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.

Blogs are one of the more interesting of the Web 2.0 tools to emerge at NRCan.  Blogs were one of the first collaborative technologies, along with the wiki, to be made widely available to employees.  Any employee who wanted a blog could get one.  There was a significant uptake on new blogs in the beginning.  Then they began to languish; outside of our brave band of librarians and their library blog, no one was posting to the blogs they had requested and no one was responding to them.  Interestingly enough, they were hardly being used for almost a year, until they started springing up again only recently. 

Why did this re-emergence of blogging appear?  The answer is that the NRCan use of blogs reflected more about the cultural change in communicating than about their effectiveness.  As there was no blog culture at NRCan, many of those employees who requested blogs, posted once, and when they didn’t get scads of responses, they never posted again.  However, I also think the early ones died because no one had a business use identified for them, or at the very least, people didn’t see really good examples of how to use them in a government department.   

This trend changed around eight months ago with “The Daily Reed”, an energy-related information sharing blog.  It was shortly followed by many more blogs. What was interesting and so promising about these blogs was that they became key channels for communications and information sharing for the workgroups.  They weren’t “text book” blogs laying out an individual’s point of view. They were used to share news and links to new studies or new projects, and the occasional staff member retirement party.  In a lot of ways these early blogs began replacing email as a primary daily information sharing tool.  Other blog types are beginning to emerge, including blogs for project reporting, blogs that express personal points of view on any number of topics, and blogs furthering the growth of communities of practice.

Blogs are becoming a viable tool because there is a community of users that has taken them up.  We have learned how to incorporate and use them in our work - in other words, there is an emergent blogging culture at NRCan. 

So how do we make this happen?  We didn’t, and that is the key.  While it is true that we made the tool available it’s what we didn’t do that I think made all the difference.   We didn’t impose restrictions on who could have a blog or how blogs were to be used.  There was no allocation of blogs by organizational unit or span of responsibility.   There was no editorial or moderator control imposed, no third party vetting of contents.  We didn’t even restrict what bloggers could talk about (outside of saying in our blogging policy that bloggers should follow acceptable use guardrails).

Other lessons have been learned from our more successful bloggers.  Blogging takes an ongoing commitment, and they need to be updated regularly in order to build and maintain a following.  Bloggers don’t blog in isolation.  They often are responding to other bloggers and they refer to their blogs frequently.  Bloggers also should classify their posts using tags and categories in order to improve their profile and searchability.   Bloggers blog in the language of choice, although in some cases they translate or provide synopses where the blog is part of a consultation or official communications channel.      

Finally, one of the reasons that NRCan blogs are now successful is that we didn’t shut down the blog tool because it looked like blogs were a lost cause.  Ultimately we trusted that if the employees of NRCan were given the freedom to experiment with the technology, they would find a use for blogs on their own and develop innovative and unanticipated uses for the tool.   I have to say it’s nice when things work out the way you expected, even when you didn’t expect, or anticipate, the ways they are evolving.  

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.