There are a couple of ways of looking at gov20 technologies and their role in national governance, most of the chatter that I’m seeing at the moment is focused on just one side of the opportunity.
Certainly there is a role for gov20 technologies in increasing government transparency, but what about the efficiency of government itself?
As I have said before on this blog, we often think about Government as a monolithic organization that serves faceless services to the tax paying population.
In reality government is much like any other major organization with hundreds of departments, thousands of business processes and tens of thousands of employees. Changes can be complex, they need to be well understood and represented in a business cases that clearly explain the benefits that will be realized through any money that is spent.
To give you an idea of the size of governments, the United Kingdom’s National Office of Statistics presents the UK civil service at around 500,000 full time employees and Statistics Canada shows the Canadian federal government consisting of around 300,000 employees. These numbers are representative of national government employees only, and don’t include state or local employees, it does not need to be said that these are big organizations.
So, I hear you ask, what does this have to do with gov20?
There are several areas where I think more internally focused use of gov20 technology could bring significant efficiency to the way that government works, helping the civil service understand what might be happening in other major agencies, or helping track policy changes coming out of the various executive branches of government.
Implemented correctly these technologies could make government significantly more nimble and better prepared to deliver the external agendas that are currently being discussed in blogs and in the press.
For example, one area where I feel we might be able to see some immediate benefit would be in dealing with the perception that governments are risk averse, instead using technology to ensure that government employees are better informed about the way their business process interacts with others and preparing them to react more rapidly to changing environmental circumstances.
From the outside government can often appear to be slow to react to a changing environment, in my experience the civil service tend to be anything but, in many cases they are dealing with programs of unimaginable size and complexity.
When you are a company delivering a new service you get to make some choices about who your customers will be, what quality of service you might offer and how that service will interact with the rest of your business. Governments rarely get to make those choices, changes to business practice have to be considered in terms of how it will impact processes across the rest of government, and developed in a manner that does not disenfranchise any part of society. As such a change program in Government can be significantly more complex than it would be in the commercial world, and it takes time for organizations to work through that complexity.
I’m surprised that we have not started to see vendors offering social networking and web20 solutions that aim to solve some of these complex issues inside of government, finding ways to use technology to connect a few hundred thousand internal employees of a particular government to provide information and insight on upcoming programs along with a forum to quickly work out any related challenges.
Beginning by tackling some of these internal challenges may help government employees see the value of gov20 technology within their own environments, I’m confident that it would help spark new ideas around how social media and gov20 technologies could be used externally across many thousands of employees, rather than relying on a handful of departmental champions as we appear to be doing in many cases at the moment.
Over time I have a view that solving some of the internal challenges, and then looking at how you might externalize what government learns during that process, will rapidly get us to the full level of interaction that an increasing number of people crave, rather than pushing for potentially premature implementation of gov20 services that may be disconnected from internal processes and valid business cases.
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