This is my first post on the GTEC blog for 2010. Spring is traditionally the time when GTEC had information to post, so here we go!
Get this…. GTEC has an iPhone app! The GTEC App is now available on the iTunes store as a free download at http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/gtec/id370930820?mt=8&uo=6.

About three months ago, I was approached by Brian Hurley, the CEO of Ottawa-based Purple Forge. Brian had the idea to customize his approaches to iPhone apps for politicians into a tool that GTEC could offer to our delegates. The conversation was a bit of an eye opener for both of us. Brian was already well aware of how his application could draw attention. The buzz from the application he developed for the CPAC Convention in the United States was actually covered on CNN.

Through the conversation, Brian and I laid out the main elements of a tool that could place useful information in the hands of our delegates, and also leverage social media to create a higher level of engagement within the government technology community. While the application is available now to iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users, the goal is to have a BlackBerry version by the time GTEC happens in October.

The application has much of the information and functionality you would find on the GTEC website, but when this information is put into the hands of delegates through their mobile devices, many new opportunities can be created to “connect, inform and engage” our audience. At this point, the application has the following capabilities:

• 2010 conference profile
• 2010 Distinction Awards Profile
• 2010 Exhibitor listings
• GTEC Blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Flicker feeds
• Register and Attend functions
• Interactive Maps
• Media feeds
• Social media capability through “Social” and “Engage” functions.

What makes the app a viable option for us is the fact that personal use of iPhones and iPod Touch is dramatically on the rise. Within the technology and government communities, thousands of people are using these devices at home, and are able to carry them at GTEC for their own use. We already have WiFi networks in place at GTEC, making it possible to use the iPod for the conference, and we plan to have devices available (yes, iPads!) for people to try at the event if they do not already own one.

The application will evolve as the event approaches and we acquire more speakers, update our exhibitor and visitor lists, and discover new ways to leverage this tool. For now, I am pleased we have a new tool that could represent a dramatic improvement in the way we communicate to delegates and the ways in which delegates experience GTEC.

Like anything else, the application will be customized and improved as we build out the event.

Log on to the iTunes App store today to download your free copy: http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/gtec/id370930820?mt=8&uo=6.

Tags: Canadian Government IT, GTEC, High Performance, iPhone

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

Online conversations are transforming the relationship between people and organizations. Are government bodies listening? By David Jacobson, PricewaterhouseCoopers Canada LLP

With blended or multimedia search results at our fingertips (including video, images, blog posts, and personalization searches), leisure and business are rapidly and dramatically changing and converging. Welcome to the age of the “selfsumer”. In this new era, Canadians use discussion forums, blogs, email, text messages and a variety of social networking tools to share what, when and how they buy. The way they communicate has changed the rules of business. If government and the public sector wish to participate, they cannot continue using only traditional approaches to connect with their staff and the public.

My experience as an emerging technologies director with PwC Canada indicates that selfsumers are a growing number of consumers and employees who search for, discover and create information on products, services and companies via multiple sources on the web. They collaborate online using various social media to find and make purchase decisions. This is a new type of consumer that is less reliant on hard sell commercials and more reliant on discovering products and brands using the internet and social networking.

With one voice that can morph into a community in minutes, selfsumers’ online influence has begun to alter the relationship between businesses and the public. This shift has challenged business leaders to think more creatively when developing new products, promotional content and e-commerce channels. Public sector leaders can do the same to increase their level of engagement with Canadians.

Analyzing selfsumers’ digital behaviour can help government organizations refine their ability to capture consumer intelligence, gain insight into their changing needs and build connectivity. It can also help cash-strapped agencies save money because targeted campaigns are supported by a deeper understanding of consumers which removes guesswork and decreases the likelihood of wasted time and financial resources.

Government executives must rely on their CIOs to translate selfsumers’ ideas into a business and IT strategy. To be fully effective, the IT centre will need different approaches to read digital behaviour and meet strategic goals.

To stay agile with changing digital conversations, CIOs need to be more creative when strategizing with the executive team. For example, they can deliver new types of lucrative business applications, uncover ways for departments and data servers to share information and knowledge, and improve data-warehousing to keep pace with growing amounts of information exchanged between Canadians on blogs and message boards. This creativity, agility and innovation will become more beneficial as selfsumers’ tastes and skills continue to influence more business applications and practices.

According to PwC’s study How the Consumer Conversation Will Transform Business, the number of online discussions about a customer-facing organization – its brand and reputation – can reach thousands or even millions per day. Aggregating and analyzing these online conversations will require increasingly sophisticated technology and a commitment to continually improve strategies to listen, process and quickly respond. Government agencies that embrace these methods demonstrate their commitment to helping Canadians.

For more information on the dialogue with consumers, read PwC Canada’s 2009 Report on Emerging Canadian Software Companies: A CEO Perspective and Navigating the Era of the Empowered Consumer.

Tags: blog, CIO, CIO Boot camp, CIO Bootcamp, consumer social networking, online conversations, PricewaterhouseCoopers, PwC, selfsumer, Social Media, Technology

By Ivan Milam, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP

More than a decade ago, most Canadian public sector and government CIOs focused on providing “the pipes, power and ping” for their organizations. Their primary job was to keep the department’s IT infrastructure and applications running. Their priorities were often set by other executives whose primary purpose was to drive down cost while demanding increased service.  However, over the past 10 years public sector CIOs have increasingly come to the  understanding that to be an equal partner at the executive table they must break from their traditional “infrastructure delivery” roles and embrace a much more strategic one of an equal business partner in the organization.

As a trusted public sector advisor with PwC, I have helped many departments make this very important transition.  Through these experiences, I’ve witnessed CIO’s make this journey by using, to varying degrees, elements of the following 6 key activities.

1. Deliver core services efficiently

IT departments are continually asked to do more with less. CIOs who are strategic partners demonstrate to business executives that they’re delivering core services at the lowest expense while achieving high levels of client satisfaction.  Without this foundation piece, CIOs typically get stuck in the process of continually defending IT’s cost instead highlighting its value.

But doing so means utilizing all available options to enhance IT efficiency. These include outsourcing, co-sourcing, co-partnerships, and improving collaboration with other stakeholders and partners.  Leveraging all options to improve the day-to-day IT functions free up CIOs to do what CIOs do best – highlight strategic and innovation opportunities to help drive their organization’s to meet their strategic goals and outcomes.

2. Immerse yourself in the business and demonstrate your knowledge

CIOs must not only show value by delivering services efficiently. They must also develop a genuine understanding of the business outside of IT operations. High performing IM/IT executives learn about the business processes, business drivers, and strategic focus of all business units in their organization.  By showing their knowledge of the organization and selling ideas supported by data and a sound knowledge of the business, they demonstrate they are not only a technology person but a strategic peer at the executive level.

3. Align your innovation and ideas with the organization’s strategic vision using a structured process

Instead of taking orders at the board room table, leading CIO’s are proactive in presenting ideas that align IT’s investments with the organization’s priorities. One way to do this is to develop a structured process for prioritizing innovative ideas for IT investment. A structured process helps to identify, evaluate, develop and present new IT innovations to the organization. Then, as an executive team, they can determine the best ideas that align with the organization’s strategic vision.

4. Stay engaged by connecting with people

Gaining visibility at the executive, stakeholder and staff level with active participation and collaboration is another tool used by many CIOs. Building these relationships allows CIOs to share the organization’s vision and learn how vendors, suppliers or employees can contribute.

Successful CIOs are often seen engaging stakeholders by participating in local public speaking events to communicate where they’re taking their organizations and how stakeholders can help. Other platforms used to get the message out to staff include wikis, blogs and social networking tools. These methods contribute to collaboration and innovation, and build awareness around the IT department’s value to the organization.

5. Enable agility with effective architecture

Typically, a lot of companies have a complex IT architecture with different systems that do not work well together. This hampers innovation and the agility to solve problems quickly.

CIOs who bring IT from the back office to the executive table develop and more importantly implement architectures that provide flexibility to handle the changes that innovation brings. Reducing system complexity and increasing standardization are two key approaches that allow organizations to pivot on a dime when embracing new technologies or discovering new priorities.

6. Keep an eye on risk

The balancing act for CIOs is to bring value while remaining cognizant of risk. IT represents a significant area of vulnerability for an organization in different ways. Without adequate controls, companies may leave themselves open to fraud, security breaches, or a loss of intellectual capital. 

Effective CIOs balance security, risk and compliance requirements with innovation.

With technology playing such a large role in our lives today, CIOs must be equal partners at the executive table.  Today, an ever increasing number of CIOs are advancing down this path. For each CIO and each organization, the journey is different but many of the steps are similar. 

Tags: CIO, CIO Bootcamp, innovation, IT, PricewaterhouseCoopers, PwC Canada, tech, Technology

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 examine four principles for government 2.0 – simplicity, crowdsource relevance, appropriate calls to action and measurement matters.

Principle #1 – Simplicity

Call this the Google lesson.  The popularity of sites like Google and Twitter are based on the simplicity of their interfaces, and a clear path for participation.  Even new users can quickly and easily comprehend the steps they need to take.   To increase adoption of government 2.0, organizations need to ensure that they practice simplicity and not make things overly complicated.  A clean user interface, with a specific path for participation from the first visit engages users instead of intimidating them. Furthermore, it is important to understand that much of simplicity is about layering; you can achieve the same outcome in terms of activity or desired activities by just not showing everything up front.

Principle #2 – Crowdsource Relevance

Most social networking sites and communities have so much content, that it can be overwhelming to  users.   These sites, to varying degrees, make use of crowdsourcing, where users essentially do the work of “classifying” the information.  For enterprises, crowdsourcing is a powerful tool that enables the organization to take mountains of information and connect users with only the best and most relevant content. 

Just a few examples of crowdsourcing in action include when users bookmark information (which is an implicit endorsement), users mark something as helpful, users visit something (implies popularity), users tag or classify something (when you upload the content) which provides important meta-data.  Crowdsourcing, when used in conjunction with social filtering, becomes a powerful tool for government 2.0 initiatives as the information is classified and aggregated for users, enabling them to get the most valuable information fast, sorting information by what their peers find most valuable.

Principle #3 – Appropriate Calls to Action

The unique value of government 2.0 is engaging the voice of community members, but in the beginning it can be difficult to get people talking within a community.  There may be a lot of lurkers, but not a whole lot of people participating. Often, new users aren’t clear on what actions they could be taking – whether it be uploading a video or making a comment on a piece of content — so they end up doing nothing.  To get users participating from the inception of the community, and new users engaged from the day they join, there needs to be appropriate calls to action throughout the community.

A strong example of appropriate calls to action are found within FaceBook.  With each user`s status updates, there is the opportunity for their friends to indicate that they like the item, or to comment on that item.  It is clear to users what steps they can take with that content to participate, and this principle offers an immense amount of value to enterprises as they work to build thriving communities.

Principle #4 – Measurement Matters

To truly ensure the success of your government 2.0 initiatives, metrics need to be clearly defined and measured on an ongoing basis. Metrics are central to being able to plan and strategize efforts and activities in a project. This enables users and community managers to have tangible metrics so they can know what is working/what is not, who is participating/who is not,  and setting targets for growth of the project.  

Social networking sites are driven by metrics, numbers of friends, followers and so on.  Enterprises need to take these metrics much deeper to identify short, medium and long term goals, manage and nurture top contributors and determine what is most successful within the community.   A project without substantiated ROI is not a project for long, so measuring items like page information and overall community information can make a critical difference in the adoption and success of the community.

Watch this video by Andrew Chambers of Northern Lights (and formerly of the US Federal Reserve Bank) on how measurement matters in communities.

Next week I’ll tackle four more principles for communities and social networking  as part of Government 2.0.

Tags: communities, Crowdsource, Facebook, Google, Government 2.0, Microsoft SharePoing, Social Networking, Twitter, Web 2.0

Getting people to use Web 2.0 takes more than just having a great new tool – the buzz around social media is key to its success. And while access to GCpedia may be limited to public servants, discussion of it certainly is not. Most of the buzz around GCpedia is positive, but more importantly, a slice of the discussion offers TBS and users some very concrete ways to improve the Wiki in terms of what went right and what needs to change in the deployment of future Web 2.0 tools. That’s why the public service needs to pay attention to what people are saying about GCpedia – especially outside of its walls.

Here are the top 5 things to know about how GCpedia is discussed on the web:

1- Wikipedia’s take on its GC cousin – Oddly enough, the Wikipedia article on GCpedia is an orphan, as “few or no articles link to it.” It is also tagged as a stub – there isn’t much about GCpedia on its closest public analogue. As is Wikipedia’s aim, the language about GCpedia is neutral – so, one has to wonder why TBS hasn’t taken advantage of what is potentially a good, and at least a cheap and easy opportunity to tout the goals of GCpedia. (Who cares about GCpedia outside of the public service? Taxpayers, quite possibly,)

2 – GCpedia will save the public service!  – David Eaves makes the point that GCpedia is an excellent way to capture all of the tacit knowledge that will walk out the door when senior management  retires in droves. Used properly, GCpedia could serve as a wealth of go-to information for those who will advance to mid-level and senior positions. Government departments and agencies need to be willing to endure the temporary pain of dedicating staff to interviewing almost-retirees and posting the findings to GCpedia, to avoid a longer term consequence: losing the collective intelligence getting ready to exit the public service.

3 – GCpedia remains the domain of GCgeeks? – Peter Smith is worried about how well GCpedia lends itself to use by newbies. The level of technical knowledge necessary to using GCpedia is one of the reasons Eaves cites for why soon-to-be-retirees aren’t likely to post what they know themselves. Smith is right – the interface is confusing, and could easily intimidate anyone with techno-trepidation. What is the solution? One is likely more training than what is largely available thus far, especially if TBS is sold on the MediaWiki platform.

4 – Lots of talk on Twitter – Interestingly enough, many public servants have turned to Twitter to talk about GCpedia. This isn’t surprising, just important. Remember that Twitter may well be the easiest real-time resource for anyone who wants to take the pulse of the Web-2.0-crowd’s feeling about GCpedia.

5 – Mostly love, but some concerns, too – Overall, the talk about GCpedia is overwhelmingly positive. And where challenges are discussed on the Web, so are solutions, which gives GCpedia’s owners and users an opportunity to engage in in-depth and strategic discussions about the role of this communication channel. That discussion is vital if GCpedia is going to live up to its potential.

Tags: Collaboration, GCpedia, Government 2.0, Knowledge Management, Social Media, Twitter, Web 2.0, Wiki