I read an interesting post on measuring the value of social media by Nick Charney at his blog CPS Renewal. I found his post thought provoking as usual and, as usual, I loved that Nick issued a challenge to readers (mostly government employees I am assuming) to send him stories about social media experiences in government.

Nick presents his conundrum as follows:

“The more time I spend examining the use of social media within government, the more I think that measuring the value it brings is a near impossible task.”

I don’t agree that the task is impossible at all. At NRCan – and I appreciate the fact that our SM experience is going into its third year – we celebrated SM “successes” at every opportunity. By “successes” I mean, the innovative and sustainable ways employees are using tools like the Wiki, blogs, NRTube, Delicious, RSS Feeds, etc. to improve collaboration and knowledge sharing across lines of business and to change the way they worked. We go to great lengths to profile the “value” that this new way of working brings to the department.

Nick goes on to state:

“…the more I reflect on the situation the more I realize that we can’t quantify the value because we still rely heavily on traditional empirical standards. Don’t get me wrong I am not advocating doing away with empirical approaches but rather simply stating that social media is still so new to government that it would be premature to expect to accurately capture its value in a spreadsheet.

Perhaps the spreadsheet is the wrong vehicle. I don’t think it’s premature at all to quantify the value of SM in government. But why would you want to? The SM tools speak for themselves – not through quantitative stats like page views and hits but as they are used to replace “traditional” approaches in the way we manage information. For the first time ever (well, certainly during my six years at NRCan) employees are truly in control of the information they create and share. I believe this is due mostly to the availability and ease of use of SM tools.

I suppose you could count the number of emails with Wiki links vs the number of emails with documents attached. You could count the number of videos viewed on NRTube. You could probably even count the number of NRCan employees with active Twitter accounts. But to what end?

If you are looking at this from a GC renewal perspective, then I suggest you look at the big picture. In my opinion, SM helps distribute decision-making and leadership amongst all users. I agree that this is probably easier to measure from a qualitative perspective. But if SM is contributing to GC renewal – it most certainly is at NRCan – then is that not measurement enough?

Nonetheless, count me in on your scheme Nick, I have a few NRCan SM stories to share.

Now that we have the internal NRCan Resource Wiki hitting its stride, a growing and active blog culture, and a vibrant video community of practice, where does NRCan go from here?  Do we add new technologies such as professional networking in order to provide even more ways for employees to collaborate and share knowledge?  Do we explore the potential of crowd sourcing to tap into the wisdom of our community?   Do we begin to turn outwards in order to engage citizens and clients in new ways?

The answer is all of the above.  However, we believe that underlying the implementation of collaborative technologies is a foundational need to integrate them with our traditional tools in order to create a comprehensive knowledge base for the whole department.  In other words, our priority these days is to mashup all our sources of knowledge. 

The reasons for this are obvious.  Collaborative technologies are increasingly being used by employees to discuss issues and share ideas, to provide status updates on key files, and to capture considerations and decisions around our projects and initiatives.  At the same time we continue to create studies, reports and datasets using our traditional tools such as word processing and document management systems and databases.  By bringing together new and traditional sources via an integrated knowledge base we can create synergies and provide a more comprehensive and complete picture of the work we do. 

Imagine being able to easily access all the sources of information on ‘climate change’ at NRCan.  You would find a wiki page describing the topic and current status of activities, scientific and policy studies present and past, blog discussions on the latest policy developments, videos of our scientists talking about their findings and a network of expertise with responsibilities in this area, all of this and more from a single point of access. This is what we are aiming for by mashing it all up.

 In order to achieve this objective NRCan has articulated two basic principles: 

1) Information and knowledge should be openly available.  That means putting information and knowledge into shared spaces so that they can be accessed by everyone;

 2) A common and basic level of information classification should be applied to all our sources of knowledge to enable better integration and improve findability.

Most importantly, we are also rolling out an enterprise search engine to search across all these knowledge sources.  Currently it searches wikis, blogs, discussion forums, the intranet and our departmental phone directory.  Over the next few months we will extend the search to content and document management spaces, our growing catalogue of videos and eventually to our legacy shared drives.  All of this taken together will lay the foundation for NRCan to make its information and knowledge broadly accessible, first to our employees, but potential beyond to other government departments and to Canadian citizens.   Now that’s a mashup!  

News south (err… north) of the border this week as controversy erupts over the email of a current state governor and vice-presidential nominee.  This issue first hit the radar with the apparent hacking and inappropriate distribution of email sent through a free hosted service but has now resurfaced as the focal point of a debate over transparency, email records and appropriate use of communication forms that could be subject to Open Records legislation.  Alaska’s Open Records Act defines public records very much like any North American jurisdiction with Access to Information or Freedom of Information “sunshine” laws:

books, papers, files, accounts, writings, including drafts and memorializations of conversations, and other items, regardless of format or physical characteristics, that are developed or received by a public agency, or by a private contractor for a public agency, and that are preserved for their informational value or as evidence of the organization or operation of the public agency

While this particular incident is receiving front-page attention because of the impending US election, it most surely is not an isolated incident or one restricted to public sector.  Enterprise Content Management and Records Management professionals have since 2001 been working to develop awareness, solutions and information governance strategies to meet rigorous disclosure, records retention and electronic discovery requirements in the US and increasingly in Canada.

The Alaskan email controversy serves as a wake up call to information management practitioners regardless of the jurisdiction or department we serve – public business communication must be preserved, protected and disclosed regardless of the individual format, program or communication channel that is used.

Back to basics – manage the content, not the container it came in.  Use of unsanctioned email, text, chat or other electronic communication tools does not preclude the record from inclusion in an ATIP/FOI or discovery order in most jurisdictions. Unmanaged, uncontrolled business correspondence is a time bomb in government and commercial enterprise. 

Transparency is as crucial a component of compliance as is a retention schedule.