Carry on blogging: now with even more diverse content!

November 4, 2010 in Blog Business, Government
Tags: blogging, innovation, sun tzu

Obviously my previous blog post (on leaving my job at COI) was probably the most significant and personal single piece I’ve ever written here, and I’ve been really amazed and bowled over by the response and comments back on it via email, Twitter, Facebook and the rest – thank you, one and all.

It does, however, leave me in a bit of a nervous quandary about The Next Blog Post – it’s got something of that “difficult second album” feel to it after a breakout hit record, where you just know the follow-up just doesn’t have anything like the same importance, depth of meaning or frankly level of interest as that one and is going to be, if we’re honest, a bit of a disappointment. So I thought I’d throw in a quick “managing expectations” post in the meantime to lay out my intentions.

First, the good news (or maybe bad – depends on your point of view): I’ll certainly be blogging a lot more. In the past I’ve been ecstatic to get around to writing a blog post a month, and a post a week would have been a worrying level of hyperactivity from which neither I nor the blog would likely never have recovered. Now, though, with more time on my hands and with the public announcements of my circumstances out of the way, an increased frequency of posting is very much on the cards. You are hereby warned!

Actually, one of the limiting factors of blogging more is simply, “what am I going to write about?”, and here’s what I really wanted to say in this piece: it’s going to be as random, disorganised, eclectic and all-over-the-place as it ever was. Serious pieces about work – or rather, life without work for the time being – will be crammed alongside pieces about films and television programmes. Digital and social media developments will sit alongside pieces on politics, which I can now – no longer a civil servant – actually write and talk about.

I’m still very much interested in government and communications, and about what happens to COI, but I don’t want to become a one-issue blogger who drones on about the same subject every day because I’d bore the hell out of you, dear reader, and if not then certainly me. Also, there’s a lot of thoughts about all that which are swirling around in my head right now, and I need to let the pieces settle a bit before coming back and writing more in that area.

Hence the next post will be about US politics, and the one after that will be a scrapbook of film reviews that I’ve meant to post for about six weeks now but not got around to because of the other things have been going on, and then we’ll see what happens after that.

But in the meantime, just to keep the government comms theme running albeit by slender thread, I wanted to commend two brilliant blog posts I’ve been reading this week by public sector folk, one a former COI colleague.

Sun Tzu for our times?

Ross Ferguson, a former COI-er and now Head of Networks in the Digital Diplomacy Group at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, wrote a fascinating blog post on David Kilcullen, a name not well known in the UK but who was one of the architects of “The Surge” initiative that the US implemented in Iraq.

Ross has written up a great summary of learnings from a 2007 paper written by Kilcullen offering a practical guide for officers engaged in counter-insurgency operations; Ross’s attention was caught by one line asking “what does all the theory mean, at the company level?” which leads on to the idea that the quintessential business poseur’s guide – the 6th century BC “Art of War” by Sun Tzu, often cited but rarely read one suspects – really needs a modern day equivalent. Just as the rules of war and engagement have changed profoundly during the last decade – and relying on a military handbook over two millennia old would be disastrous in this day and age – so too does business philosophy require a thorough updating and overhaul to meet a profoundly different landscape.

Among the lessons: Know your turf; Diagnose the problem; Travel light and harden your CSS; Find a political/cultural adviser; Train the squad leaders – then trust them; and Rank is nothing: talent is everything. As with the best blog posts, it’s thought-provoking and will get your brain whirring with ideas and possibilities.

Innovation functions in large organisations

The same is true for Kate Bennet’s post on the lessons she learned about innovation working on a graduate scheme at the Department for Work and Pensions. Long time readers of this blog will know that I have a particular interest in innovation, and in particular with how anything approaching innovation can be achieved in such a large and habitually resistant-to-change culture as the civil service, so Kate’s blog post on the subject couldn’t have been more on my wavelength if I’d asked for a special commission.

There’s some really valuable advice here – from the need to mix old experienced hands with newcomers who are keen, fresh and eager; the need to push boundaries but still be aware of the need to win high-level friends and not alienate them; to the very important point that innovation is not the same as inventing from scratch, and that it’s not about the latest gadgets either. Kate finishes off with “sometime you have to forget the rules and just do it”, which is very true but also very difficult in a large organisation as there can be big consequences and frankly most of us are risk-averse, safety first especially when it comes to career-affecting judgement calls. As Kate wisely counsels at the very end of he piece: “if you push it too far then make sure you have a back-up plan.” Gulp!

Plus, I have to say that with its colourful and appropriate icons for each lesson, this is one of the more visually appealing blog posts I’ve read in a while. Makes me think I need to liven the place up around here!

Innovation v transformation?

February 27, 2009 in Government, Social Media
Tags: Government, innovation, Social Media, transformational government

There have been several eye-catching Government site launches in the last few weeks, showing how seriously Government is taking social media. But is the drive for digital engagement at odds with another key online policy?

The most high profile of the recent launches has to be Real Help Now, the government’s new brand for tackling the effects of the economic recession by introducing and demonstrating the practical help available to families and businesses during the recession. In some ways it seems like the fulfilment of a Campaign story from January that reported:

Liam Byrne, the Cabinet Office minister … wants COI to consider branding the Government’s anti-recession measures in an umbrella ad campaign. Such a move could provoke allegations that an umbrella campaign would also aim to convince voters that the Government is acting to limit the scale of the downturn.

In fact COI wasn’t involved in this particular website launch and credit has to go to Simon Dickson, Dave Briggs and the rest of the Downing Street team who put it together in a very short space of time. Steph Gray notes that instead of WordPress it is “using the cloud as its CMS, via tagged items from Delicious and YouTube,”

Simon writes that:

We aren’t making any great claims for this site: it is what it is, a pretty front end, courtesy of regular collaborator Jonathan Harris, pointing to other people’s material, plus a (first person) message from the Prime Minister. But if it can establish itself, there’s naturally plenty of scope to extend and expand into something more communicative and interactive.

And a very nice front end it is too – the purple design is both striking and classy, reassuring yet dynamic – not an easy trick to pull off. It’s been criticised by the media as being merely an attempt to use a “coloured logo to convince public it is doing something over recession” but that seems very unfair to a site that is clearly doing a lot more than simply post a few PDFs of generic advice that no one will ever read, which was the approach of the first wave of websites “tackling” the recession. But at the same time it’s not a match to the US federal website Recovery.gov either and Dougald Hine points out that there’s an awful lot more that social media could be used for to tackle the recession.

But Real Help Now isn’t the only site launch of late. There’s also The London Summit 2009, a website from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which is a small masterclass in social media techniques which as Steph Gray notes:

In the emerging field of digital engagement for policymaking, this seems to be doing a lot right: a hub for news, early planning, serious resource invested original content (but not much new money thrown at technology), partnerships with innovative forums for debate, a strategy for engagement designed to work at the level of professionals as well as the public, and measurement.

And finally there’s the rather more low-key launch of a discussion site for the Digital Britain interim report consultation by the Secretariat for the Digital Britain Steering Board. This is more of a fix, if we’re honest, to the rather embarrassing oversight by the original report that made feedback to the report difficult: you had to hunt-and-seek the email address 72 pages in. There was none of the impressive interactive consultation you see on the likes of, for example, the Power of Information Taskforce beta report.

Now, okay, after all of that background, time to get to the point:

One thing that all these recent site launches share is that they are all … Well, recent site launches, with their own URLs. But hang on a minute, isn’t government supposed to be dramatically slashing the number of standalone websites across government? Isn’t Transformational Government talking about how website rationalisation has resulted in “another 712 government websites have been earmarked for closure – bringing the total to more than 900 since 2006 and making it easier for people to find the information they want and need online”? How can one part of government be working hard to close websites and discourage any new launches, while Downing Street, the FCO and Digital Britain are merrily opening brand new ones?

With Real Help Now, for example, the obvious transformationally-compliant approach would have been for Directgov to take responsibility for hosting this information, which is public-facing and bringing together information from across government – very much Directgov’s thing. So why wasn’t it part of the Directgov offering? Was it the need for a separate brand away from Directgov orange, needing its own URL? But many government departments have claimed that their pet project needs such standalone status and distinctive brand, and website rationalisation has put them in their place and told them “No” in the interests of streamlining the morass of websites the citizen previously had to traverse to find the information they needed.

Probably the short answer for why Real Help Now wasn’t done on Directgov is that it wasn’t technically possible to use the sort of social media tools on the Directgov shared CMS platform – at least not without spending a huge load of money to achieve it and taking far too long. I’ve worked with a client on a simple revamp of their website design on a similar shared services platform, and it took many months of delicate negotiations to achieve it when the IT supplier’s default response seemed to be “the computer says no.” And that’s just changing some cosmetic designs – who knows how long it would have taken to anything truly fresh and innovative?

But that opens up a whole new can of worms in this day and age of Web 2.0 fast track innovation: are we saying that the large “supersites” like Directgov, Businesslink and Schoolsweb (if that ever launches!) aren’t compatible with innovation, social media and fast turn around?

That’s an argument dangerous to the whole policy of transformational government online, for website rationalisation, and for Directgov: while all those initiatives seemed like a fine response to the out-of-control mess of online government real estate in 2005, it’s possible that it’s all already outdated and outmoded even before it completes its task, because with new in-favour initiatives such as the appointment of a high-level senior post of Director of Digital Engagement precisely to embed social media and innovative, cost-effective ways of using technology and the web, an infrastructure that impedes this or makes it too costly or time-consuming is going to find itself kicked into touch or into shape in the coming months.

Maybe it’s time for Transformational Government to come up with its own version 2.0 to take into account how it should be working to promote open source, small inspirational and novel microsites? Behind the scenes it already is – coming up with ways of using the semantic web to deliver services while retaining the core commitment to Directgov, Businesslink and a small number of central websites and forbidding any new ones. But the evidence suggests this core line might be breaking in 2009 and that it needs to have a more fundamental root-and-branch rethink or risk becoming the sort of block to responsive, user-centred design of government services that it was created to promote and achieve.