NPSC Blog

At the beginning of March Gartner published a brief paper, titled ‘What Does Web 2.0 Mean to Government (no link: subscription required), that included some significant observations about our future operating environment, and it set me thinking about what this will mean for the public sector in big-picture terms.

Before we get to the report itself, by way of an introduction: if you are not entirely sure what this whole Web 2.0 thing is, then you should probably have a look at this seminal article by Tim O’Reilly, What Is Web 2.0.

Back to the Gartner report. The opening sentence summarizes the nature of the analysts’ thinking and conclusions:

Web 2.0 will affect several industries, but none will feel such a pervasive impact as government.

I would argue that the first half of the sentence is already looking anachronistic (Web 2.0 is not just affecting industries now, it is driving them) and, given this, the second half doesn’t necessarily augur all that well for governments.

Why not? Because most governments are still trying to come to terms with Web 1.0, let alone adapt to the rapidly changing expectations of citizens who are experiencing seismic shifts in personalisation, data control and accessibility in their dealings with Web 2.0 businesses.

And this ‘expectation gap’ will manifest inside agencies as much as it will in their dealings with citizens. I have already posted about the importance of agencies evolving into the sorts of workplaces that match younger generations cultural expectations, but I can’t stress how important this is.

Governments, like every other employer, are desperate to attract and retain quality staff and ensuring that employees work in an environment that is socially and technologically similar to their existing experience of the world is critical. You wouldn’t expect a young public servant to work without a phone, why would you expect them to work in an environment where they can’t IM, blog or collaborate with colleagues on a wiki?

This strikes me as one of the shortcomings of the Gartner paper: there is no consideration of how Web 2.0 technologies will influence the internal processes and cultures of agencies. I would expect that internally driven change was just as significant a contributor to transformed government as changing citizen expectations.

Gartner go on to predict (I believe, accurately) that mashups will provide government with opportunities to operate more efficiently and effectively:

(Examples of mashups) requires governments to rethink the way they make their data and services accessible to external consumers, be they constituents or intermediaries.

This is the real crux of the implementation of Web 2.0 for government: who owns the data? And how do we manage it? I started to cover this when I wrote about microformats, and their potential for government. By making the data available for syndication and reuse, we are essentially saying to people “this is authoritative, go out and use it in ways that will make it valuable for you.” This could mean mashing up geo data with contact details (hCards) and agency address (adr) to provide a map of agency contacts that would be updated in realtime as the respective agencies updated their websites.

As Tim O’Reilly observed in Wired this week:

A lot of people still think, “Oh, it’s about social networking. It’s about blogging. It’s about wikis.” I think it’s about the data that’s created by those mechanisms, and the businesses that that data will make possible.

And the more of that data that is structured, the more that is semantic, the greater the payload of value that government will be able to deliver; both in terms of increased efficiencies and effectiveness, and in terms of opportunities for businesses and communities.

Of course, this requires a fundamental change in the way agencies view the data that they collect and maintain. It amounts to, in many ways, the open sourcing of government. Is that a step that we are ready (or able) to take? Will we have a choice?

The Gartner paper acknowledges this as a risk, stating:

As far as re-intermediation — which is where greatest potential benefit of Web 2.0 may lie — regulatory, privacy and data issues and politics must be considered. Much data that could produce benefits is not sharable. Different jurisdictions are struggling with how to produce the requisite policy/legal changes.

What does this mean for communicators?

The vanguard of Web 2.0 in government is social media. And as communicators we are at the front and center of managing this change process. Understanding social media, and successfully implementing it in your agency, is an important step towards Web 2.0, and it is one that will largely rest upon your shoulders.

We may be only taking the first, tentative steps towards Govt 2.0, but our publics will increasingly expect more personalisation, more responsive and agile government. Our fellow public servants will increasingly expect a work environment that reflects their interests, their networks and ways of communicating with their colleagues and peers. And all of this represents a tremendous opportunity for us to reinvent the way that government serves the people. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?