Linked Data & Business Intelligence – Is this a two sided coin?

I haven’t blogged much lately and there is good reason for that, firstly I’ve recently gone through a restructure and redundancy process, I still work for the council but have moved somewhere else as part of the redeployment process (more on this in a separate post).

However one of the things that remains the same is that I’m still lucky to get involved in very interesting projects and this creates many problems for me. 1) I try to create links between projects when none clearly exist, but when they do they make a lot of sense, 2) my mind is never really quiet for long periods to allow me to find inner peace and 3) there is so much to get involved in that I have to ensure that I stay focused on the now, whilst keeping an eye or two on the future.

I’m fortunate to be involved in some Linked Data work that going here, mainly thinking and planning first steps but it is really fascinating and I can see why Linked Data fans champion the need to do more – I really do see the value, but we need to actually provide it through real world application before some senior folk will really support it.

For those who don’t know what Linked Data is:

Linked Data describes a method of publishing structured data, so that it can be interlinked and become more useful. It builds upon standard Web technologies, such as HTTP and URIs – but rather than using them to serve web pages for human readers, it extends them to share information in a way that can be read automatically by computers. This enables data from different sources to be connected and queried
Via Wikipedia

We had a session today to learn more about Linked Data and the practical first steps we can take in order to start proving value not just internally but across some partnerships.

One of the others areas that I’ve been involved in but not so much on a practical level is looking at the Business Intelligence capability across the council.

For those who don’t know what business intelligence is:

Business intelligence technologies provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, process mining, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining and predictive analytics……..Often Business Intelligence applications use data gathered from a data warehouse. However, not all data warehouses are used for business intelligence, nor do all business intelligence applications require a data warehouse
via Wikipedia 

 

Now one of the interesting aspects for me is that there are similarities in these two areas which I think I need to explore further as I learn more about each over the coming months etc.

On face value they seem to be two sides of the same coin – Linked Data looking primarily externally to create meaning and context, whilst business intelligence looks across internal systems and applications to create meaning and context.

I would think it is fair to say that we are in the very early stages of each of these projects and it will take time for us to get to grips with how we want to see both develop.

But I can’t help but think that we need to bring these two agendas together somehow without compromising each project – perhaps through shared learning, data modelling, data cleansing and approaches to master data management.

I could be wrong and I maybe over complicating two very complicated areas already….but surely the outputs of the internal business intelligence tools should form the basis of our published linked data for others to consume.

I guess time will tell 🙂

 

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Social Media Stages/Themes for Local Government

I read with interest Dan Slee’s blog post “Linked Social: Eight steps of social media evolution in local government” and whilst I agree with Dan I commented on his post with a slightly different perspective.

I recommend that you can read the post directly but I have included a bit of my comment below:

With regard to social media and wider social technologies there are lots and lots and lots of people using them and very much engaged in them and they are part of an unwritten future we are heading towards. The potential application of the variety of social technologies are creating a unique set of opportunities to transform not just the public sector but generally our way of life….from broadcast to conversations to collectively decisions to location based services to event driven location services to a seamless offering of content and services based on who and where i am. And the role of local government and the web in this context looks different to me.

So I’d suggest something like this in terms of an evolution which simply places your view into a slightly different context and one i think you may have eluded to before, but can’t seem to find a link…

I don’t really see these as a hierarchy or a straight path from 1 through to 6, more a set of themes which have different approaches and challenges depending on where your ambition is and where your current state is….

1) Ignorance and defiance

2) One way communication

3) Dialogue and conversation

4) Collective decision making

5) “check in” for content and services around me and for me

6) “push notification” for content and services around me and for me

The above applies for internal (staff) and external (residents and citizens) delivery

To be honest, I’ve blogged on a similar topic before but hadn’t really expressed my view on the stages or themes on the use of social technologies in this way before as I do kind of prefer self discovery with some of this, but here is a first stab at explaining in a bit more detail what I think about each of these stages / themes.

However the rule that I proposed in that blog post a couple of years ago is still very much valid:

Rule Number One:
Don’t focus on the technology, technology itself doesn’t do anything, there is a saying that we use in my council “there is no such thing as an IT project, there are only business projects”. The key message here is YOU need to focus on business problems and issues and if social media tools are part of the solution then great. But don’t force social media where it isn’t needed or wanted. To put it another way, try using a social media tool that offers you no value for me something like friendfeed is that tool, i don’t get it or understand it, so i don’t use it, at this point in time it doesn’t solve any problem i have.

I’m not claiming that this is ground breaking because it certainly isn’t but it has helped me understand how much you can or can’t progress depending on your organisations ambition with regard to social technologies.

1) Ignorance and defiance
Straight forward stage really, this represents organisations who may have isolated staff trying to push forward social technologies but those people struggle to get acceptance and open access to sites.

There seems to be a strong defiance to progressing this agenda in the current climate and most of the views held by decision makers are this is a disruptive technology and is counter productive to the aims of the organisation or council.

The defiance and ignorance isn’t restricted to external use only, there is also culture that restricts internal opportunities to use social solutions.

For people who work in such organisations I blogged recently about some do’s and don’ts for getting buy-in by senior managers – these may help, but they don’t come with a guarantee.

2) One way communication

This stage/theme is characterised by organisations and councils who only see the more mainstream social media tools to amplify their existing broadcast channels. This is often represented and seen as a continuous stream of one way traffic made up of press releases. You won’t see much conversation or retweeting of other people’s content.

To be fair this is a common approach and one which allows organisations and councils to experience the social media approach within a very narrow field – I’m not saying it is right or wrong, however the challenge here is moving beyond simply one way broadcast within a reasonable time period so that you don’t lose the opportunity to engage a new audience with your content and or services.

3) Dialogue and conversation

This is where I sense most councils are looking to aim toward in the short-term, it certainly seems the most logical and on reflection looks as though it can create some value.

This is really about changing the way your organisation sees and understands internet based communication tools. My personal view is organisations are happy to allow staff to enter into some kind of email conversation with a customer/citizen providing that they are providing accurate and relevant information or signposting, perhaps even a service directly.

Moving this approach into a more real-time environment seems to present challenges to organisations around relevance, reputation, behaviour etc which currently exist within our traditional communications channels such as phone, face to face and email.

My experience is that organisations and councils have “over time” created a set of consistent standards relating to each channel that they expect their staff to adhere to, thus ensuring that any risks are mitigated and the customer/citizen is engaged with appropriately.

The simple answer is that we all need to develop the same kind of standards for the new channels (easier said than done of course). This in itself presents more challenges which are related to the first stage (Ignorance and Defiance) as there are still perceptions that “social” is not “business”.

I refer back to Rule Number 1 at this point as this is, in my opinion, the approach you will need to take to ensure that you deliver value and take the focus away from the actual tool and seek to simply create a solution to an existing and emerging problem.

4) Collective Decision Making

In most conversations I hear about social technologies, the one area that really does fascinate me is the whole issue of democratic engagement and how social technologies can support and change the way in which citizens are involved in decision-making at a local, national and international level.

I’m not going to go into huge detail about what I believe this is, as I believe this space is still emerging and progress is being made by other people, we just need to learn before a wider set of organisations actually start progressing this area.

One person who I admire and whose blog I enjoy reading around this area is Catherine Howe (Chief Executive of Public i). On her blog you can read all about the Virtual Town Hall project as well as understand her thinking into all of this.

You can of course read about others experiences and views on this area, a couple more people I enjoy reading are: Richard Wilson (Izwe), Carl Whistlecraft (Kirklees Council) and Dave McKenna (Swansea Council)

5) “check in” for content and services around me and for me

I am not currently aware of any council really progressing this aspect, but I know some are using services such as foursquare and Facebook places as a method to engage customers/citizens.

Essentially it is about using the location-based services as a means to access particular services or content. An example might be within libraries, someone checks in and then is made aware of a particular offer or event that is being promoted, a simple process really but it does take some planning and co-ordination across channels in order to maximise the opportunity.

An internal example here might be a public sector worker checks into a public building and is pushed tasks via workflow.

This idea builds on the concept that colleague Martin Howitt articulates in his Location Based Architecture blog post.

6) “push notification” for content and services around me and for me

This is the only evolutionary step in these stages/themes as this is really pushing the previous stage/theme to a more proactive level and again building on the location-based architecture approach.

The main difference in this area is that i wouldn’t need to check in, in order to be pushed tasks, my smart device which naturally has GPS (ok this is a future thing as we need connectivity and devices to catch up), knows where I am and pushes a notification as I pass within a reasonable distance of a public building/space where I have tasks to complete.

Stages/themes 5 and 6 both require a significant underlying architecture and infrastructure in order to maximise the value and opportunity. This post is not the post to explain the infrastructure, that will have to be another time.

I know that each of these stages present different opportunities and challenges and solutions are already emerging which help organisations support their goals within each area. It will be down to each individual organisation to understand its own ambitions.

The only aspect i didn’t refer to is the cultural challenges in transitioning from a traditional business to a social business…that is definitely another blog post.

Its always been about collaboration

A collection of thoughts went through my mind when I scanned this presentation on slideshare…

My first set of thoughts focused on a set of products and or tools, two  in particular popped into my mind:

• Simpl (Social Innovation Marketplace from FutureGov and crew) and
• CitizenScape (A social web platform for involving citizens in the democratic process from Public i)

NB: There are other tools and products available, but these were two which were on my mind at the time of thinking.

Both tools clearly have a primary focus, but in the context of progressing towards Collaborative Enterprises, which is moving beyond Social Business. They have a common purpose – provide tools which equip the organisation with components to progress towards being a Collaborative Enterprise.

My second set of thoughts were about how the skills of collaboration are fostered in society.  My children who are aged 6 and 4 and both in school are always talking about how they worked with their friends or other classes (or even other schools) to deliver a class project.

So collaboration is an essential part of education and learning – that isn’t really news, but it is interesting because when you arrive in work, in most cases, your collaboration opportunities are reduced and you are restricted to poor channels of collaboration and are even forced into particular processes which do not resemble anything you have previously encountered.

My third set of thoughts were about how the progress made on all things social is merely a short-term distraction on our way toward Collaborative Enterprises.

In my experience within Local Government, the word “Social” is often counter productive and I have always preferred the term Business networking instead of social networking – semantics, I know, but it is important. However what we really need to get right is how the collaborative processes of the organisation are either supporting of hindering progress with social tools, that will be the best place to start if you wish to change your organisation.

The word “social” is over used in a lot of terms now and I’m not personally convinced that everyone using it, understands what the implications and impact is – it is also complicated by terms like social business, as this could sound similar to social enterprise, in terms of meaning but this is a completely different context.

My final set of thoughts were about how the presentation misses one key component that I believe any collaborative enterprise will possess and understand and that is Gamification. There are huge opportunities to bring together the skills and approaches of games into the design and architectures of organisations to create truly Collaborative Enterprises.  This is still a new area of thinking for me, but it is something I want to explore more of in the coming months and years.

 

Your Social Business Maturity Level

I was looking at my RSS feeds earlier and came across an excellent post by Jeremiah Owyang – The Web Strategist.  The post is called Spend wisely –  finally an investment roadmap for social business buyers.

The main thing I loved about the post was this one side maturity assessment, which could be used in conjunction with the Social Media Strategy and Framework in a previous post of mine.

Another thing I liked about the post was the following graphic which gives you a very broad overview of how you can match spending or resource commitment to your social business maturity.

Check out the full report here on slideshare

Facilitating a Social Media Strategy

Updated: included wordle graphic

I’ve had quite a number of conversations  about social media strategy at the council recently,  as well as with a number of people via twitter and other networks.

So I thought I’d share my thinking on this and also share the strategy (co-developed by Martin Howitt) which I use to help others as well as a framework to developing a Social Media Action/Implementation Plan.

This is intended to be a reusable framework and strategy – as the detail and local variations will come in your own action plan.

To put this into context the council has already made significant progress around Social Media – In January 2010 the Council introduced a Social Media Policy and Guidelines which states:

Devon County Council is committed to making the best use of all available technology and innovation to improve the way we do business. This includes using all reasonable and cost-effective means to improve the way we communicate, reach out and interact with the different communities we serve.

It includes guidance around personal and professional responsibilities, using social media in different scenarios and key things to consider.

We don’t yet have a formal Social Media Strategy (yet), but the following is what I am personally using and promoting internally as a method and approach to adopting social media within our business operations.

The Strategy:
We will maximise the positive impact of our use of social media in support of the councils business aims and social objectives.

Principles:

1. The use of social media, like anything else the organisation does, must be informed by business strategy and social objectives.
2. Social technology does nothing on its own. To create value from social media, it is people and processes that must change.
3. Becoming a truly social organisation will yield benefits in terms of sustainability, responsiveness, reputation, lower operating costs, and higher social impact.
4. Social media can in theory pervade every part of the organisation’s value chain. But it should only do so if there are defined and (where possible) measurable positive business impacts.
5. There is no such thing as a social media project: there are only business projects that utilise social media tools to some extent to achieve their objectives.
6. A social media capability must therefore be built or adopted specifically to serve the objectives and current projects of the organisation.

Tactics:

1. Identify which organisational processes / service areas which might use social software or social media tools
2. For each process / service area – state the key objectives and outcomes
3. List the available tools and their best-value use cases
4. For each process/service area identified in (1), identify the most useful tools from (3) and map the potential benefits to objectives/outcomes in (2)
5. Consolidate the list in (4) by channel and/or by organisational role.
6. For each role identified in (5), evaluate the cost, benefits, and risks
7. Create a prioritised portfolio of projects, expected benefits, and Key Performance Indicators based on the outputs of (6)

I appreciate that this may sound easier than it actually is, but to be honest if it were that easy everyone would be doing it and no one would have trouble justifying its use. If you can build this approach into the service business planning cycle you (as facilitator) and the service area will yield higher results in terms of potential Social Media projects supporting and delivering business outcomes – that is the theory anyway 🙂

As a starting point I’d recommend that you look at your own service area as well as highlighting or at least acknowledging other “high value” organisational processes which could benefit from this exercise, so that you can get familiar with the process and the level of understanding you will need around some of the tools and best value use cases.

It is worth trying to separate the cross cutting processes from the actual service areas for example “community engagement” might be a service area in your organisation as well as it being a cross cutting activity. In my opinion you are likely to identify a better value proposition looking at the cross cutting process of community engagement then the service itself.

In my Council a sample list might look something like this:

Process / Activity Areas

• Community Engagement
• Customer Service
• Staff Engagement
• Community Consultations
• Staff Consultations
• Personal and Self Directed Learning
• Knowledge Sharing
• Policy Development
• Service Planning
• Emergency Communications
• Press and PR Relations

I’ve separated the activities of engagement and consultation on purpose as different social value can be created depending on your approach.  By tackling a cross cutting process or activity you can influence and impact a greater number and range of people who can add value when you start looking at this on a service perspective.

Service Areas

• Trading Standards
• Libraries
• Road Safety
• Highways (roads and traffic)
• Waste Services
• Registration Services

The reality here is I could have included a list of nearly all services, but you really need to stay focused and work on a service by service basis sometimes.

I envisage that the best approach would be a twin track approach –  During the prioritisation process outlined in stage 7 – try selecting one activity area alongside a service area to increase the organisational learning opportunities.

Hope this is helpful –  and I wish you luck….I’d be very keen to hear your stories on how this works or doesn’t for you.