Enterprise Social Software in the Public Sector

Since we started our internal social networking pilot earlier this year i have been asked three main questions:

1. Why are you using Enterprise Social Software in Local Government
2. What value does it offer your organisation?
3. Where next?

I have posted on this before, albeit briefly and based around a presentation i did at LocalGovCamp in Birmingham but i didn’t really go into too much detail at the time.

Let me take this three questions one at a time to help provide some context and my thinking as to why, what and where i see this type of functionality benefiting local government and potentially the wider public sector.

Why?

Okay, for me, social media and social networking is already and will become even more pervasive in the lives of the public and this will impact and influence how public services are delivered, developed and used.

With the increasingly use of mobile applications linked with the social connectedness of these tools, people are becoming more and more aware of what is around them, who is around them and how they can access information and services around them. Local today means much more than it did when even i was a little boy back in the early 80’s.

However with all this usage in people’s daily lives it isn’t often we use such tools in a professional capacity as an employee of an organisation, granted many people participate in environments like Communities of Practice, but these situations are not the mainstream approach. What people do use practically everyday is email and that is something which for most still lacks a professional approach by most. But i guess that depends on why you are using it.

For me however piloting the use of social networking enables people in an organisation to experience what most people only experience in sites like facebook in a professional environment. It will in my opinion help people (staff) grasp the concept of engaging people in online environments far easier than trying to explain and demonstrate how it can be done in more mainstream sites like facebook.

What is the value?

There are huge pressures on the public sector to engage with people and to involve people in the design and development of services. Without using new technologies in innovative ways we will never be in a position to truly engage people and more importantly enough people in that process to demonstrate appropriate engagement.

The lessons learned from using such tools internally will enable us to better understand the challenges faced with external engagement and online participation.

If organisations can learn how to effective engage with people online in internal environments we will all appreciate the benefits and pitfalls in managing such an approach.

In our pilot we have experienced a number of challenges as well as opening up new opportunities just by using the software first hand. Now i have used facebook for sometime now and it would have been hard for to have seen the kind of opportunities available without putting myself in that professional context of an internal social networking environment. Some examples of some of the potential uses of an internal social software platform.

• Staff directory – people finder, by subject, skill, interest etc
• Workforce data – qualifications and skills gaps
• Internal project management
• Alternative to email (refocuses email on more formal internal communications and allows conversations to be surfaced and searched – supports Freedom of Information)
• Internal helpdesk (ICT, HR etc – enables staff to self support and generates and more effective user community)
• Ideas development
• Collaboration with colleagues and partners
• Keeping staff informed (enables managers to keep up to date with what there staff are doing in remote or home based team environments
• Reduces the need for face to face contact and when required adds value to face to face contact/meetings
• elearning and peer to peer support
• Plus many more…..

We have identified a wide range of opportunities just by actually being able to use such a product internally and without fear of making a mistake in the public domain.

There are of course still people who are sceptical of such tools but the purpose of such as pilot is two fold. One is to demonstrate some of the benefits identified early on and secondly to allow people to experience a tool first hand.

Where next?

The biggest question really, where next, well in my opinion bringing these types of tools into an organisation especially local government will provide a number of strategic benefits and the challenge is whether or not we are prepared to take that leap and do it.

Traditionally and my council is no different, the age profile of the organisation is top heavy, by that i mean we have a large proportion of people expected to retire without having enough younger people coming in.  The reality is that younger people are already expecting to communicate in new innovative ways and if we don’t provide them with the types of communications tools that they expect we will face a challenge to keep these people engaged and motivated in the workforce.

We also have huge pressures as mentioned before to engage with people, i believe internal social networks can provide an effective “learning” environment for external online engagement and participation.

New roles around online community managers, which is a blend of project management and facilitation to some degree but in an online context, something which is completely new and requires new skills.

I think the immediate next step is to increase people’s access to and usage of these tools to enable people locally to understand how these tools can be used and how they can be deployed as part of their wider service delivery framework.

Ideally i’d love to continue the internal learning and enable the organisation to foster a new culture of learning and ideas as well as complimenting existing communications channels.

I previously posted this video but it makes more sense to post it in this post then it did in the last one. It is an interview of myself and Rob Gray (Blue Ocean IQ) by David Wilcox at LocalGovCamp talking about the pilot we have done here in Devon.

The ever growing Twitterers from DCC

On the 14th January i summarised the social media journey so far in my council and I listed the known DCC twitterers, well since then we have had a steady increase in twitterings – a total of 26 accounts.

Original DCC Twitterers (not all are constantly active)

• Me
• Sue Tylcoat – Solutions Development Manager @suety
• Pete Morton – Enterprise Architect @podra
• Sue Bicks – Enterprise Architect @subix
• Russell Taylor – eComms @russ_t_uk
• Martin Howitt – Enterprise Architect @mhowitt
• Emma Jarvis – ICT Programmes @emjarvis
• Pip Tucker – Head of Strategic Intelligence @piptucker (private)
• Richard Carter – Head of Business Transformation @rcarter (private)
• Anna Matthews – National Management Trainee @localgovgrad
• Lynda Bowler – Libraries Web Manager @lmbowler
• Sarah Evans – Improvement Officer @sarahevans7
• Katie Bacon – Youth Participation @katie_bacon
• Shaun Carter  – Strategic Intelligence @Shaun32

Found or joined since the 14th January

• Paula Miles -Corporate Communications @paulamiles
• Fliss Clooney – Libraries – @flissc
• Lesley Salter – Libraries – @lesleysalter
• Julian Manning – Consultation – @julian_manning (private)
• Helen Drever – Strategic Intelligence – @hdrever
• Charlie Lee – Finance – @charlie_lee (private)
  
• Robert Weeks – Enterprise Architect @robjw
• Kevin Gillick – Project/Programme Management @kev_bo
• Simon Bailey – Enterprise Architect @smbsmb

The Council has currently got 2 twitter accounts

• County Council -  @devoncc
• Devon Libraries – @devonlibraries

We also have our first Councillor twittering as well

• Councillor Sally Morgan @sallymorgan

I am still on the hunt for more and also encouraging others to join. If you do work for DCC and you are not on the list let me know.

Creating an internal Social Media Forum

The increasing awareness generally of social media tools for most people has made my job a little easier in terms of raising internal awareness. But it has created a new challenges, co-ordinating the new found interest in such sites, for some stopping them rushing head first and for most lots of interest generally from people saying “not sure what i can do but want to know more, as my customers are using it”. So i am planning a “Social Media Forum” to do exactly the above plus much more but first things first.

The need to co-ordinate may seem a little excessive but there are some logical reasons for this.

1. Too many “official DCC” pages and services popping up without the corporate side of the organisation being aware is a little too risky and will only reaffirm for the doubters that this is not something we should be doing
2. Lessons from the youth participation pilot project using SNS has proved that we need to manage our presence carefully and we don’t want to encourage all staff to suddenly start requesting friends or what ever it may be from our citizens. There are also issues that need to be understood around privacy and staff code of conduct as well the more complex issue around engagement. If we ask people we should see the feedback as formal feedback and not something that can be cast aside because of the informal nature of the technology. this still needs to be recognised and plugged into the formal procedures
3. I want to ensure that we maximise our opportunities in these sites and appreciate that some routes we want to take will require and impact on resources, specially if we really want to use the channels and don’t just see them as “token” gestures and playing the game because it is seen to be trendy

On top of this forum, (and thanks to Dave Briggs for suggesting) i will be looking to create a surgery aspect to it (come and have your problems addressed) to enable people to take advantage of this stuff and not to feel isolated because none of these tools are supported by our helpdesk….this will need to be carefully managed as i will need to hopefully identify some “tool experts” as part of the forum.

So far i have received a good response and i have encouraged others to pass it on in true social networking spirit. It has also triggered a few more internal awareness presentations due to the viral marketing.

Will keep you posted on progress.

Using Google Maps with formal GIS

As part of the wider redevelopment of the councils website we are also looking at how we can incorporate google maps.

We currently use ArcGIS and isn’t (in my humble opinion) very user friendly, but it is very powerful and good and doing what it does. A colleague and I met earlier in the week to look at what the challenges were and what the implications would be if we tried to migrate all of the current ArcGIS maps and data across to google maps. We were going to try and bid for some development money to pilot the use of weblogic (middleware software) to extract the information and integrate it into google maps without having to reinvest all the time and effort that has been spent on creating the originals.

The great news is that my colleague found the google geo developers blog which has a post called Using google maps to visualize arcgis.

This will save us time and money in moving forward with the use of google maps. The advantage of this is that we can continue using Arcgis for the internal GIS requirements for now and offer the public google maps.

Thoughts on Social Networking and Youth Participation event

On Friday I attended with some colleagues from Youth Service and Youth participation here in Devon, a great event hosted by the Children’s Services Network in London entitled “Social Networking Sites and Youth Participation”

We were going because we were also invited to speak at the event which was actually a very enjoyable experience.

The programme was actually quite short as it was to be followed by the launch of the National Youth Agency research project where Tim Davies and Pete Cranston went through the findings.

The day started well, we had already begun to network with people, what was great about the event, was that the topic was specific enough to encourage good networking with people from all over the public sector.

Here are my thoughts and notes – they may not reflect accurately what people said, this is my interpretation along with additional thoughts that occurred at the time.

Andy Sawford – Chief Executive of the LGIU welcomed everyone.

• Highlighted key challenges
• Breadth – can we use such tools to reach far enough out to also include the vulnerable and those who might be excluded
• Depth – can we engage deep enough that we are affecting change and contributing and participating on real issues.
• What works – we need to continually evaluate and learn from what people are doing.

Ian Johnson – Secretariat of the Youth Citizenship Commission

• Gave some personal experiences of dealing and interacting with Social Networking
• Posed some questions to stimulate debate and discussion throughout the day
• Tried to get everyone to think differently and outside of their normal “box” by not assuming what we know is correct in these online spaces

Tim Davies – Practical Participation and convenor of UKYOuthOnline.org

• Tim gave a great “intro to Social networking sites” for anyone who hadn’t actually seen or understood what they can do
• asked people what words came into their minds when he said the word “participation”
  • change
  • dialogue
  • influence
  • involvement
• SNS and participation, what can it do?
  • messenging
  • rating services or consultation – developing a continual feedback cycle
  • embed other media and quick to publish functions
  • spread activities through networks, viral nature of SNS
• Transformation
  • traditional structures still exist, but this is a direct challenge to that approach
  • moving towards a networked structure organisation

Liam Webber and Therri Brown – Young Advisors to the Young Mayor of Lewisham

• It was great to hear directly from young people and there talk was perhaps quite controversial because they stated “we don’t think engaging with facebook etc will work because they are personal spaces”
• This caused a great Q&A session and stimulated some great thought and responses from Liam and Therri.
• the main reason for there views was that in my opinion, they didn’t want “the government” or even “the council” to become a friend as it would find out a lot more about them and they were not happy with that.
• They did raise issues of exclusion which were valid
• My view is that Social networking sites are only an additional method in the toolbox and if youth workers can use it then they can. The key is to build on existing contacts to manage the participation and not open up SNS to all staff to engage with anyone.
• A young person still has a choice to refuse contact just like they would in face to face youth work.

Dr Julia Glidden – Managing Director 21c Consultancy

• This was a great presentation and although it was by far broader than the previous speakers for me it gave an excellent overview and context to what we are all trying to do which is “try and keep up with society as best possible”
• She raised some excellent points about we are on the edge, pushing boundaries. We need to be supported to enable this initial work to succeed for others to follow.
• on the whole a very inspiring presentation.

Tom Gaskin – Norfolk Blurb – Norfolk County Council

• Tom was accompanied by a young person from Norfolk but i didn’t seem to make a note of her name.
• A practical demo of how they use social networking with some deliberate mistakes for audience participation. this was good and made the points perfectly about not using personal profiles when engaging
• Some Q&A which was great and followed the days questions perfectly.
• Finished with some do’s and don’ts

Then came our presentation.

• here is our presentation via slideshow – the video clip will be included as a separate post to follow this one.

Jasmine Ali – Head of Children’s Services Network

• feedback from a survey on “how many local authorities are using SNS? – why and why not?
• launched a facebook group to develop the ideas and work done through the day and to facilitate collaboration.

This was in effect the end of the main day. There was a short break, which was taken up with some great conversations with people who are keen to do similar things but need some extra support.

Then came the NYA research launch…… But that is another post.

On the Saturday there was a unconference called “UK Youth Online -= Towards Youth Work 2.0“, if you get a chance to read about it i recommend it, i was unable to attend but kept up to speed via twitter and the various comments/blogs.

We also did some post event networking, whilst enjoying a refreshment in a local pub, I always find this is where the best connection are made after events and some of the best conversations.

One particular conversation focused on the benefits of Youth Workers in SNS and i suggested that the presence of Youth Workers in SNS may actually reassure some parents about the perceived dangers that are reported. Youth Work could make a real positive contribution to the way in which SNS is looked upon. How this will be received by young people will be interesting, however there is no difference between a youth worker trying to make contact on a street or in a SNS.

Finally I do hope that we can start to hear some really positive stories about SNS and in particular youth work being done successfully in these new spaces as well. It is a valuable service and one which i have developed more respect for since doing this project.