Last week we discussed the concept of a “social” workplace and the value of collaboration among public sector information workers.  But where is the real return? What specific areas can benefit most from an investment in collaborative technologies and encouragement of better communication of information?

Managing Human Capital

Recruitment, attraction and cultivation of a skilled public sector workforce remain an expensive challenge, even when economic conditions expand the pool of candidates. A flexible and committed workforce who can fill critical gaps during periods of staff turnover and use collected intelligence to prioritize tasks can only exist when information is simple to find, and experts are ready to share.

Skills and learning management, expert finders, employee on boarding and mentorship, alumni networks, succession planning, and career development: these are the key functions that often determine an organization’s ability to attract, maintain, and cultivate a talented employee base.  Collaborative tools deliver in-house networks that weave the strong social fabric of trust, connection, and shared goals among colleagues.

Self-Service and Peer-to-Peer Empowerment

Time spent on repetitive tasks, struggling with email inbox overload, trying to track down the right person to answer a question – sound familiar? As departments downsize, right-size, reorganize, merge, spin-off, or decentralize, complexities compound, and productivity and a sense of accomplishment suffers.  Disengagement sets in.

Organizations that build a Social Workplace can make effective use of simple and intuitive content creation tools. Measurable productivity gains, reduced search times, efficient reuse of shared content are demonstrated with web-based authoring tools for FAQs, project knowledge bases, best practices, or meeting notes. Employees who are encouraged to share their educational background, previous work history, and expose hobbies and interests very often are called to share these formerly hidden skills on new projects. Easy location of in-house experts, regardless of level or role, becomes a natural part of internal knowledge discovery.

Transparency and Corporate Governance

Poor decisions that contribute to negative business results are often made without the benefit of internal expert consultation. One-to-one communication tools – including email – are not conducive to open, vetted discussions on risks, precedent and implications. Organizations with narrow definitions of compliance that focus only on retention rules miss the opportunity to proactively root out and shed light on risky behaviors or patterns.

2.0 technology and culture also delivers a compliance educational opportunity beyond mere publication of statements or policies. It allows rich media, peer to peer discussion, and online interaction to deliver a compelling vision of enterprise goals and expectations. Audio, video and rich graphic content forms transcend language, geography and generations to communicate acceptable practices and instill understanding. 

The Virtual Enterprise

Providing an equivalent online Social Workplace experience for employees who work away from the physical office is an important aspect of employee engagement and productivity. Geographical separation can lead to a disconnection from team or organizational shared goals.  Adoption of a Social Workplace allows distributed organizations to offer the same virtual water cooler networking experience to remote staff as the more traditional office employees.  Opening awareness to hidden skills and undervalued experience, finding common interests, and building personal trust and networks is the value of the human connection we find among our colleagues. The Social Workplace now brings this to the virtual enterprise.

Enable the Front Line

Service representatives, program managers, help desk staff, inspectors, and emergency responders are mobile professionals who require accurate timely data at their fingertips and they move quickly to execute on opportunities.  Often the most accurate intelligence on field conditions, public concerns, hazards, or safety issues will come from peers—this is the buzz, the scoop, the first-hand observational knowledge. The pressure to be in tune with issues can be impossible when individuals are left to fend for themselves.

Organizations that get better at capturing and disseminating the intrinsic knowledge in the field will find competitive advantage with the Social Workplace. Quick and easy web or mobile capture of data, images, or text notes shared with a broader team leads to timely awareness of trends and conditions on the road. This field intelligence needs to become part of mainstream corporate memory. Seeking input directly from front line services deepens collected wisdom and shows responsiveness to changing conditions.

It’s great to be back on the GTEC.CA blog as we ramp up for the main event in October 2009. What a year it has been for the world of Government 2.0 and enterprise collaboration.  Use of social media and online communities for citizen engagement are now routinely front page news. “Enterprise 2.0” has moved from the fringe of public sector priorities into the mainstream, and early adopter departments and agencies worldwide are showing tangible and measurable success.

But what are organizations really trying to accomplish with a 2.0 strategy? Why is a renewed emphasis on collaboration important to the departmental mission?  Beyond the hype, beyond the fluff – what the real objective?  Ultimately success in the knowledge economy –whether public or private sector – rests on connecting the three fundamental elements of business: People, Processes and Content.  Balancing these three elements is not as easy as it seems. As public sector workplaces became automated in the 1980s and ‘90s, this world of “1.0” meant focus on process and content – the rapid rise of email, of shared network drives, of workflow tools endlessly routing items into inbox task lists: transactional content was pushed and pulled from eyeball to eyeball.  Process and Content? Yep! Got it covered.  People? Err… not so much.

Public sector employees personify contributors to the knowledge economy:  program development, delivery of citizen services, protection of infrastructure and populace, regulation and monitoring to ensure high quality of life for residents.  Information is the lifeblood of public sector activity – and this content comes from people.

When we talk about this new generation of collaboration -  inspired by the tools and practices of the 2.0 phenomenon -  we often hear the term “social”:  social networking, social media, social computing.  Social in this context does not mean leisure, or fun and games, it means people. It means bringing the human voice back into the wired world of the electronic workplace.  Organizations wanting to adopt a 2.0 strategy are seeking a more Social Workplace.  The “Social Workplace” is an ideal expression of Web 2.0 technologies to connect people with their peers and with critical content and information. Culturally, it helps break down hierarchical and administrative barriers to innovation and idea exchange among rank and file employees. Technologically, it introduces simpler content creation and communication tools and uses the Web to bridge geographical and generational gaps.

As Web-based collaboration becomes energized by the introduction of social and rich media, sharing and maintaining quality content can accelerate employee productivity. Where individual knowledge was previously hidden, successful teams are seeing shared information and experiences becoming part of broader organizational culture. Employees who actively share their knowledge emerge as experts, and departments that encourage employees to share their knowledge build stronger peer-to-peer and community networks, accelerating internal productivity gains. Providing a variety of simple, interactive, personalized community tools accessible over the Web or smart phones can achieve measurable positive results in this Social Workplace.  In Part 2 of this discussion, we’ll explore the essential scenarios best served by the Social Workplace:

• Attraction, retention, and better use of talent as part of human capital management
• More transparency in corporate governance and communication
• Enablement of front line staff to respond and serve
• Support for a more virtual enterprise
• Respect and protection of institutional memory

Stay tuned…

Interesting developments south of the border…

On July 30, 2008, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) voted “unanimously” to start looking at web sites – specifically emerging interactive technology – as new ways to open up channels of communication and disclosure between corporations and the investor and shareholder community. According to SEC Chairman Christopher Cox in the July 30 statement,  “Ongoing developments in technology have increased both the markets’ and investors’ demand for more timely company disclosure on the Web, and in turn, raised new securities law issues for public companies to consider”.  

While on the surface this new guidance might not have direct applicability to Canadian public sector, this statement represents a critical turning point in the journey to Government 2.0.  Increasingly regulatory and legislative bodies are being compelled by emerging technology and changing information worker habits to look at new content forms and channels.  This SEC development recognizes that corporate disclosures can now legitimately be made through new communication channels – including blogs and investor communities or forums. Companies who want to pursue cost effective and interactive shareholder communication can now explore these Web 2.0 inspired tools that have proved so valuable in other areas of customer engagement.

Open Text will be watching this interesting collision between 2.0 culture and content and the legal compliance obligations we see in both private and public sector.  As new forms of content and online communication become more widely accepted in the eyes of courts, regulatory bodies and public sector agencies, those of us who are concerned about records retention, preservation, corporate memory retention and appropriate disposal policies need to think hard about how new 2.0 content types are handled.  Ensuring that information governance strategies and retention best practices extend to the next generation of electronic content is what we do best.

Click here if you’ve thought about these issues. We want to know: Are You Ready?

We at Open Text are committed to being champions of education and awareness – ensuring that our customers and prospects are armed with the right data to make informed decisions about technology and the implications these decisions will have on their internal processes.  Just a few weeks ago I delivered a seminar as part of the ARMA Canada National Conference in Fredericton, NB on the topic “What Do Records Managers Need to Know about Web 2.0?”   After the session, a familiar face came up and reached a hand out – “thank you”, she said.  “My boss keeps telling me to put our best practices manual up into a wiki, and until today I didn’t really know what a wiki was”.  

So how would you describe a wiki to a non-technical colleague?

In a recent conversation with Rob Koplowitz, Principal Analyst with Forrester Research, we talked about getting away from technology buzzwords when talking to non-technical application users. “Editable web pages” was a simple, useful description of wiki functionality.  At its simplest, a wiki is an easy-to-navigate, textual, browser-based, multi-author web page that can be open for wide public access, or more locked down for only authenticated authors and editors.  FAQ documents, best practices, meeting notes, status reports, team worklists and brainstorming sites:  all ideal content types that can be served with a wiki. 

The records and information managers in the audience that day were particularly interested in some of the unique features that most wiki platforms offer: 

• Full built-in auditing of content – who made the change, what day and time, what specific text was changed
• Documented discussion and collaboration on why changes and edits are made
• Easy navigation back to previous versions and original text
• Simple and intuitive topic hierarchies, pages and cross reference links or URLs to associated information

Example: Open Text Online Customer Community Wiki with tips and tricks for new members.

So think beyond Wikipedia.org – likely the only wiki a non-technical user will have used or seen.  Wikis in public sector business need to be built on a wiki platform that is suited to management, moderation, appropriate use guidelines and ultimately can be captured and preserved as a record or artifact as would any other electronic content created in the course of public business.

Sometimes we forget that government is usually ahead of the private sector in building programs and policies to protect its core intellectual assets and records.  Many businesses in North America only took content management and records retention seriously after 2001 when more laws and regulations were imposed to combat financial misdeeds and fraud.  Government understands the value of protecting content, safely destroying expired sensitive records, and preserving and disclosing information that has long term public value. It’s not new in public sector like it is for many commercial enterprises.  Compliance with National or Provincial Archives mandates, ATIP/FOI disclosures, protection of sensitive and personal information – all decades old requirements.

But somewhere in the 1980s and 1990s, technology burst through and changed the way many public sector information workers did their jobs.  Email, networks, personal desktop computers, everyone with their own word-processor – technology helped melt down traditional hierarchies and changed how content was created and distributed. It was possible and common for a document to live only in electronic form, never having a paper ‘original’.  Getting a handle on new work practices and new content forms took time – and not all departments or agencies have been able to bring information governance principles to electronic content. Yet, even as many of us still struggle with the volume of email, we still need to look ahead. 

Technology is about to burst through a second time.  And this time it will be with new content authoring tools inspired by the personal productivity tools many of us have learned in personal online activities – wikis, blogs, interactive discussion sites, instant messaging. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be exploring a few aspects of what we mean by the buzzword Web 2.0, and what is might mean inside public sector. What should we expect? And how do we learn from the lessons of email in the ‘90s and not get caught unready.

However, inside an agency, critical resources are often intangible: know-how, specialized knowledge, experience, and team culture. Planning for the projected retirement wave disruption needs to bring together human resources and the lines of the agency business most at risk, supported by records and knowledge management professionals within the organization. Establishing mentorship programs, collaborative work environments and a structured approach to the capture, protection and dissemination of legacy work are activities that need to happen today. Clear recommendations and best practices are emerging.

Agencies should look at the demographics and at the mechanisms and programs that can be put in place now to capture key competencies and critical work knowledge of employees who will soon be eligible to retire. When blending a work force of young and old workers, managers should consider different learning needs and prepare to customize programs.

The development of structured knowledge-gathering or exit interview sessions in advance of the departure of a scheduled retirement is key. Bringing junior staff into the process as part of corporate memory transfer is important for continuity and maintenance of long-term best practices. Creating context around the artifacts left behind – boxes, files, even ore and lab samples – better ensures the preservation of a career’s worth of research and work and salvages the agency’s investment.

At the same time, agencies must incorporate the new work styles of the 20-somethings who are working their way up the ladder: Agencies should expect their technology envelops to be pushed. Demands for rapid search, online access to agency content, collaborative chats, and Web or video conferencing are increasing to default channels of communication. The incoming generation is more wired, more mobile and more demanding of technology for productivity and networking. With the demands of this new online generation, government is presented with a new opportunity to take control of electronic knowledge assets.

I’m thrilled to have this opportunity to work with the GTEC team as we ramp up for the October 2008 Conference.  GTEC is the must-attend event for Canadian public sector IT and IM professionals, and as a showcase sponsor it is a great opportunity to meet face to face with clients and hear first hand how technology is directly improving citizen services.

My name is Cheryl McKinnon, Director of Collaborative Content Management with Open Text and over the last 15 years I’ve been privileged to work with Canadian-based software vendors who are passionate about making Canadian public sector successful with content management initiatives. Over the next few months, I’d like to share some of the thoughts, trends and emerging best practices in areas of collaboration, technology as innovation enabler, unique trends in public sector, and what Web 2.0 means for government.

Though I have spent much of my work life in the technology world, my academic background is in Canadian history and have spent many hours knee deep in boxes in our National Archives.  We need to take care of our electronic heritage. We need to ensure that we can capture, preserve and protect the right information so future historians understand how we lived and worked in the early years of the 21^st century.