Challenges and Opportunities of Government 2.0

Lessons learned from successfully implemented social media projects.

The advent of social media is both a wonderful opportunity and a huge challenge to the government, experts with Booz Allen Hamilton told an audience of industry leaders and federal officials September 10, 2009, at the Gov 2.0 Summit.

“The challenge of government 2.0 is that there's no silver bullet solution,” said principal Grant McLaughlin.

“My bosses would kill me for this, but IT is the easiest part,” noted senior associate Walton Smith. “If you don't have buy-in, you can have the best tool in the world and it won't [matter].”

“To get an ROI on Web 2.0, you've got to spend time on the content,” McLaughlin added.

The two outlined the five pillars that create enterprise-wide social media platforms:

Integrating social media into the operations of agencies requires building platforms based on communities of interest, rather than organizational charts.
Communications must flow freely among all the members of that community, not adhere to traditional hierarchies.
Community members are allowed to collaborate to share knowledge and build new opportunities for knowledge.
New tools and technologies must be constructed by integrating into existing infrastructures and systems.
The community must be able to search across all the content and results have to be presented in useful ways.

In quick case-study sketches, McLaughlin and Smith presented several examples of organizations implementing aspects of social media, among them:

Smith cited the Asia Pacific Area Network (APAN), established by the Department of Defense (DoD) in Hawaii. When tsunamis occur, DoD offices need to be able to collaborate with island nations throughout the Pacific; the department historically set up emergency networks in the aftermath of an event, but they would be mothballed some time later. “They asked us to build a platform to handle day-to-day exercises,” he said.

APAN presented some special challenges because one goal was to facilitate real-time chats that include translation capabilities because of the many languages in use across the region, while also authenticating users participating in the conversations. “Now we're using this as a model for different commands,” Smith said.

GovBenefits.gov is an example of a governmentwide platform, McLaughlin said. “It's been around almost ten years. … Prior to this site, [citizens] had to understand the government to know where to get the benefits” they may be entitled to. Now, working on an “I am all I need to know” basis, users can describe themselves and their circumstances and the site tells them what they may be eligible for.

And Booz Allen itself has implemented hello.bah.com as an internal application. While “it's definitely not Web 2.0,” Smith said, “when it rolled out, it was great at capturing our institutional knowledge.” With the company projected to have 5,000 new hires a year, most of them outside the Washington area, it's a great tool to facilitate their finding resources. “It enables any two people to start a community,” he added.

The Booz Allen duo offered other examples, such as Health.mil, a Homeland Security Department first responders' network, and a platform for the intelligence community.

One challenge all these examples have in common – one that faces every government agency – is leadership, Smith said.

“It's a mindset,” he said. “Most of our efforts are around those middle managers, there for five to fifteen years, who know who they want to talk to.” Those managers need to break away from their comfort zones, and what they think they already know, in order to discover there are new sources of knowledge they can tap.

McLaughlin and Smith summarized their lessons learned to date:

You must have leadership buy-in;
You have to bring the right people together;
You have to develop a shared understanding of the problem;
You have to understand the operating environment (existing infrastructure and systems);
The solution that will work for your agency has to be customized to meet your needs and circumstances;
You have to actively and continuously promote adoption of these new tools;
You have to keep building and expanding the communities using the tools;
Social media platforms require ongoing evaluation and improvement.

story posted September 14, 2009