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| Editor's Letter |
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July 10, 2008
Feds going Web 2.0 in a big way
PICK 20 winner helping 250,000 government employees share information and build content
It wasn’t too long ago (September 2007, in fact) that Backbone gave federal political parties a failing grade on their Web 2.0 status. Back then we wrote “Canadian political parties themselves are not implementing widespread social media strategies on a national level,” and termed the collected Web sites “distinctly 1.0.”
But if the parties are slow off the mark, the same can no longer be said of the government itself. The feds and Canadian enterprise content management vendor Open Text announced in May a major rollout of Web 2.0-enabling technologies that should see up to 250,000 employees in government departments, agencies and Crown corporations begin to use wikis, forums, blogs, tagging, communities and chat.
Financial details and implementation specifics were not disclosed. The agreement is an extension of an existing business relationship.
Open Text, a giant in the content management market with 46,000 customers and millions of users in 114 countries, landed the number seven spot in this issue’s PICK 20 awards. (The contest judging was completed long before the recent government contract was announced.) Open Text was lauded by judges Sean Moffitt and Michael O’Connor Clarke as “a leader in its space” and “one of the most important Enterprise 2.0 firms in the world” respectively, although innovation was one of the judging criteria and the company was dinged slightly for not being among the most cutting-edge firms.
But as the recent federal government announcement proves, being on the cutting edge is not always the most important measure, as this project could have a significant impact on everyday Canadians.
 Information shared
The federal government faces the same information challenges as any large organization: keeping employees up to date on company policies and industry trends, extracting and sharing best practices, and capturing and preserving corporate knowledge. In the past, companies employed intranet-based information management systems to handle this and ended up with silos of disconnected information. Those companies are now moving to internal wikis and blogs, tied together with pre-emptive tagging and search functionality.
And the federal government is about to do the same. Once underway, the new collaborative systems mean a bureaucrat working on welfare policy, for example, will have easier access to current employment statistics and to past research and insight on employment assistance, and that can only lead to better policy.
Government 2.0
A recent report called “The future of collaborative government and Web 2.0” from Deloitte (available on the company’s Canadian Web site) points out that “businesses are increasingly leveraging Web 2.0 applications, using them to learn more about their customers, build brand awareness and share knowledge internally” and that similarly, “the business case for government-focused Web 2.0 adoption is overwhelming. The potential for governments to contribute to improved societal outcomes by embracing online collaboration and information sharing is now clear.”
Deloitte outlines four areas in which collaborative systems will pay off: improved policy outcomes, more effective use of government information, streamlined internal operations and attracting top talent. Progress in these areas would deliver more responsive and transparent government to Canadians.
The report cautions that these systems are only effective when embraced by the user community: “The challenge lies in government inertia: elected leaders and the public service infrastructure that supports them must overcome the cultural barriers that stand in the way of a more open, free-form style of collaboration. The report then adds: “[Success] will also require the most sophisticated Internet-based technologies to make it accessible to all stakeholders — something that technologically conservative governments have traditionally been slow to adopt.”
While true in the past, this is hopefully no longer the case for our federal government. And it is interesting to note that, in the same September article quoted above, Liberal MP Hedy Fry said, “Social media can help you better understand people’s opinions across what is a very large country. I would like to see this help change the institutions of government.”
So would we all, and we will watch the progress of this year’s number seven company as it works to update our government’s information management systems.
Peter Wolchak
Peter Wolchak
Editor
pwolchak@backbonemag.com
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