Andrea Di MaioYesterday I was chatting with a client in a state agency about trends that will impact state & local government in the next two years. One of them was around the evolving role of employees and how they will be empowered by social media, open government data and more in general what people refer to as Government 2.0.
In several posts I have been advocating the centrality of employees in the future of government (see here in particular), as they will act as information brokers and innovation agents going forward. The client agreed, saying that they expect a greater percentage of knowledge workers vs. task workers. He also made a very interesting observation about to what extent transformation can be driven by employees. Employees operate within rigid policy and procedural boundaries and unless those boundaries are changed by legislation, there could be very little they can do.
I do partially disagree and I told the client so. Procedures are ways to implement policies, but are not policies themselves. In the past, procedures were hardwired into applications and more recently into workflow or business process management systems. Employees are not supposed to change the sequence of task they are supposed to perform or to use information that is not internal or – when acquired from outside –properly assessed. But social media as well as open government data are changing everything. Employees can access a wealth of data which were previously buried into different, often incompatible systems, and can access external information that can be equally relevant to the task at hand.
In the long run policy boundaries will change and new policies will emerge that institutionalize or police or deter the use of social media to accomplish mission-critical tasks. My contention is that before we get to that point, there is a fair amount of change that can actually happen within existing policy boundaries, and that’s why – I believe – some managers are scared to let their employees use social media from their workplace.
Category: social networks in government Tags: employee-centric, government 2.0
1 response so far ↓
1 Tweets that mention Government 2.0 and Employee-Centricity: How Much Transformation Is Really Possible? -- Topsy.com October 1, 2009 at 11:20 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Antonio Dini. Antonio Dini said: RT @AndreaDiMaio Government 2.0 and Employee-Centricity: How Much Transformation Is Really Possible? – http://bit.ly/HOaCh #gov20 [...]