With a few notable exceptions, technology issues in the public sector are not substantially different than those in any other large multinational enterprise. Nonetheless, the public sector appears to have three problems (and one superb opportunity) that distinguish it from most other organizations.¹⁾

Problems

• A workforce, filled with institutional knowledge, on the cusp of retirement.
• Employment processes that are tragically broken: it’s difficult to move quickly on star candidates, and perhaps even more challenging to terminate perennial underperformers.
• Among new graduates, public service suffers from the perception of stultifyingly dull work, with upward mobility being a function of tenure rather than tenacity (and results).

Opportunity

• Engaged citizens willing to work (for free) on projects that are both meaningful to them, and useful to others.

In some sense, the problems and opportunity are intertwined: the public sector has a publicity and collaboration problem. Although addressing these problems requires a shift in culture and organizational dynamics, technology can help enable public sector renewal by simplifying processes, encouraging knowledge sharing, and leveraging citizens’ willingness to participate. Start by using technology to enable authenticity, connectivity, visibility and availability.

Many agencies have web sites and glossy brochures where employees glowingly describe fabulous job opportunities and explain how much they love their jobs. Almost no one believes this rhetoric. Instead, agencies need to enable real conversations, where candidates engage with current employees to discuss their own reality, warts and all. If agencies are terrified that employees might just talk about problems, that should be a wake up call: the workplace is badly damaged, and needs help.

Of course, most people can name a few irritants, but they’ll also be able to name things that attract them. If you encourage authentic conversations during recruiting and new hires are likely to start with open eyes, ready to embrace challenges aware of whatever irritants exist. But, don’t stop there. IT can enable authentic conversations on an ongoing basis by providing a platform for staff to discuss their work. One mechanism for this is a blog, the use of which helps publicize things going on within agencies, and demonstrates a willingness to accept input from the community.

Consider a blog run by a software developer who’s describing his use of Ruby on a new project, or by someone looking for help getting memcached to work on AIX. Candidates looking for a role at the agencies will be able to see what’s going on inside, and can share their own insights. That’s a pretty powerful introduction, and certainly a much stronger endorsement than the “It’s a great place to work” rhetoric. Of course, not everyone will blog about their experiences, but that's all right. You don’t need everyone using the tool to make it valuable.

In 2009 and beyond, new entrants to the workforce will not have spent any of their adult lives without mobile phones, text messages, web browsers, email, instant messaging and social networks. They'll have used these tools to research papers for school, to share homework with friends, to collaborate with peers around the world, and to keep in touch with people they met while on holiday. When companies hire executives, one of the most valuable components of the deal is access to the person’s contact list, a source of expertise and new business. The contact list of new hires might not make them rainmakers today (though it might), but it will help down the road, and that contact list most certainly connects them to lots of other smart motivated people today. Sadly, that contact list isn’t in a Rolodex, it’s in Facebook, often maligned by older staff a waste of time.²⁾ Instead of taking advantage of these rich networks, companies destroy them by blocking access.

The public sector needs to build on the conversation platform discussed earlier to enable connectivity among staff across agencies. If leaders feel a need to ban access to Facebook (in spite of evidence suggesting that some personal browsing at the office boosts productivity ³⁾) they must figure out how to preserve an employee’s social graph. Severing access to well-developed networks eliminates an incredible source of expertise, and destroys communication channels through which a lot gets accomplished.

Some of the information collected and managed by government is extremely long-lived, so the format in which it’s stored becomes an important issue to consider. While the merits of various formats are debated, current standards that divorce content and presentation can be employed to move ahead. One tool that does this remarkably well, while simultaneously enabling collaboration is a wiki. The wiki is an excellent tool that broadly distributed groups – characteristic of many government agencies – can use to share documentation, promulgate best practices, answer questions about their team, and provide pointers to common documents. As with blogs, wikis won’t be the right solution for all problems, but including the tool in a document management strategy recognizes its value, provides a collaboration mechanism for distributed resources, enables capture of institutional knowledge, and stores data in a long-lived format (plain text). This idea seems to be in its nascent stages with GCPEDIA – a good start – but the success of such initiatives requires senior leaders to recognize the value and pledge formal support.

Because authorship and edits of wiki articles are attributed to individuals through revision tracking, it publicly recognizes contributions, which goes a long way toward addressing a significant problem in the public sector. Allowing staff to contribute and recognizing their contribution is critical. According to an Ottawa Citizen article supported by the APEX survey, 64% of public service executives think of leaving their organization at least every month. More than half want to leave because of lack of recognition.⁴⁾

Blogs can help visibility, too. In addition, blogs provide another benefit: they fight information overload.⁵⁾ This might seem counterintuitive, but consider how blogs work. They attract input from many sources, and through the participation of many people, synthesize various streams into a smaller number of cogent ideas. If public recognition is not reason enough to consider blogs, having a proven way to distill volumes of data into more useful information should be.

As noted above, an important topic within the public sector is preservation of long-lived data. The fact that government is thinking about the issue is indicative of both the quantity of data and its value. While the government struggles with issues such as health care, education, job creation, financial transformation, taxation and foreign policy, it must necessarily prioritize things and allocate resources accordingly. This means that a lot of things that might be really useful are deferred (or simply not done).

In a recent talk,⁶⁾ NYU professor Clay Shirky discussed the concept of cognitive surplus: the idea that as people no longer have to worry about satisfying basic needs, they have more time to spend on leisure. While some of the surplus is spent on activities such as television, some of it is spent on contributions to projects that turn out to be pretty valuable: Wikipedia, Firefox, and Linux (among many others). Open source impresario Eric Raymond describes this as a “gift culture, an adaptation not to scarcity but to abundance.” No matter what label we attach to it, it has become clear that people are willing to invest some (or a lot) of their time on projects that have widespread benefit. Sometimes this may take the form of suggesting a spelling correction on a government web site. In other cases, the contribution is more involved, as with Halifax software developer William Lachance. Mr. Lachance strapped a GPS to his bicycle and rode around Halifax for 30 hours plotting the locations of all the bus stops. He then used that data to develop a web site that allows visitors and residents to plan trips around the city using the public transit network.⁷⁾ Total cost to the city? $0.

Recent history is filled with similar examples, where engaged citizens have taken data from multiple sources, pulled it into one place and created something useful. The biggest complaint from creators? That the data exists, but it’s not readily available and agencies don’t like to share it. This issue was part of the impetus for Toronto’s recent ChangeCamp: an event format, an open community and a set of tools and ideas designed to give citizens and governments the ability to work collaboratively in new ways to make change and to better address real-world challenges in our communities.⁸⁾ The City of Toronto showed up with lots of senior IT staff, and the mayor pledged to be more open and to make more data available. Other governments can use these examples to liberate their information, too. People are excited to participate and to make things better by working things that matter to them. If people are willing to work on those ideas at no cost, and if their implementation makes government seems more accessible and more responsive, why wouldn’t you open up?