Rialtas.net - Government 2.0

Post by Jeffrey Roy, CIO Government Review on InterGovWorld.com

recounting how he recently attended a meeting of four graduate students and four executives from a provincial Crown corporation. The topic was e-government and how Web 2.0 can improve customer and employee engagement and thus improve performance. The discussion was lively…

Students left impressed with the executives’ knowledge and usage of such terms as wikis, RSS feeds, and other buzzwords of the day; the managers, in turn, appreciated the insight and enthusiasm of the students, eagerly awaiting their analysis and eventual recommendations.

Such is the ideal scenario of e-government and public sector renewal - senior managers open to change, willing to listen, and prepared to empower younger workers within their organizations to lead renewal efforts aimed at the nexus between digital and organizational innovation. Such is a key to both government relevance and renewal in the coming decade.

Conversely, a more ominous scenario may be taking shape, one driven by widening concerns about a massive exodus of the senior management cadre across the federal and most provincial governments. Such departures, according to some, can only mean a critical loss of talent, knowledge and organizational memory at a time when the public sector confronts increasingly complex and managerial challenges…

Governments are thus beginning to at least consider the prospect of incentive packages for people to stay (a dramatic reversal of the mid-1990s program review era). New mechanisms, such as external audit committees (called for by the Federal Accountability Act) will also provide venues for many retired senior officials to exercise influence…

…Web 2.0 is a mystery for most senior officials in government today, a necessary evil for a smaller group of architects responsible for e-government generally and service delivery especially. No doubt, there are even a few techno-champions in the midst of this latter segment, social innovators determined to swim upstream since the public sector mindset toward embracing new technologies is mainly incremental: study, pilot and carefully roll out modest changes while doing what one can to minimize risk.

Although there are good reasons to emphasize stability and caution in a public sector realm involving partisan politics and critically important services and programs, the dilemma faced by governments is how to balance such continuity with an intensifying need for more radical innovation.

Web 2.0 personifies the latter, and especially the spreading culture of personalization, instant communication and speed. Witness Robert Reich’s new book entitled Supercapitalism, or Michael Hirschorn’s observation in a recent issue of The Atlantic that his six-year-old son cannot understand why a song heard on the radio cannot be instantly replayed.

Read the full post here..

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