Since we started our internal social networking pilot earlier this year i have been asked three main questions:
- Why are you using Enterprise Social Software in Local Government
- What value does it offer your organisation?
- 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.
A journey through life - Carl's Notepad 
I listened to this hoping to be inspired, how disappointed I was. Where’s the business drivers? Where’s the savings? How are you going to keep records? What’s the point? Technology for technologies sake.
If I open up a social networking site internally there will be an explosion of network activity and before the end of the week email use will be halved and everyone will be using instant messaging to make decisions, without any record of what they have done. How can you keep any measure of control over what you do? There has to be some value in social networking, but until you have looked at the consequences of letting the genie out of the bottle you should keep the stopper in.
MOSS will give you socila networking lite, this may help as a start, but this just looks like a solution struggling to find the problem.
It is a shame that you were not inspired or took anything of value from this post, however I think you have missed the point. We have been fortunate to be able to pilot something to answer the very questions you pose.
I don’t agree with you in that decisions will be made by instant messaging, in fact our experience with the pilot so far has confirmed that email usage has shifted towards a more formal agreement and we have removed the “conversations” which cluttered up email and made finding information which became part of FOI requests harder to surface.
We first need to understand how this technology is used internally to better inform future decisions about whether we adopt a full blown enterprise social software platform or as you suggest a “lite” version. I don’t believe MOSS does social networking. It does forms of collaboration but social networking is different and therefore requires understanding within a business context.
We are not struggling to find problems for this solution at all, we are in fact struggling to manage the expectation that a pilot creates. I do however accept that we need to understand how this fits within the wider ICT architecture as well as the information architecture. This will be done to some degree within the pilot’s lessons learns report.
What i think you may have missed or appreciated in my post is that what we are doing is trying to understand the business issues in advance and working through these. Instead of giving the business a set of technologies and just letting them get on with it. If we don’t work through the process we will never be in a position to allow the business to understand and realise the benefits and release the efficiencies that can be gained.
You are probably right that having such a tool will increase network activity, but why is this a bad thing? In the current climate, having access to your staffs knowledge and ideas will become even more crucial as organisations seeks to understand how improvements can be made. After all staff talk and exchange information all the time, but that is restricted to either 1-1 email conversations or face to face conversations in corridors or over lunch. By having a tool which can surface these ideas and conversations to everyone, raises the odds of ideas developing faster and increases their likelihood of adoption and or success.
The business drivers that we are trying to solve are listed in the post itself, albeit not explicity categorised as business drivers, more as opportunities – after all this is a learning experience. However i’ll repeat some of them in this context:
Business Drivers:
Internal Collaboration and Networking
Staff and People finder (by skills, by experience etc)
eLearning
Internal ideas and innovation
Internal communications and staff engagement
If you wish to discuss this further please do not hesitate to let me know and i can let you have my email and contact details.
In addition to the above, i have just come across this research by Jakob Nielsen’s posted in Alertbox on August 3, 2009:
Social Networking on Intranets
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/social-intranet-features.html
It comes to much the same conclusions as we have here, plus it also recognises the potential. We have only dipped our toe into the water and we have experienced the scale of some fo the issues the alertbox post highlights
Carl
Whatever value gained you from Social Networking didn’t come out in the video. I have no problem with “web 2.0” and “enterprise 2.0” in fact in my present trade people talk a lot about “RM 2.0”. Time moves on, we have to embrace the new technology, but in business context what is it for, what’s the benefit and can we control it? In my profession this means can we get good records out of it that support the business functions and allow us to be compliant with the relevant legislation, e.g. DP foi etc. The answer is of course that most organisations can’t cope with email so how do we expect them to cope with “web 2.0”
We dip our toe in social networking where there is a purpose. I read my CEO’s blog and I post on my internal (infernal?) message boards, which were particularly useful during local government reorganisation, but is there a wider use in a business context?
As for the research, Social networking expert finds that social networking is a good thing, some surprise there.
The video was a snapshot based around specific aspects of the pilot. It doesn’t truly represent the whole experience by a long way.
In terms of Records Management – I don’t think the sort of things that would be declared as records have any place in social networking platforms. Although I guess that there may be discussions that lead to the production of records – so that is facilitation rather than a barrier in my view.
There is a closer alignment with document management – and we would probably need a policy on when something should be put into a document management system. If it does turn out to be a record we have policies about what to do with it from there.
You are right organisations can’t cope with email because it is inappropriately used. Using tools like this enable organisations to make better use of email and redefine what email is for, that way managing information better.
Carl
I suppose in the end you make my point for me. If email is inappropriately used how can we expect the less formal instant messaging, blogging, twittering etc. to be used in a more appropriate way. This way lies chaos. Of course all of them are open to FOI/EIR, DP. How do I keep track of that?
Just as ICT learns that it can no longer hold back the tide by blocking things that make its life more difficult – is IM taking over the King Canute mantle?
These things are not going to go away – we have to learn how to deal with them. It is so much more difficult to keep track when they go underground.
Sue
I’m not suggesting we try and hold back the tide ( and incidently king Cnut (Danish spelling) gets a bad press on this as he was trying to prove to fauning courtiers that he couldn’t hold back the tide and he was right). What I am suggesting is that just because we can do something doesn’t mean that we should do it.
We should look at new developments, we should look at Social networking software, we should see how we can benefit from it. But where’s the business case? Can we make it work for our business and gain quantifiable benefits? Will it pay for itself? If it doesn’t is what it does worth it for other reasons? Could I gain similar benefits by doing other things?
IM and RM as a comunity has been facing up to these issues over a long period after trying to pick up the corporate pieces of badly planned and badly thought out software installs. RM has been making ICT think. Email has been a nightmare, very few organisations have a real handle on producing good corporate records from email and it is very important in a highly regulated society to have these records.
If some of the “web 2.0” software becomes useful it will come to the surface, if not it will whither and die. What worries me is that we will spend money on something that people like because it’s fun but has very little functional business application. At what point does me being able to send an instant message to colleague begin to benefit the customer who incidently remains king in all this.
I think our pilot is doing exactly what you are recommending…giving us the chance to look at it and see if we can benefit from it. If it hadnt ‘come to the surface’ I dont think we’d be doing it.
We had ideas of what the benefits might be – and even so – were amazed at the obvious reduction in email (for example). In terms of RM it seems much easier to manage something that is open and transparent in an enterprise social media product – that is eminently searchable and where nothing can be done anonymously – than when it is lurking at the bottom of a few inboxes.
Isnt educating the workforce the answer to a lot of these difficulties? I think they are generally aware of the problems – but dont necessarily know there is something that can be done about them.
I find being able to instant message a colleague – knowing that they are there because their icon is green – far more beneficial to the customer than emailing half a dozen people in the hope that someone that can help is around and can respond eventually.
Sue
I agree education is the key and something we ignore at our peril. sadly we do have a tendancy to give a minimal amount of training (at least in my council).
I’m glad your pilot has drawn out the benefits of whatever “web 2.0” applications you are using and would be interested to see what they are and how you measured them. In the case of a green icon it only means someones computer is on, personally I would show my age and ring them, far better than emailing and in many ways better than looking for the icon, at least someone else in the team could tell you where they were.
As for the email and social media product. Well now you have two things to manage. Any pressure you have taken off of the email servers you have simply put elsewhere and I’m not sure that logs make good records.
I think you will find the green icon is a little more sophisticated than that…mine regularly tells people I am ‘idle’.
Sue
Many people tell me I am idle even without an icon, how perceptive they are. 🙂