(I've been meaning to do this for months - probably years, actually, but been too lazy/busy. When I upgraded my Radio Userland software recently, the WYSIWYG editing no longer worked. Lazy/busy won out yet again, but this time it was easier to move the blog.)
11:39:47 AM    
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New research on Breaking Barriers to e-Government is coming out of Europe, and the tie in between eGov and adopting collaboration is becoming more clear. 

Effective collaboration using Internet-enabled tools (virtual collaboration) supports communication across geographically separated locations, positively impacting Barriers 4 (poor coordination), 5 (workplace and organizational inflexibility), and 6 (lack of trust).

Barriers 2 (financial inhibitors), 3 (digital divides), and 7 (poor technical design) are also barriers to adopting virtual collaboration. Addressing these issues as a technology adoption project may provide a lower-risk lever for solving the larger context for each of these issues.

Then there's Barrier #1, Leadership failures. [Insert dramatic pause here.] Solving that one is much more difficult. One starting point is to assist in leadership awareness of the drivers and new demands of the knowledge economy. This is an education issue, but with the busy schedules of most executives in government as well as in commercial organizations, education will need to come through as many avenues as possible, including the media.

more info:

The seven barriers to success in eGovernment were identified as: 1) Leadership failures; 2) Financial inhibitors; 3) Digital divides; 4) Poor coordination; 5) Workplace and organizational inflexibility; 6) Lack of trust and 7) Poor technical design.

The most prevalent issues mentioned in a survey of e-Government experts and users were: Coordination across central, regional and local levels of government; Resistance to change by government officials; and 3) Lack of interoperability between IT systems;

I haven't had time to explore this yet, but there's lots more info at http://www.egovbarriers.org/ (the website for the 3 year research program).

9:44:29 AM    
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Are you a knowledge bridger? That's someone who takes expertise from one field and applies it to solve a problem in a completely different field, thereby creating a breakthrough product or service. Wharton's David Hsu and National University of Singaporee's Kwanghua Lim looked at knowledge bridging in biotech startups and concluded that among the possible strategies to increase knowledge bridging in an organization, the trick was simply to "hire the right people and give them the freedom to follow their curiosity".

If it were only that easy. Just look at the first part, "hire the right people". What would the job posting on Monster look like? And as with any hire, how do you know that you've hired a solid performer rather than an impressive interview performance? Then there's that pesky problem: superstars behaving badly. Will your latest talent turn into a disruptive prima dona? Then there's the availability issue. If you are lucky enough to find the right person, can you win them away from competing job offers? If you "win" them over now, how do you keep them?

These are central issues for the knowledge economy. One approach is to grow your own superstars. Give them resources and opportunity to succeed individually and also take steps to open your corporate culture. Ideas include creating wide transparency across the enterprise; encouraging cross-training, continuing education, and sabbaticals; encourage a sense of community in both physical spaces and electronic ones (via today's collaboration and social software); make sure your innovation process is the best possible; and of course be ready to embrace your distributed knowledge bridgers, wherever they may live or travel.

You can even look for inspiration by being a knowledge bridger... take, for example, Management by Baseball.

4:22:53 PM    
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It shouldn't come as a surprise to regular readers of this blog that IBM's latest CEO research, which focused on innovation, stresses the need for collaboration. From the Executive Summary:

"External collaboration is indispensable. CEOs stressed the overwhelming importance of collaborative innovation – particularly beyond company walls. Business partners and customers were cited as top sources of innovative ideas, while research and development (R&D) fell much lower on the list. However, CEOs also admitted that their organizations are not collaborating nearly enough."

Among IBM's recommendations:

• Ignite innovation through business and technology integration – use technology as an innovation catalyst by combining it with business and market insights.
• Defy collaboration limits – Collaborate on a massive, geography-defying scale to open a world of possibilities.

7:29:06 AM    
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I was browsing through Don Hinchcliffe's lists of Web 2.0 software: The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005 and More Great Web 2.0 Software, wondering how quickly this information would be out of date given the rising adoption rate of Ajax and all things "Web 2.0" - a term that I admit I'm still a bit fuzzy about.

In 2002 and 2003 I created an online catalog to track the quickly evolving marketplace for COTS collaboration tools, but I can see this type of solution would need a radical overhaul to work with Web 2.0 concepts. To start with, the lessons of collective intelligence tell us that a handful of researchers can't be the only ones populating the database. Rather, a system of open submissions and ratings would be necessary, such as in use at Digg. The second big change would be in the data elements captured - for example it's no longer interesting to filter tools by which "operating system" they run on. For a short while it may be interesting to filter based on which browsers it's been tested in. A huge discriminator would be whether there's an open API available. In addition to capturing "articles" (which could include blogs) on a particular tool, it would be cool to link each tool to a list of mashups that use it. Each of these may be considered a tool itself, so the links between tools will be recursive.

Very preliminary thoughts, to be sure, but the more important question is if such a tools guide was created, how would it be used? Would it be valuable?

8:34:53 AM    
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Some Advice beyond Forrester...

The usability of eGovernment websites has a ways to go, according to Forrester Research  (Making eGovernment Web Sites Usable, Dec. 20, 2005). They used their proprietary website review process on a total of 7 major government websites. In conclusion they suggest using Scenario Design to improve their sites, which asks: Who are your users?; what are their goals?; and how can you help them achieve those goals?

Coincidentally, I had the chance to use the survey's top-rated site recently, as I filled out FAFSA applications twice - one for each of my freshmen twins. It was easy, but it was also easy to see how it could have been improved. Wish I had taken notes, although I'll have the pleasure of doing it all over again soon enough. Hmm, maybe I will take notes!

Just about any website can be improved. I doubt, however, that anyone needs to rely on Forrester's proprietary review process to improve these sites. For example, try wikipedia's entry for "usability testing", or even this "classic" (i.e., really old) tutorial on Information Architecture.

Finally, I can't buy in to Forrester's final advice: "Stick To The Basics To Make Government Sites Usable." Rather, implement projects that yield the highest value to our nation as a whole. My advice: save your money on this report; instead, try Forrester's IT portfolio management techniques to help balance competing priorities.

Looking forward, we should start seeing more government websites integrate collaboration capabilities, connecting the human user to a human guide who can help them through the tough spots where general automation strategies just won't work. Simple user observations can yield all sorts of insights into how well these innovations work.

6:39:02 PM    
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Blogs and RSS "grew dramatically", according to Forrester's Social Computing Takes A Step Forward As Blogging And RSS Grow, Marketers Can Play A Role (by Charlene Li , December 14, 2005). Yes, from 5% to a whopping 10% of the population now reading blogs at least once a week. OK, maybe this isn't exactly what I'd call "dramatic", but it's a definite trend.

Are blogs just repeating the early history of the web? When I started writing HTML in the early 90's, websites gained attention in the press as more and more companies published their Internet sites. But they never saw the website I created - an employee information site hosted safely behind the firewall of a major government agency.  Yes, while the press followed each tidbit of public evidence of the web's growth, a huge population of private intranet sites was growing undetected.

A few innovative companies are already experimenting with blogs for internal communication, we just don't hear about them as much when they're behind firewalls.

Imagine an intranet of blogs, one for each individual in a consulting firm. Each person may work on many projects; each project may have many workers. How would you as a manager get the status of a project's workers: ask each worker to email it to you? Have fun creating that monthy status report! And on the other end, how many status reports would each worker have to email out? 

With a blog-based status reporting system, each worker would post to his or her blog at least weekly, categorizing or tagging the post according to project and any other topics that may fit. Want to find out how the project is doing? Pull the appropriately categorized posts into a consolidated blog. What to know what that person did this week? last week? last month? Just click through the project blog to the individual's blog.

But status reports are just one example of the benefits of blogging behind the firewall. Think of the benefits for mentoring junior staff, for capturing lessons learned and best practices, and for building a community among staff that are often distributed at various customer sites.

2:25:36 PM    
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