“To Gov 2.0 or not to Gov 2.0″ — that is the question

Marcus Browne of ZDNet Australia is suggesting that “Governments are expected to increasingly use social networking and other Web 2.0 innovations as a means of fostering greater participation and dialogue with their citizens, as well as encouraging more effective intra-government communication.”

We saw some of this movement late last year when Gary Nairn announced that he would use blogs to engage citizens in policy discussion:

“…blogs are another means for government to seek feedback from citizens on major programs or topics of interest to Australians … blogs could speed up consultation and enable the government and other citizens to analyze and debate issues in reasonable detail.”

Unfortunately, we’re yet to see any real action on this in the government sphere, and I’m starting to wonder whether or not the social computing evolution actually suited to government departments.

In an analysis of cultural issues affecting the adoption, and behaviour of use, of social computing tools, recent studies indicate that cultures who have highly complex hierarchical structures (i.e. high on Hofstede’s Power Distance index) are less likely to use tools like wikis and blogs.

Anecdotally, I can say that while social networking tools work well within team environments for collaboration, my experience has been that they work less well between teams in government organisations simply due to the bureaucracy typical of high Power Distance organisations. Generally, this form of hierarchy reinforcement manifests as good old red tape — quality assurance, sign-off, formal approval, and even physical signatures on paper, before information can change hands. I’ve even been witness to this between the functional branches within an organisation with similar processes mandated between government departments.

These problems with adoption can be seen in the large numbers of government departments, and even private organisations like Channel 7, Telstra, Credit Suisse, and Goldman Sachs, who’ve simply blanket banned their employees from using social computing tools, believing that they’re time wasters, not business tools. Toby Ward of CorporateWebsite.com suggests this reaction is because most organizations fear applications like Facebook and even loathe them.

“About half of the medium to large-sized organisations (it’s even higher in Government and Financial Services) forbid and block employees from using it”.

A recent survey of 1,200 global HR professionals — conducted by content security specialists Clearswift — supports this observation. 79 percent said their company was completely blocking access to social networking sites. This behaviour, Clearswift revealed, was due to a lack of understanding of social computing tools, with some respondents indicating that they had not even heard the term Web 2.0 before.

Strangely enough, fear and knowledge have a well-researched and well-documented social psychological dimension (Reizler, 1944 [1]; Rotter, 1966 [2]; Levenson, 1973 [3]; and others). Clear parallels can be drawn from the reaction of banning due to ignorance of the nature of social computing tools to the concepts of “learned helplessness” and “locus of control” — that is, “there’s nothing I can do so I will just ban it”. These studies clearly tell us that with education comes an increase in the perception of control and a reduction in fear.

Obviously, then, education is a key factor to adoption — that there are clear advantages for organisations, government or otherwise, for the use of these tools, and that they can be made safe and secure. The proof is in companies like Serena Software who are adopting public social sites like Facebook as their corporate intranet — ultimately because of the lack of flexibility of use and findability of information inherent in traditional intranets that many organisations also share.

Luis Suarez, knowledge management specialist for IBM, suggests that supporting knowledge work is a good way to proceed:

We should go instead for those just-in-time education snippets that knowledge workers would require and let them figure them out by themselves. They will eventually do it and succeed. The social aspect of the tools would eventually do their work quite nicely.

M

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[1]. Riezler, K. (1944) The Social Psychology of Fear. The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 49, No. 6 (May, 1944), pp. 489-498

[2]. Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs, 80, whole issue.

[3]. Levenson, H. (1973). Multidimensional locus of control in psychiatric patients. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 41, 397-404.