Presenting at Web Directions Government

After receiving some encouragement from John Allsopp, I’m presenting at Web Directions this year on the topic of knowledge management and social computing.

For many people, knowledge management is an IT system that sits somewhere and gobbles up documents. Some vendors claim that their Records Management System or their Document Management System will do all your knowledge management, and for us KM practitioners this focus away from people and to systems has led to nothing but trouble for a decade.

Knowledge management is, first and foremost, about people. It’s not about software. It’s about storytelling, having a coffee and sharing war stories, about getting together after a difficult project and doing “lessons learned”, and even about watching a video to learn techniques from other sporting teams. If you can get your people together to share the important bits inside their heads then you can ensure you’ve got ways to equip people with the information they need do successfully do their jobs in an information-demanding world.

The people-centric part is why the boom in social computing tools out of the Web 2.0-sphere is so exciting. In the modern world, people just don’t have lots of time to get together and chat, so a system that supports the way people tend to share information, that is, in a social-way, is vital.

Want to learn more? Come see me at Web Directions Government on 19-20 May at Old Parliament House, Canberra Australia.
M

“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.

Australia gets a Broadband Minister

I stumbled across an interesting bit of news from ZDnet this morning. Not only will Australia get a new Prime Minister, but he also comes with a Broadband Minister.

I always thought that having Communications, Information Technology and Arts lumped together as a portfolio was rather wierd. But now, arts has been dropped and the importance of broadband infrastructure reinforced. This will be a good thing for Australia, given the numerous reports suggesting we’re falling behind world standards, most likely due to Telstra’s monopoly over infrastructure stifling the market.

“AUSTRALIA remains in 17th place among developed countries in the proportion of broadband internet users, as critics claim it risks falling behind if plans are not made to encourage more investment” - The Age. July, 2006.

Maybe now, we’ll see this previous resource given the attention it needs. Only time will tell.

M