@maricela. Agreed, this is not at all black and white, and I also appreciate that for organizations that provide consulting or products for collaboration solutions the idea that government clients should be “piloting” outside before spending any dollar is sort of unwelcome. However the examples you seem to allude to are Enterprise 2.0 while what I am talking about is Government 2.0. My contention is that before establishing externally-facing social media, most government organizations need to spend time figiring out the value from somebody else’s solution. There will always be cases where – after doing so – the outcome is the establishment of an externally-facing enterprise solution, but assuming this can be planned upfront, without going through something like the SOCIAL franework, is not accurate. As to your point about people being busy, I always advise clients that if they do not have time to make an effort to understand what is already available out there, they’d better do nothing.

@Anthony. I also like the term “solution value” but would also argue that the term “solution” has many nuances. Joining an external community and leveraging it for enterprise purposes can be indeed a solution. As you know from previous conversations on our respective blogs, I believe that government organizations cannot articulate a fully fledged business case for a specific solution until when they’ve gone through some form of intelligence work – such as the one suggested by the SOCIAL framework – that justifies the need and space for them to establish a community they run and drive.

Having been at this game for a while supporting projects under regulated environments, but also working on social and healthcare services, I have found out that this is not so black and white.

First, pilot doesn’t mean only a sector of an organization. I know of companies with tens of thousands of employees who have piloted E 2.0 initiatives across all the company. I also believe that organizational dynamics tremendously impact a project and those dynamics are so varied between entities that it is like DNA fingerprinting. Thus, piloting someone elses anything might not reflect the “people and processes” challenges a given entity or organization might follow.

Finally, but more importantly, people are really busy and don’t participate just because. We focus on what we call Solution Value and work hard at what would motivate people to participate since most do not want to collaborate or contribute just because (we even created a list of why people collaborate). I fear that pretending this is a black and white subject falls under the same hype that I see at the enterprise side of the business that one solution fits all. When it comes to trying to achieve specific outcomes it is imperative to see if that outcome’s value is greater than the effort to get there as well as great enough to engage key stakeholders.

The fundamental shift that I think you are calling out here is that we as individuals working in government need to identify as a part of the community and contribute in much the same way as anyone would. The idea that that you can ‘pilot’ a community gets more outmoded on a daily basis. Some public segments are moving faster than government at adopting social tools for community building and may be much more effective at it.