Andrea Di MaioAs a Gartner analyst I travel and live a lot outside of my home country, which is Italy. Actually, my entire professional life, even before joining Gartner, has led me to work abroad with international partners and client. This means that I have plenty of opportunities to look at my country almost as an outsider,
This morning a colleague told me about a recent statement from Mr. Renato Brunetta, the Italian Minister for Public Administration and Innovation, who just announced that he wants to prevent government employees from accessing Facebook (see news in Italian), most likely in an attempt to increase their productivity. Over the last year, Mr Brunetta led several battles to fight absenteeism and to make employees more productive.
This particular one, though, is almost ironical. In fact, as a politician, Mr Brunetta has his own page on Facebook, with over 50,000 fans: on that page he has often spoken highly about the innovative power of the Internet (see this, also in Italian). However when it comes to employees, he threatens to introduce filters that will make Facebook inaccessible.
I have been covering this topic a number of times in my blog, and what I observe outside Italy is the exact opposite. Government departments that used to prevent access to external media sites, now allow access either on case by case basis or to all employees (see my latest post). Later today or tomorrow I will post about further interesting client conversations in North America and how social media are becoming mission-critical to government organizations.
On the other hand many would say that the irony of this case is embedded in the name of Mr.Brunetta’s ministry: maybe Public Administration and Innovation make an oxymoron, and certainly so in my country.
Category: Uncategorized social networks in government Tags: innovation, Italy, social media
8 responses so far ↓
1 Government 2.0 Won’t Happen Without Officer 2.0 June 1, 2009 at 3:06 am
[...] I being too optimistic? Is this a dream rather than future reality? Should ministers keep banning Facebook and bashing on employees, treating them as a liability rather than their most important asset? With [...]
2 Citizen-Driven Government Must Be Employee-Centric, Too June 11, 2009 at 1:46 pm
[...] quality and low productivity is indeed the inflexibility if not laziness of many employees. We have countries like Italy where government employees are under intense scrutiny and are subject to public criticism by [...]
3 Italian Directive on Internet Use in the Public Sector Sets A Worst Practice June 25, 2009 at 9:59 am
[...] a previous post I anticipated that the Italian minister for innovation and public administration wanted to ban [...]
4 Government 2.0 Made In Italy: Blurring The Boundaries Between Politics and Operations September 17, 2009 at 9:34 am
[...] this experience will give Mr Brunetta further food for thought to reconsider or confirm his decision to fight the personal use of social media by government employees. [...]
5 Government 2.0 Made In Italy: Blurring The Boundaries Between Politics and Operations September 17, 2009 at 9:34 am
[...] this experience will give Mr Brunetta further food for thought to reconsider or confirm his decision to fight the personal use of social media by government employees. [...]
6 An Amazing Citizen Service Anecdote January 6, 2010 at 3:08 am
[...] bureaucracy. I have to admit that, for how critical I have been in the past with this minister for preventing employees from using social media and for some questionable use of government web sites, I am quite impressed. No email, no social [...]
7 Why Berlusconi Does Not Get Facebook April 5, 2010 at 2:36 am
[...] and innovation criticized government employees who waste their time on social media and issued a very restrictive policy. Incidentally, it would be interesting to see what he thinks now: would he prevent employees from [...]
8 Berlusconi y sus primeros pasos en Facebook | Politica 2.0 - Democracia Digital April 5, 2010 at 3:48 pm
[...] gobierno por que la red social les hacia perder su tiempo en los medios de comunicación social y emitió una política muy restrictiva . Por cierto, sería interesante conocer lo que piensa [...]