Higher expectations from end users and a larger focus on efficiency and value for money drive change in the public sector. In many cases, these contribute to a fundamental re-evaluation of service delivery and the need for transformational change to achieve the industry’s desired outcomes. Given IT’s role as a key enabler of business transformation, the CIO needs to be at the executive table to share how IT can contribute to transformational initiatives.

For more than 17 years, I have advised government clients on public sector reform and have led large complex transformation projects for their back office functions. In my experience, if technology leaders want their voices heard by chief executives, they must demonstrate that they recognize their key role in business transformation.

Since there is no universal way to do this, I have provided three steps to help CIOs become more influential during transformational projects.

1. Manage government stakeholder needs.
Since IT is a service-driven department, CIOs must be aware of their stakeholders and actively manage them. Stakeholders can include your customers, CEO or company employees. CIOs need to know who they are, understand what they need from your team and communicate the IT department’s requirements to them. By engaging stakeholders in dialogue and fostering relationships with them, CIOs will be able to address concerns at the executive table and build credibility.

2. Obtain clarity on how IT can align with business requirements while competing for scarce resources.
In any corporate environment, the CEO faces competing bids from different departments within the organization to fund strategic projects. With increasing demands on public sector finances, this is becoming ever more relevant to public sector organizations. In order to compete for scarce resources, CIOs must be present at the executive table and demonstrate the value that IT can add to the business requirements.

To prepare, consider how IT investments can help fulfill the business’s objective, the scope of work involved and how the IT department can fit their needs within the broader business strategy and budget. Clearly demonstrating this alignment will contribute to the CIO’s influence during long-term transformation projects.

3. Demonstrate the benefits of technology-driven changes.
If IT departments want to introduce new technology, CIOs must be able to demonstrate the benefits to the end user, how it will contribute to the organization’s strategic goals and its financial and business benefits. This requires a detailed understanding of the end-to-end business processes. The business insight CIOs gain from this will create a unique combination with their technology expertise to help them become a vital and respected contributor in the boardroom.

Large-scale business changes require a business-savvy CIO who is able to articulate the IT department’s benefits to decision-makers and help deliver their agency’s objectives. CIOs who can see how IT aligns with their organization’s business strategy and clearly articulate the alignment to executives will create meaningful transformation that ultimately benefits Canadian citizens.

Roger de Montfort led a panel, The Leadership Role of the CIO, at GTEC’s CIO Boot camp on Monday October 5, 2009.

Tags: business transformation, CIO, CIO Boot camp, large scale change, PricewaterhouseCoopers, PwC Canada

The change has been gradual, but the results have been dramatic.  Over the last twenty years – since the spread of the Internet and the dawn of what has come to be known as the Information Age – the relationship between governments and citizens has changed forever.   Citizens are no longer content to be passive recipients of government services, paying their taxes and expressing their pleasure or displeasure only at the ballot box.  Armed with vast amounts of information and near-instantaneous communications, citizens are seeking not only better service from government, but service that is tailored to their specific needs.  

The early stages of the Information Age – evidenced by personal computers, the Internet and mobile communications – brought us to this point.  Now there are signs from around the world that a new phase of the Information Age – featuring new technologies and more innovative uses of older technologies – is upon us, changing not only the way that governments deliver services, but the essential relationship between governments and citizens themselves.

What we are witnessing today is the shift from e-government to e-governance.  New technologies allow governments to deliver services more efficiently, but the change is deeper than that.  These technologies – ranging from social networking to cloud computing – enable governments to seek advice and counsel directly from citizens, to inform and educate them, and to engage them in the design and processes of governance itself.

Accenture has studied this trend in depth, identifying dozens of cases of governments adopting new strategies (and adapting old ones) to better engage the public, deliver more effective public services and involve citizens in their own governance.  At the same time, we have conducted an ongoing international study – the Global Cities Forum – to hear what citizens believe government should be doing to help improve the quality of their lives. 

These studies have led to the development of what we call the Public Service Value Governance Framework, a model of governance that connects people – as citizens, service users and taxpayers – with those whom they elect to lead them. 

The framework is built around four components:

1.      Outcomes – Governments are focusing on improved social and economic conditions for citizens, such as health, learning and safety, and not merely on the amount of services provided or on efficiency.

2.      Balance – Governments must balance choice and flexibility with fairness and common good, addressing gaps between those who are able to take advantage of service improvements and those who are not.

3.      Engagement – Governments are engaging, educating and enrolling citizens as co-producers of public values by seeking their views and helping them make the best use of government resources.

4.      Accountability—Governments must not only be more transparent about their actions and performance, they must provide accessible means for citizens to remedy problems with government and public services.

In our global research, we have identified many examples of governments at all levels – national, state, provincial and local – that are adapting innovative technologies to put this framework in place.  In Canada, for example, to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of public service provision, the Federal Government has launched a government-wide pilot for a new internal collaboration platform called GCpedia, an internal version of the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia.  The service allows federal employees to post articles as well as comment on and edit articles posted on GCpedia by their peers.  The federal government is using GCpedia to enable informal collaboration between federal employees within and across organizations.  

Tomorrow at GTEC, Greg Parston, the Director of Accenture’s Institute for Public Service Value, will be sharing these research findings on e-Governance. Greg will be speaking on Tuesday October 6^th at 9:15 in Theatre 1.

Tags: Gov 2.0, Governance, Government 2.0, Service delivery

Last week NRCan gave a presentation to the Conference Board of Canada on the role of social media in risk management. The presentation took the usual form: we discussed our experiences in managing the risk of social media implementation, focused on how to address quality of content on wikis, and how to guide and inform employees on the acceptable use of new and open technologies.

What was different about this particular presentation was the inclusion of a few slides on how social media could be used to contribute to – and in fact reinforce – risk management activities. We had an audience interested in all aspects of risk management, and as good presenters we looked at our own NRCan Wiki, our blogs and other tools to find good examples to illustrate how social media could help reduce risks – or at least serve as a way to identify risks earlier.

Joe the security guy
Take one of our IT security guys for example – let’s call him Joe . He’s a well-respected and knowledgeable NRCan employee, whose work concerns protecting corporate systems and ensuring that we’re kept well informed on any potential risks. Joe wrote a blog entry about the dangers of Twitter. It was a good, well thought out entry that generated a discussion amongst employees. Some employees were concerned that this attention to potential risk could slow things down, and the issue was discussed from a diverse variety of perspectives.

How does this support better risk management? The first thing to note is that Joe posted his blog entry voluntarily – not because he was asked or because there had been a problem, but because he saw something on the horizon and took the initiative to address it by starting a discussion with his fellow employees. This discussion took place before the Department had officially identified Twitter as a tool being used by employees, and long before it had indentified the need to provide relevant policies and guidelines.

Now that the need has arisen, the policy does not need to start from square one. There is already a base of research and opinion to be found in the discussion sparked by Joe’s blog entry. Joe has created a living repository for information and knowledge that could play a valuable role in building a risk management approach, a repository fuelled by the experiences of NRCan employees. Now policies can be built not only on theoretical implementation plans, but also on how real employees have chosen to make use of social media tools.

This is the power of social media: to build on the wisdom of crowds. In the social media forum, the latest concepts are discussed by people that have an interest in the topic, no matter whether they have an official role in the file or not. With social media, a body of valuable knowledge and experience can grow organically, fuelled by the passion and interest of real people, including those who may not have been reached through traditional lines of communication.

We must not only recognize the value but also make use of the discussions and analyses that are generated through the knowledge skunkworks of social media. Taking this inclusive and proactive approach will help us anticipate new trends and build corporate knowledge, not only for managing risk but also for any other subject matter or mandate.

Tags: Blogs, knowledge, mitigation, NRCan, Risk, Security, Social Media, Web 2.0, Wiki

Governments are looking for ways to leverage Web 2.0 communities and social networking within their organizations, many looking to do so based on their commitment and interest in Microsoft SharePoint.  Based on nine years of experience working in this field, there are a number of principles organizations can apply to successfully deploy communities in social networking.  In this three part series, I will outline 11 principles for social networking on the SharePoint platform, or more generally.

This week, I’m going to tackle the final three principles for government 2.0 –  the importance of design, status updates and follow the data  

Principle #9 – Design Can Make a Big Difference

While in theory, this principle may seem like a no-brainer, it is important when it comes to government 2.0 to keep in mind that small design changes can make a big difference.  Taking the time to understand the positioning of the community, along with how exactly people use different features, is key to the success or failure of a government 2.0 strategy.  For example, a community deployment within the US military made a number of fairly minor design changes, and they were able to dramatically increase the number of views, visits, comments, blogs, bookmarks and question replies with very little growth in the total number of community members.   A small change to the commenting feature resulted in a more than 350% increase in the number of comments being made within the community.

Principle #10 – Status Updates 

Consumer social networking has driven the status update phenomenon, with most services including function so we can see what our friends, family, coworkers and other associates are up to.  While it may seem that the status update is too frivolous or fun for the enterprise, it offers a powerful tool to engage users within communities. 

Within a social learning community, setting the status update to what are you learning provides a relatively simple, yet robust way to communicate with and engage others in the community.  Status updates are particularly interesting as they have proven very effective within consumer social networking sites and now users are comfortable with communicating in this manner.  They provide an easy way to engage users that may be hesitant to participate as the approach closely mirrors something they are likely doing on a personal level.  As these users visit the site to do status updates they are apt to become engaged in other activities over time.

Principle #11 – Follow the Data

In the enterprise there are multiple technology products and solutions to support a wide variety of essential business process needs.  Government 2.0 applications are not intended to replace these approaches but to take their data and make them relevant to a broader audience and contextualize them with the wisdom of the crowds.  One example is at the Defense Acquisition University in the United States where they produce guidance for military acquisitions.  In this context, producing documents are highly structured and require multiple levels of sign-off before the document is complete.  In this case they use SharePoint for document routing.  However, at inflection points in the process and at the end, this document needs to be disseminated and used by a broad community in a Web 2.0 style context.  The key is to make it easy for data in these workflow driven systems like SharePoint to become visible and usable by a broad enterprise audience.

Government 2.0 offers organizations a new and tangible way to drive business results using proven technologies and approaches from social networking.   Applying the above principles can enable organizations across the public and private sector to make Government 2.0 and communities a success.

Tags: Government 2.0, Microsoft SharePoint, Social Networking, Web 2.0

Governments are looking for ways to leverage Web 2.0 communities and social networking within their organizations, many looking to do so based on their commitment and interest in Microsoft SharePoint.  Based on nine years of experience working in this field, there are a number of principles organizations can apply to successfully deploy communities in social networking.  In this three part series, I will outline 11 principles for social networking on the SharePoint platform, or more generally.

This week, I’m going to tackle the four more principles for government 2.0 –  the importance of design, status updates and follow the data  

Principle #5: Nurture Content Addiction

Successful sites are those active enough to maintain the attention of even the busiest people.  Novelty and change are one big reason for people to keep coming back.   The ongoing success of FaceBook and Twitter illustrate how “content addiction” creates a reason for visitors to continually engage with the site.

From an enterprise perspective, this “content addiction” can be achieved by applying the practice of content aggregation across the social learning community.  Aggregating content across all topics and areas provides pulse on the project, or even the entire organization.  Social filters are key to making this information meaningful to users.   A good public example of this Digg.com. 

Personalized aggregation, which continues to grow in popularity, is another important strategy where users collect all the feeds from topics or colleagues to see in one location.  This Facebook or Twitter style aggregation when applied within the government provides a broad view introducing users to new information, while the personalized view trims down the information.  An important piece of content production is revealing both implicit content [content as revealed user activity such as ‘Ted marked document X as helpful’] and explicit content [content that is added by typing].  

Principle #6 – Use Play and Gaming

Enterprise learning professionals are increasingly relying on play and gaming as a key element of corporate training and development programs.   They are doing so with good reason, as play and gaming are engaging in a very deep way.  For those people who are into gaming, their games and communities are very consuming, and keep them coming back.  A good example of this is the popularity of online gaming communities such as World of Warcraft or the interactive components of gaming consoles like Xbox Live.

These same principles can be applied to social learning applications.  Taking the principles of gaming and applying them to a training scenario offers a very compelling and engaging way for enterprises to keep users active within a community. 

For example, the Army relies heavily on play and learning in its MilSpace community in helping members develop critical decision making skills.  Users watch a real-life scenario on video and are asked what they would do in a similar situation.  When respondents answer, they can then see others’ responses as well as how the real-life person decided and what happened in the end.

Principle #7 – Keep Users Connected

Social and web 2.0 approaches rely on continual participation.  Continual personalized hooks and calls to action keep people coming back and keep people addicted.  The trick is to let the application do the work.  Think of the emails that you may receive from Linked In (Someone has added you to their LinkedIn Network) or FaceBook (Bob has sent you a new message on FaceBook). 

Traditionally, within the community setting, a newsletter or similar tool was used to engage users on a weekly, biweekly or monthly basis.  Applying the successful approach from social networking of continual updates throughout each day encourages ongoing interaction with the community, which keeps users both connected and engaged.

Principle #8 – It’s a Service

A major difference of intranet communities versus social media or social networking sites is that users come to the communities because they want something.  Users are likely looking for information or need a solution to a specific problem. As such, the organization needs to keep in mind that the community is a service and the community’s goal is to provide the best possible service to users.  For example, if you include questions and answers as part of your community, you need to ensure that people are successful by treating it as a true service.  Mechanisms need to be in place to ensure that unanswered questions are addressed, questions are routed to the right people, and new answerers are enlisted.  That many questions get answers, how many are “good” answers, and how long it takes for users to find answers.

Watch this video by Andrew Chambers on how service is important for communities at the Federal Reserve Bank and Northern Lights.

Check back next week for the final three principles for communities and social networking  as part of Government 2.0.

Tags: communities, Digg, Facebook, Government 2.0, LinkedIn, Microsoft, SharePoint, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Xbox