PSleader

for those who would make a difference

White House Forum on IT Management Reform : Video Presentation

Last week, the US Office of Management and Budget hosted a Forum on Information Technology Management Reform at the White House. In the below video, following an introduction by Jeff Science, Vivek Kundra presents the 25 point action plan for the US governments IT strategy going forward. Already, they have been able to reduce budget by $3 Billion dollars and improve delivery of projects by 50%.

The numbers in this presentation absolutely boggle the mind and the amount of waste identified and now in process of being recovered is nothing less than incredible.

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Feds will expand use of social media

By Andrew Mayeda, Postmedia News: “The federal government is developing plans to give public servants more freedom to use social media such as Facebook and Twitter so departments can engage more directly with the public and recruit young talent who expect a “Web 2.0” workplace.

Senior information-management officials also propose creating a central “open-data” portal that would make raw government information available to web surfers, provided the data isn’t personal, secret or confidential, according to internal documents obtained by Postmedia News.” Link to full article at Canada.com

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Australia is the second largest government user of Yammer – over 110 active networks

There’s recently been some controversy in Australian government over the use of Yammer, a private and secure enterprise social network, which I discussed in my post, The ongoing struggles to balance IT security and staff empowerment.

I asked Simon Spencer, Yammer’s newly appointed Asia-Pacific General Manager, how many government agencies in Australia were using Yammer.

I was expecting him to answer maybe 30-40 agencies.

He told me that, counting state and federal government, there were at least 110 Australian agencies now using Yammer – with a total of around 13,000 users.

I was surprised, I hadn’t expected that much adoption.

However I was even more surprised when he gave me the global figures on take-up.

Simon said that Australia represents 29% of all government networks using Yammer. The US represents 33% and the UK about 26%. The rest of the world accounts for the other 12%.

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Late Bloomers and The Evolution of “Social”

“…[W]e live in a society with peculiar expectations about the time course of success. We think that if a child isn’t blossoming as fast as the others in grade school, he or she will be hard pressed to eventually flourish.”

Scott Barry Kaufman, Ph.D Candidate, Yale, Psychology Today, November 2008

The Social Evolution is in full swing. We are finally moving beyond early stage social experiments, and on to achieving transformation through distributed learning and exchange that characterize complex social behaviors.

Scott Barry Kaufman’s article on the phenomena of “late bloomers” provides an opportunity to consider an interesting metaphor on social transformation. Like late boomers in human development, social transformation is prone to the emergence of “late bloomers” too.

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Think IDEO, but for government

This entry may be last before the new year, and to be honest, has been a long time coming. You see, I’ve got this thought in my head and it seems to have taken up residence. I’m not sure how much you know about me, or how much you care to know, but I’ve spent the last four years in the public sector. I could bore you with all of the details but let’s just say that I’ve experienced both the best and the worst this sector has to offer.

My initial experience was so abhorrent that I’ve made it my mission to try to make it better for others; I look to my father for inspiration and to my children for lessons in collaboration. I like to think that I have helped inspire public servants to be courageous, to rethink old mental models, and to alert them to the art of the possible.

I’ve met many great people, inspiring thinkers and doers, and for that I am incredibly fortunate. Many think I am living the dream, that I am one of the few who have come as close as you possibly can to an entrepreneur in the public sector. There was a time when I agreed with them, but that time has passed.


We are ready for so much more

I was on the bus on my way to work yesterday and overheard three public servants speaking. One of them was talking about her son who was working as a student two days a week for a federal agency. He was doing so well that they wanted to bridge him in full time, only he didn’t want that. In fact, “It is the last thing he wants, he is looking for something where he can be entrepreneurial.”

It’s not surprising, despite the best efforts of some of our best and brightest, even the most well-intentioned attempt at public sector innovation is suffocated by the traditionally bureaucratic: committees, policies, and briefing notes. Perhaps it’s time for a complete redesign.

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Should government policy be discussed in social media?

There’s a fantastic series of articles being published over at FutureGov Asia-Pacific at the moment, introducing some very interesting perspectives on social media and government.

One asks, Should policy be debated in social media?, providing perspectives from senior leaders in different jurisdictions across the region.

There is a fair amount of diversity in the viewpoints, however the overall consensus appears to be that it should.

Several of those asked to comment pointed out that it is happening anyway – regardless of what governments may wish.

It is my view that we’re past the point where government agencies and politicians have the luxury to choose where and how they form their policy. They can no longer fall back on government-controlled due process.

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An Open Government Directive Scorecard, Year One

The Open Government Directive (OGD) was issued on December 8th, 2009, by the administration of President Obama.  The document states:

“The three principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration form the cornerstone of an open government.”

It is around these three core attributes that the directive is focused. 

On this first year anniversary I wanted to take a moment and share my thoughts on how well the US Government has done in terms of OGD and in regards to moving the needle regarding open government overall.  This is clearly subjective on my part and it is my hope that the Whitehouse will take this opportunity to provide a more objective score.

The scorecard is built using the following breakdown:

  • Goal Setting: 30%
  • Clear Strategies and Measurements of Success: 20%
  • Leadership Education and Approaches: 20%
  • Personnel Communication,  Training, Retention:  20%
  • Use of Technology: 10%

My individual and overall grades, with brief explanation, follow.

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What’s the risk for government agencies of NOT engaging via social media?

If you do not embrace social media soon, the digital divide in your country will be dwarfed by the divide between your country and the rest of the world.
Chris Moore, the CIO of Edmonton Canada, as reported in FutureGov Magazine.

When people ask me to consider the risks of government agencies engaging with audiences via social media, I often respond by asking them if they’ve considered the risks of not engaging.

This often gets blank looks; many people don’t often consider the risks of not doing things, even though it is a normal part of life.

For example, who today doesn’t understand the risks of not wearing seat belts? However, only 15 years ago there were plenty of concerns still raised about the risk of wearing them.

Here’s a list of some of the risks highlighted by the US anti-seatbelt movement:

  • Wouldn’t you rather be thrown through the windshield of your car to safety than trapped in a rolling vehicle? And after you are thrown through the windshield, how can you jump out of the way of your rolling car if you’re all tangled in a seatbelt?
  • As much as one tenth of one percent of auto accidents involve sudden fire or plunging into water. If everyone in the United States takes part in an annual auto accident, that’s 23,000 people who run the risk of being trapped and fatally killed by a seatbelt each year!
  • Psychiatrists say that exposing young children to practices such as bondage from an early age can cause confusion during puberty.
  • A section on seatbelts in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Web site’s FAQ says (when edited for clarity): “Wear … a seatbelt … and … you will … died.”
  • Even the statistics of the pro-seatbelt Automotive Coalition for Restraint of Freedom proves the case of their opposition. The Coalition says that seatbelts cut the risk of serious or fatal injury by 40% to 55%, but even if this number is believed, it means that seatbelts are potentially deadly in the remaining 60% to 45% of cases!
  • Seatbelting is related to the hideous ancient Chinese practice of foot binding.

I expect, over time, that many of the risks of using social media will become normalised and accepted or explained away as myths, whereas the risks of not using social media will become more acute.

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How Do Rocket Scientists Learn?

Rocket scientists, software developers, systems engineers, and all the other people that work at Goddard helping us better understand the earth and space are smart. That’s a given. But how do they improve their practice, learn from each other, and continue to improve on overwhelmingly complex tasks?

In a huge and complex organization such as Goddard, Knowledge Management is usually a core component of organizational learning. I’ve done some work in Knowledge Management in the past, and obsessively read Harvard Business Review articles on the topic, but I was really excited to dig into it in the context of space exploration. I spent a few weeks reading as much as I could on the topic, and was fortunate enough to attend an internal workshop led by the extraordinary Ed Rodgers, head of Knowledge Management at Goddard.

Here’s what I learned.

Knowledge Management at Goddard is About People

NASA creates things that don’t exist yet. Doing that takes incredible talent. At NASA, the talent lies not in its complex technologies, shuttles, spaceships, or intranets, but rather in its people. The products are certainly breathtaking and wondrous, but the success of the things that come out of NASA are a reflection of the knowledge of and collaboration between thousands of brilliant people. This point was really driven home at the Knowledge Management conference I attended…according to one participant:

“we didn’t hire smart people so we could tell them what to do; we hired them to tell us what to do.”

NASA’s work is organized around Missions. When a Mission is stood up people from across the center are brought together to work on the project. In theory, people with similar backgrounds and skills should be interchangeable. That’s where knowledge management comes in – to make sure that anyone from a particular unit that is assigned to a project has all the skills and knowledge developed in that content area within the unit. Each mission should get the knowledge of the whole department when you work with an individual.

The case study ”Goddard Space Flight Center: Building a Learning Organization (B)”[1] summarizes this point really well:

Knowledge Management is “better application of collective knowledge to the individual problem. So we need to develop some systems and do a little more work to share collective knowledge and make us smarter.”

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Thom’s Top Ten #g2e 2010 edition

Back in May I wrote about attending Gov 2.0 Expo, in that post I promised to share some of what I learned. In short, it was an intense three days, lots of great presentations, and more importantly dozens of interesting and insightful conversations.  Here is my report.

1.  Top quote

I thought this was a very mature statement.

” web 2.0 tools are not something we need to learn to use, but environments we need to learn to live in.” Jack Holt, Dept. of Defense

For other things I thought were cool at the time you can check out my twitter feed from the conference.

2. Thou shalt engage

There is a ton of civic and employee consultation going on south of the 49th parallel. It seemed like every second presentation was about some form of engagement, mostly using the tool made available by GSA to all agencies, a good example is GSA’s own consultation.

With all this activity going on I expect we will see some more lessons learned in the next few months at WebContent.gov, but two early conclusions appeared in my mind:

  • A broad national conversation is difficult if not impossible and of limited value.There are simply too many voices. Maybe when semantic analysis improves it will be practical but for now focus is essential.
  • Follow-up is critical. You need to know what you are planning on doing with the input,  be transparent about your intentions and follow through. Be sincere and prepare for the unexpected.  See this post from David Eaves for some perspective on what can happen.

David also had a wonderful keynote at the show about open data, baseball and government. You can watch it here.

For a Canadian perspective on engagement check out what the folks at Ottawa based Publivate are up to.

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