Andrea DiMaio

A few days ago I spent an hour with two enterprise architects at a Department of Education. Our conversation started talking about the trends we see on the adoption of enterprise architecture in government, and how web 2.0 and the emergence of web-oriented architectures (WOA) are challenging the very premises of whole-of-government EA programs.
As we touched upon web 2.0 and innovation, I couldn’t help ask what their experience and planes were with social networks. I know they had been quite innovative and had broken new ground by providing students access to email in the cloud. What I found out though was that not only staff had still traditional email accounts, but that they were banned from accessing external social networks. While we were discussing about their plans for using web 2.0 to support collaboration between teachers who teach similar courses (in order to exchange and leverage each other’s material), I suggested that this could be done by using some existing social networks that those teachers may be using at home: they replied that the approach was quite the opposite, i.e. to select social software to implement on the secure network they use.
This made me reflect about two things. The first one is that one cannot tag a government organization as “innovative” just because they decide to try out something new within their comfort zone, but without really pushing the boundaries. The  second one – a point I make often to clients when we discuss about social networks – is that a key success factors in making  social networks thrive is to break the boundary between the different roles that an individual plays.