missing is how we introduce more robust and enterprise scalable collaboration concepts and platforms into government program delivery framework that encourages collaboration with its citizens; how do we use Facebook as government entities? How do we leverage blogs and wikis within a program delivery framework designed to reach out from Vancouver to St-John’s? If the US could elect its first black President on the strength of Facebook and Barrackobama.org, certainly the Canadian government can renew its program delivery approach to citizens using 2.0 technologies? We just need our own Canadian Barrack to stand up and be heard.

Ok…I am done what has turned into a rant and I do apologize for this. However there are many roadblocks ahead – not opportunities… but roadblocks – and we must face them head on if we are to modernize our public sector program delivery approach to leverage the 2.0 technologies being used around the world. If ISO was able to modernize its voting system to reduce its standards adoption period from years to weeks, by using the web, Canada, as the world’s once #1 rated digital country, should embrace this challenge head on and lead. I would go as far as it is our role to do so and lead the way… just have to find that Canadian Obama somewhere, if you see him or her, please let me know.