Andrea Di MaioEarlier today I gave a presentation on web 2.0 and social media to a group of IT officials from one of the Canadian provinces. the audience was quite lively and interactive and they shared with me some insights about their experience with social media.
They are amongst the few (see previous post) who do not ban Facebook and other similar sites, nor they actively monitor its usage besides the normal content filtering that take place for Internet access. One interesting nugget was that they found out how important Facebook was to the business when – for some technical reason – it was inaccessible for a day or so. Some senior users in the organization complained that without Facebook they could not complete some important task, for which they have been using the tool for some time. To my reaction that this could have been an excuse as they just wanted to keep accessing it for personal reasons, the client told me that it was a real, mission-critical use involving both internal and external collaboration, but just something that they did not know about.
Tough luck for those who want to ban the use of consumer social media by government employees: the genie may already be out of the bottle. While fighting abuse remains important, preventing use is no longer an option.
Category: social networks in government Tags: consumerization, Facebook
3 responses so far ↓
1 Andrew Frank May 7, 2009 at 6:03 pm
Social networking, blogs, and Web 2.0 work as communication methods, because these technologies are the way in which more and more people are choosing to communicate. Twitter, Facebook, and Squidoo allow incredibly innovative solutions and relevant information to be quickly shared amongst groups of people that are typically working towards a common mission and vision.
Rather than constantly fighting to stop an unstoppable force, it is in the best interest of organizations, both private and public, to identify innovative ways in which they can leverage the fact that people are finally communicating. Much of the issue that we have had in our organizations historically has stemmed from the fact that we operate in silos. If we allow individuals to learn from the shared experience of the global network and community. The organizations that will win are those organizations that understand that they no longer have the control, the community does.
2 US Federal Government Blesses “Government 2.0” May 16, 2009 at 4:55 pm
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3 Social Media Cannot Deliver Business Value If Employees Are Denied Access October 8, 2009 at 6:49 am
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