The 'Other James Brown'

Are citizens finally customers?

2009-10-27T07:51:23Z

I was in Japan last month (fascinating county, would love to go back and spend more time there) where I spent a week with the local Microsoft team and with Bill Edwards from CSTransform (formerly Gov3).

Bill was the UK e-Communications Director under Tony Blair's government and was responsible for the original UK Online portal and the now far more successful DirectGov portal. He was part of the team that designed the business model for DirectGov which has lead to it being the most successful eGovernment portal in Europe by quite some way. I enjoyed not only his sense of humour, but also his wealth of experience in delivering successful eGovernment projects from a business/political rather than technical viewpoint. There was one comment he made which really rang true for me.

Governments for years have called citizens ‘consumers’, and tried to treat them in the same way that commercial companies have. However in reality citizens are not consumers; I pay my tax not because I want too, but because I have too. Citizens have little choice in the government services they consume, unlike with a more traditional business where there is a wide choice of competing products and ways of purchasing them.

However that all changes with eGovernment. As a citizen I now have a choice in the way that I consume government services. I can consume services electronically, or I can continue to consume services offline in the way I have done for decades. Citizens will not move online just because online services are there. Citizens will only move online when the overall experience of dealing with the government online is better than dealing with it through more traditional channels. In the same way people will buy goods online only if they offer a better overall experience (cost, convenience, etc) than going to traditional bricks and mortar stores.

Governments need to start using the same techniques as commercial companies do to ensure that their online services offer a more compelling experience than their offline channels.

SharePoint 2010 for Governments

2009-10-22T22:49:11Z

I have to admit, I am hugely impressed with the new functionality on offer in SharePoint 2010, it is a huge leap forward. It really is an immensely powerful platform offering a huge range of services. The official one sentence description is “The Business Collaboration Platform for the Enterprise and the Web”

For a good overview of the product, read the blog post SharePoint 2010 which although long gives a good high level view. There are also a number of videos published which give a good overview; hopefully all the sessions will be made public soon.

Speaking to many of the partners and customers at the SharePoint conference this week in Las Vegas the two main comments were the breadth of functionality that SharePoint can now offer, as well as the quality of the pre-Beta1 release that they were using.

Some of the areas that stood out for me this week thinking about how Governments can use it were:

Accessibility – as I wrote about in my previous post, SharePoint 2010 is now WCAG 2.0 compliant
Standards Compliance – a number of standards including XHTML are supported by the UI, and the data is accessible via REST interfaces and cross browser support
Support for multi-language – The support for handling multiple languages has improved
Social Computing – SharePoint can now really offer the internal and external Social Computing needs of Gov 2.0.
Enterprise Content Management – The ECM features of SharePoint not only offer huge improvements in the traditional content management, but also bringing that into Social Computing and Search.
Web Content Management – One of the main focuses during this release was to bring the web content management up to best of breed, so Governments can use SharePoint both within the firewall as well as for building compelling websites
Federation – SharePoint is now a Claims aware app, making it accessible through federation that will all far easier collaboration between government agencies.

This is just a quick set of features and improvements that stood out for me, there are also many other features that will improve collaboration, integration with Legacy systems, access through mobile devices and so much more.

Well done to the SharePoint team!

SharePoint 2010 accessibility with WCAG 2.0 support

2009-10-19T19:43:44Z

After a long wait we can now announce that SharePoint 2010 has greatly improved accessibility with WCAG 2.0 support. I am out in Las Vegas at the SharePoint 2010 Conference and Steve Ballmer announced the WCAG 2.0 support during his keynote to great applause.

For a full overview of SharePoint 2010 check out this blog post from the SharePoint team http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/10/19/sharepoint-2010.aspx. As i get more details about the accessibility support and other bits I will post them up.

Just one thing to note… the accessibility support is for WCAG 2.0 released earlier this year, not the original WCAG standard. For a quick overview take a look at the post ‘New W3C accessibility standard released’

Government Cloud Computing - Public or Private

2009-09-29T13:49:09Z

One of the hottest topics in government at the moment is usage of the cloud, and this was one of the topics up for discussion while I was in Japan recently. The Japanese Government announced earlier in the year the plans to build a private cloud for Government, the Kasumigaseki Cloud.

Likewise in the UK I have working with teams on the proposed UK G-Cloud, which would be a private cloud based in the UK providing services for Government.

There has also been a lot to discussion in the US around the governments use of cloud, with the launch of http://app.gov that allows government organisations to purchase public cloud services from a centralised web site.

From these initiatives a number of questions and thoughts spring to mind about how the different cloud models might work in government. Although cloud technologies have been with us for a while, how the public sector can take best advantage of them is still to be decided.

Public Clouds

There are many obvious security and data sovereignty arguments that restrict the use of public cloud services. Governments around the world have many rules that restrict where data is located and where data can be accessed from and by who. I think that the US Administration has been able to adopt this model in a way that many other Governments will struggle as many of the Cloud providers are US companies with data centers on US soil.

There will be use of public clouds in governments, but in most cases it is going to be reserved for public data.

Private Clouds

This is what I believe that most governments will be looking at for the majority of their cloud needs. The risk of moving to a pubic clouds outweighs the cost benefit. However, if we can provide services to governments though private clouds we can gain many of the benefits but allow them to control the mitigation of risk.

Clouds don't sell themselves

However, please don't believe for a moment that this is an easy sell. The decision making process in government is complex and political. Cost is one of many factors, and it alone is not enough to sell the cloud. The shared services initiatives in most countries have struggled, and we run a risk of positioning cloud services as shared services v2 – which will hit the same business issues as shared services v1.

Unless we can come up with a compelling business proposition for governments (which is different from a compelling commercial business proposition which most cloud services are targeting) then they will continue to buy services that they can install and control locally.

Twitter usage guidelines

2009-08-05T18:17:41Z

Well I have been away on the road for the last couple of weeks at the annual internal Microsoft Sales conference in Atlanta and then in Seattle for TechReady - an internal tech conference. So I have been too busy to post, but had a great time catching up with many contacts from around the globe and learning about lots of things that I cannot tell you about!

However, while clearing out my backlog of emails and unread posts I came across this from UK Digital Engagement blog - Template Twitter strategy for Government Departments which weighs in at 20 pages. Some of the uses of the document are:

To get buy-in, explain Twitter's importance to non-believers and the uninitiated, and face down accusations of bandwagon-jumping
To set clear objectives and metrics to make sure there's a return on the investment of staff time (and if there isn’t, we’ll stop doing it)
To make sure the channel is used consistently and carefully, to protect corporate reputation from silly mistakes or inappropriate use
To plan varied and interesting content, and enthuse those who will provide it into actively wanting to do so.
As a briefing tool for new starters in the team who will be involved in the management of the channel

I have had a quick skim read, but it looks like there are many sensible suggestions for organisations that are entering into or thinking of entering into the twittering world.

Microsoft Public Sector Government Partner of the year – Spenta Consulting

2009-07-19T15:32:50Z

Congratulations and well done to everyone at Spenta, you really deserved to win the Microsoft Public Sector Government partner of the year. Glad to see you are highlighting it on your rather nice SharePoint based website :) http://www.spenta.es

Also congratulations to Daniel Sabater who has been become a Dynamics CRM Most Valuable Professional, well done you really deserve it. (Daniel, now can you put this on your blog so I can translate it into English…)

Now all we need to do is get David Martos to become an MVP for SharePoint as he knows more about it than anyone else I know! (David, same goes for you about the translator widget; you know how bad my Spanish is…)

Well done to you all.

All looks great, but why do we need Gov2.0?

2009-07-17T12:21:45Z

I was working with one of our teams in the Middle East to help them prepare for a presentation to a group of Government CIO’s around Gov2.0. I put together some slides for them, got some background reading, example sites etc and sent it over. Then came the question - ‘Thanks James, all looks great, but why do we need Gov 2.0’.

Andrea Di Maio (who's blog you really should subscribe to) has written an article for www.governing.com called ‘The Blurring of Government’. In it is this paragraph that sums up one of the reasons why governments need Gov 2.0

Generation-Yers are entering their productive lives, and their different set of values and expectations will impact governments both as service delivery organizations and as employers. In particular, social networking behaviors and the greater demand for transparency clash with the traditional top-down hierarchical and one-way style of interaction that is typical of government organizations

Perfectly put. The structures of governments were designed for an age that seems to have come and gone; and they need to change rapidly as the gap between citizens expectations and what they are delivering is getting bigger every day.

A personal favourite of mine is still the video from www.unitedminds.ie, a guy from Dublin who is campaigning for a new form of government. Whether you agree with him or not, the frustrations and questions he raised in the video are very real. Governments need to deal with citizens who want to use blogs, Twitter, YouTube, etc to ask these questions. Citizens want more transparency, they want to get more involved; unless government organisations change, frustration will only increase.

Windows Azure

2009-07-15T22:12:53Z

At the Worldwide Partner Conference more details have just been announced around Windows Azure, the Microsoft Cloud Platform. This short video is a really good and very clear view of what Windows Azure is, and how it works; well worth a quick watch.

Windows Azure and other related bits (SQL Azure and .net Services) are going to be made commercially available at the PDC Conference in November which is fantastic news. Pricing has been announced and you can find more information in this post ‘Confirming commercial availability and announcing business model’.

So this is going to mean that projects like the Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) which host data out of the cloud can be built on a supported and live platform. I am getting ready for a couple of internal conferences in next two weeks, but once I get back to my desk I am going to do a more in-depth look at the OGDI project and see if we can get some non-US data sets up there.

I am currently collecting links to any public datasets I can find (they are here ), if you have any other ones I would love to know about them.

Governments engaging using Social Media

2009-07-09T18:16:48Z

There are three interesting posts this week from various sources around Social Media. First one really underlines why it cannot be ignored. After reading the post ‘Social media now more popular than personal email – Neilsen’ and looking at the statistics of internet usage I have to admit this is the way that I communicate to a number of my friends. Whereas a year or two ago I would email friends, now I often just send messages on Facebook.

There are a number of examples of government organisations who have used Facebook effectively and those that have not managed so well. Checking back on Boris Johnson (Mayor of London) who back in January I pointed out had not posted any updates to his Facebook group for a month now looks like he is (or someone is) doing it on a daily basis.

It is a way of people keeping up-to-date with what he is doing and what he is thinking. Most of his posts seem to get a fair amount of comments – these range from thoughtful insights to ‘Boris for King’ and ‘we have named our dog Boris after you”….

Leading on from that is a post from Andrea DiMaio who was talking to a government client about their web presence and Facebook presence when it was pointed out that they did not believe that they had any presence on Facebook. Someone it appears had set up a group and was happily answering questions, all looked official except no-one knew who the creator of the group was…

It is important that even if you are not engaging over Facebook or Twitter, you need to ensure that someone else it not doing it on your behalf.

Finally, it is important not to forget that there is more than just facebook and twitter out there. As pointed to in the excellent whitepaper on Obama’s use of Social Media ‘Barack Obama’s Social Media Toolkit’, the Obama campaign maintained profiles across 15 different social networking sites including Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, AsianAve.com, MiGente.com, BlackPlanet.com and others. There is more that just Facebook out there and you need to understand what local and community driven social networking sites are out there.

As pointed out by the third post ‘2009 Facebook demographics and statistics report’ there has been a staggering increase of 513% of people over 55 joining Facebook, while college and high school users has dropped by 20%. Facebook was not the first social network out there, and it will not stay at the top forever. You need to understand who are the people you want to communicate with, then you needs to understand where they are – don't assume it is Facebook, it may be somewhere else.

Twitter usage in emergency situations

2009-07-08T11:56:37Z

The BBC website has an article ‘Twitter to give bushfire alerts’ where it explains that after this years tragic bushfires in Victoria, the State will use Twitter in future to keep people up to date.

I think that Twitter can be a huge help in these situations. The technical issue you have in situations like the Victoria bushfires is one of scale. As hundreds of thousands of people hit your website from around the world, the ability to scale out the hardware to cope with the load is just not possible. A site that is probably running on a couple of servers will soon become swamped in that situation. Sites like Twitter or Facebook however run at such a huge capacity already, that the increase of that size can be coped with, and they have the dynamic infrastructure to add servers rapidly if needed.

The other issues is the scalability of gathering and pushing out of data. If you rely on ‘official’ sources (ie Fire, Police etc) then you will never get the full picture. If citizens can report fires, whoever is receiving those calls and emails will soon become overloaded. In a fast moving emergency situation you will never be able to keep up with demand.

So this is where Twitter and social computing comes in. The are designed to allow community participation, they can scale massively and also they can often receive data from many different sources – ie SMS, Mobile Phones, PC’s.

The other advantage is that if people enter in the data in a structured format, you can start to mine that data. Last winter there was significant snowfall across the UK, and being the UK that means that the country grinds to a halt. Using twitter, and a defined format of the hashtag #uksnow then the first part of the postcode and x/10 to rate how bad the snow was. So for example mine would have been

#uksnow OX4 7/10

Now we have data coming in, in a format that we can mine you can do something about it. There were a number of sites at the time that gave mashups of the data, so you could see how badly places were hit. After the event, someone also created a time-lapse video to show how the snow spread across the country.

Government and Twitter: Wanted – One usage policy….

2009-07-06T16:09:14Z

As reported on localgov.co.uk, Croydon council has had to suspend its use of Twitter after a member of the council staff used the account to criticise a reporter. I find the statement they released slightly bizarre:

A spokesman said: 'We need someone to find out how Twitter works, review its potential and then enlighten others as to how best it may be used for legitimate, professional purposes.

'As yet there are no rules about using this kind of channel.

'As with email and the internet a few years back, guidelines will be developed if the media enters common usage.

So if you do not know how it works or what you are going to use it for; you created the account it because….?

Any Government organisation has to be aware that any form of communication will come under scrutiny from the press, citizens and other organisations. No new channel of communication should be opened without at least some basic guidelines – and the classic is don't put anything in print (paper or internet) that would cause you problems if it was on the front page of a national newspaper.

I would be interesting to see if there are any basic generic guidelines for both Twitter and Blogging. One of the best I have seen in this area is from the US Air Force on how to deal with comments on your blog. It is clear and simple - just what you need.

Government 2.0 Examples: Good and Bad

2009-07-01T18:28:54Z

Like all things there are good and bad examples of Gov 2.0. One of the main drivers for Gov 2.0 should be a reduction in cost of communication with citizens and I came across two separate examples with different outcomes.

Spenta, a Spanish partner who specialises in SharePoint, CRM and .net development and do most of the work on the CSP Demo image and CodePlex for CSP, pointed me at this article about the Barcelona Mayors’ Blog, and the cost of it which is being called into question.

The complaint is that he has spent €315,000 annually on his blog which has 23,000 readers a month, and even after this expense he is not answering the questions being posted by these citizens. The main cost seems to have arisen from the cost of 6 people used to write the blog for him, which seems a little over the top…

On a more positive note I was looking at the Neighbourhood America website (they are global, despite the name) who provide SaaS Gov2.0 solutions. In one of their case studies they worked with the United States Health Care Working Group and the team responsible for reaching out to citizens. This team have to find out what health care coverage and services they want, and how they are willing to pay for it.

Using social software they managed to reduce the cost per participant from $250 to $7.50 and quadruple the number or participants. A far better set of figures than they managed to get in Barcelona.

It does not matter how good your tools are, you need to put them to effective use to get good results.

Should government own our data?

2009-06-30T11:41:42Z

I know when someone first started to describe to me the concept that the government should not hold data about me, but rather I should hold it instead – it took me a little while to understand why this was a good thing.

A paper has been released by the Centre for Policy Studies (an independent right wing think tank) entitled “Its ours – Why we, not government, must own our data” by Liam Maxwell that takes you through some of the arguments in this area.

In its summary it points out:

In 2009/10, the UK Government will spend about £16.5 billion on IT, equivalent to 1.4% of GDP. However, much IT spending is currently wasted. Only 30% of projects succeed.

A clear choice is emerging for the future of government IT:

− Either to continue with the Transformational Government agenda. This relies on the State holding, in the words of the Treasury’s adviser, a “deep truth about the citizen, based on their behaviour, experiences, beliefs, needs and rights”, with huge centralised databases directing public services to the point of need (as judged by the State).

− Or to abandon expensive and failing centralised IT projects and yield control of personal information to individual citizens. This is the approach that has been increasingly effective in the private sector.

Having worked in this sector for a while now, both in the UK and worldwide it is terrifying to see the money that is thrown a huge doomed IT projects. As you go into the report there are some other staggering statistics.

when the DWP analysed its communications with customers, it found that the take-up was tiny. More than half of the “customer base” (51%) were able to access services online by mid 2008. But out of the 142 million contacts with the public, only 340,000 (about 0.25%) used the online services.

and also

The high cost of government IT provision – £16.5 billion this year, and growing – is equivalent to £700 for every household in the country, or almost £300 for every man, woman and child. To put this in perspective, the State spends approximately 60% more every year on administrative IT than it does on drugs for the National Health Service.

No other organisation spends anywhere as much on IT, even though they process similar amounts of data on each individual. For while central government spends £300 per person per year, Google, MSN and online banks spend between £10 and £60 per person per year.

The quotes like this keep on rolling out for the first 21 pages, before it starts to look that the alternative. The paper is quote good, however I would prefer something with less of a party political bias. One other area they do not touch on, and I think is one of the most interesting is around cost. How does the private sector make money on holding your data – is it through advertising or even selling data to third parties?

The dark side of Gov 2.0

2009-06-28T00:34:11Z

I am rather enjoying Andrea DiMaio’s latest post – It is time to explore the dark side of Government 2.0. As I have noted a few times here, here and here not everything is always rosy in the Gov 2.0 garden. One of the issues that I see is the speed at which governments are feeling that they need to adopt Gov 2.0, and they are not going into it with their eyes open.

One of my current concerns is the weight being given by governments to online polls and the influence that social media seems to have on them. The first and foremost concern is around the digital divide; there is a significant percentage of the population without internet access – but even then there is a significant percentage that are unlikely to engage with the government online. My mother and father have a PC and (finally after a lot of nagging) have broadband; however they will not be going near Facebook, Twitter or any other Social Media and nor are they likely to engage in any online petitions. Is their voice less valid?

What I fear is that we move into a world where whoever shouts loudest online can influence the direction of government. Petitions whether online or offline are not a replacement for democracy they just indicate what one group of people think about a subject. As I commented in this post, just because 2 million people clicked a link saying that they did not want road tolls – there was no debate, no understanding of the pro’s and con’s and no-one asked the other 50 odd million people in this country what they felt.

What is great about online engagement is that it lowers the barrier of entry to engagement. As a citizen, I do not have to attend town hall meetings if the information and engagement is also done online. However because the barrier to entry is lower, it is also more susceptible to spamming (for want of another word). For example, my brother sent me a link to a poll on the 10 Downing Street web site. Did I agree with its sentiments – kind of. Did I click the link – of course, my brother asked me to.

Don't get me wrong, I do believe that online engagement is important, and will become ever more important – but it should not be given more weight than it deserves, especially given its limitations in representing a cross section of the population and also the ease with which media and pressure groups can gain online support.

Gov 2.0 in Local Government: Yammer or Twitter?

2009-06-26T17:58:57Z

Gov 2.0 can and will effect all levels of governments and associated agencies. Over on the Headstar e-government blog there is a case study of Web 2.0 in Local Government which sparked my interest for two reasons.

Firstly and totally unrelated to the subject in hand is that it is about Brighton and Hove City Council which is where I went to school and strangely enough I was there on Wednesday with my Father and Brother watching Sussex take on the might of the Australian cricket team. A glorious day was had by all and the Sussex team played fantastically well. (To my Australian readers that is a photo of Philip Hughes being comprehensively bowled out for 15 runs while being bathed in bright English sunlight. Yes, both events can happen in England, it is just that neither of them happen enough for our liking)

The second point in the post was about their use of Yammer which in many ways is similar to Twitter, but with one important difference. Whereas Twitter is open to anyone, Yammer restricts you to communicating within your own organisation (restricted by email domain eg @microsoft.com). Instead of answering the question ‘what are you doing?’, instead you answer the question ‘What are you working on?’.

I have tried Twitter, but if I am honest its noise to relevant data ratio is just too high. Like most people over the course of a day I am monitoring multiple inputs. Phone, SMS and Instant Messaging are pretty well 100% relevant – there is a 1:1 connection between you and the person connecting with you.

Email is next down on the list. Microsoft does email like no other company I know with many people having 100+ mails a day to deal with. I would like to say that the noise to relevant data ratio is better than it is, but I do sometimes spend too much time wading through emails.

Below that are Blogs. I subscribe to nearly 90 blogs and a fair amount of that is noise, but I also get a enough relevant data out of it to be a worthwhile investment.

Bottom of the list is Twitter. I subscribed to it not for social reasons, nor to keep up on day to day events, but to get information relevant for my job. I am sorry, but the noise to relevant data ratio was just to low – it was not worth my investment. It took up too much time and gave me too little in return.

I think over time Twitter is going to settle down as more of a social service – keeping up with friends, current affairs etc. But where people are trying to use it as part of their daily job to help team collaboration and information sharing, I don't think it works.

That is where I think Yammer or another similar service will fill that gap. No offence, but I don't care what you are doing – I however am interested in what you are working on, what you have read that is relevant to your role, information that I can use in my daily work.

Companies and organisations will inevitably move to use social computing as part of their day to day activities, but the usage is sometimes subtly different to the use of non-commercial services and I think the assumption that tools such as Twitter and FaceBook can be used successfully in a corporate/public sector environment is wrong.