Dissident

Browsing the web cost billions in lost productivity

I worry that some people believe this sort of rubbish. According to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) the average UK worker spends ninety minutes a week misusing corporate internet connections.

The CBI said that workers are spending roughly an hour and a half out of their week visiting web sites that have no relation to their work whatsoever. Cumulatively, it said, this costs UK businesses some £10.6bn in lost productivity over the course of a year.

The CBI polled some 503 businesses, who it said employed nearly one million workers between them. Two thirds of those who took part admitted that they think that their staff use work time – ie, not lunch, or formal breaks, to look at non-work sites. It identified social networking, web-based email and shopping and holiday sites as the biggest draws. Overall, they estimate the annual cost, per employee to be the region of £1000. According to the report, this costs UK businesses £10.6 billion (yes billion) a year in lost productivity.

Firstly of all, do they really expect us to believe that if there was a complete embargo on 'non work related websites' that we'd be saving the economy getting on for £11 billion? This assumes that these employees wouldn't be doing other 'wasteful' things with their time if they weren't surfing the web - like reading a newspaper or doing su-doku, or otherwise expanding their knowledge.

Secondly, they seem to have concluded that any serendipitous use of the internet is wasted time. What about all that information that has been both consciously and sub-consciously absorbed during this browsing experience? I wonder if they've quantified the times when some apparently useless nugget of information has been stored in the sub-concious and then used at some later date to contribute to the well being of the person (e.g. some health information), or maybe even applied to the workplace in a way that has improved productivity?

I'm saddened that a respected industry body such as the CBI should publish such report like this that draws some very debatable conclusions on a potentially flawed hypothesis that serendipitous use of the web is bad for business. Maybe they'd have us bring the workhouse back?

I just hope that managers will not use this report as further ammunition to restrict workers from using the web for anything other than browsing their own company's web site.  Let's not apply 19th century working practices to 21st century workers!

Web 2.0 vs Accessibility

NOTE: THIS ITEM ALSO POSTED TO STEVE-DALE.NET, WHICH IS NOW MY MAIN BLOG.

I attended an "Enterprise 2.0" event last week where Ian Lloyd gave a very thought provoking presentation on the impact of Web 2.0 on accessibility. Ian is a web developer working for the Nationwide Building Society, and clearly knows his stuff when it comes to designing websites that will accommodate assistive technologies - such as screen readers, voice to text and screen magnifiers.

This was particularly relevant to the work I'm presently doing in building on-line environments for support of Communities of Practice in the public sector, where accessibility standards and guidelines for websites is far more rigorously enforced than in the private sector. Conforming to standards such as W3C Web Accessibility Initiative is a given, but websites must also conform to guidance such as Delivering Inclusive Websites, issued by the COI.

Personally, I have some sympathy with developers of 'social media-rich' websites (which I'll categorise as being 'Web 2.0') in that it's quite difficult to find the right balance between accessibility and making the site appealing to a mass audience. Clearly Facebook comes to mind here. However, I'm not sure that vendors/developers do enough to ensure that they have catered for the disabled minority. For example, the Captcha processes used on a growing number of websites are fairly difficult to negotiate even for someone with 20:20 vision.

I don't necessarily think that Social Media has to mean poor accessibility, yet there seems to be a sort of tacit acceptance that this is the case . I'm now far more aware of my obligations in striving to make the CoP platform available to a more diverse audience and will be taking steps to in the next development phase to ensure we're meeting the required guidelines and best practice.

Two very useful resources for anyone interested in issues around accessibility and diversity are Abilitynet and the Shaw Trust.

Communities of Practice in Local Government

So glad to see the Community of Practice (CoP) website for local government getting some blog coverage.

Happy to provide any help, information, advice to anyone wishing to use the platform, or anyone wishing to start up a similar initiative for their communities.

Steve

Fostering a collaboration culture

An excellent posting from Shawn over at Anecdote about fostering a collaboration culture. A good corollary to my recent postings about what I see as growing and misplaced belief that Web 2.0 is the solution to more effective knowledge sharing. They key point I was trying to make is that technical solutions (blogs, wikis, RSS) by themselves do not create, nurture or develop learning and sharing communities, or improve engagement between government and citizens. I emphasised the importance of people in the equation, both in terms of skilled facilitators (those who support and encourage conversations and collaboration) and the willingness of the users themselves to actively engage (e.g. a shared domain of interest). Shawn refers to fostering a culture of collaboration, which I think is quite often overlooked by those who are rushing headlong into implementing Web 2.0 facilities in order to achieve better knowledge management.  To put this into perspective, the investment (time, cost and support) for the 'people and process' side of the communities of practice being developed across local government exceeds the cost of the technology by a factor of ten or more. Furthermore, this is recurrent cost and not a one-off capital expense.

However, I'm not encouraged by recent conversations I've had with representatives from one or two large government departments, who seem to have a budget for progressing a collaboration strategy, which extends to implementing a technical solution (usually Sharepoint) and nothing else. To quote Shawn "I think it's a big problem because this narrow view of collaboration starts to get the concept a bad name: "yeh, we did collaboration but no one used it."

Let's all hope the 'people' message is getting home.

Gov 2.0: Truly Transformative Government

I attended the “Gov 2.0, or Truly Transformative Government” seminar held at Portcullis House yesterday afternoon. The event was sponsored by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) and in partnership with the Oxford Internet Institute. The purpose was to look at how Government can exploit the success of the contemporary Internet.

The event preamble stated:
“Usage of government websites is on the rise but has yet to take off like Facebook, iTunes and many other spectacular examples. In this seminar we look at whether government and public services could engage the public in the way music, shopping contemporary Internet for the design of public services and public engagement? Attendees will have the chance to listen and question leading figures in the area from Government, academia and industry.”

I only attended session 2 (by choice – this seemed the more interesting session to me since it was more ‘end-user’ focused):

• Reinventing Government for the Intranet age – Jerry Fishenden, Microsoft
• Citizen redesign of user-centric government – William Heath, Ideal Government
• Small is beautiful: Re-engineering government from the bottom-up – Tom Steinberg, mySociety.
• There was a panel Q&A chaired by the Earl of Errol.

Jerry Fishenden

• Government systems set up as individual silos to meet needs of the individual departments and not citizen-centric.
• Example of young offender, who may be in and out of education several times, known to social services, then police and ultimately judiciary.
• Data on the individual held in multiple places and limited sharing of data/information.

William Heath

• Web 2.0 is anti-hierarchical. Potential loss of control
• Culture of assertive non-listening and spin in government
• The challenge for CIO’s is to manage up, not down
• IT suppliers are contracted to conform to stated requirements, not solve social problems.
• Lack of a clear customer voice
• Citizen's have difficulty getting information from government that will help them with manage the complexities of living in today's society
• Problems for the citizen – the Computer says ‘No!”

Tom Steinberg
Demonstration of FixMyStreet.

• Shows how existing datasets can be simply re-purposed.
• “World exclusive” demo of mashup enabling users to enter house price and travel time to place of work parameters to identify areas on map that match parameters. Many uses – e.g. those seeking affordable housing within required travel time.
• Don’t try and do culture change. Implement what the user needs – culture change will follow.
• Keep things (projects) small
• Heavyweight project management (e.g. Prince 2) can be the enemy. Need agile project management and agile development.
• Stop wasting money on training; if tools are worth using then training is unnecessary.
• Don’t spend 80% of budget on culture change – double your investment in the technology instead.

Quote of the day (non-attributed)
“There is a stench of failure in traditional project management in government – and quite rightly deserved!”

Q&A (abstract)
Q: Government systems and technology designed to manage highly complex processes – e.g. tax, with incremental change in response to changes in law. Need for

A: Yes, but why can’t HMRC have simple “submit tax form” button on their website?
A:  Government already have most of the personal tax details from previous returns – why can’t they issue tax returns largely completed – citizen then note any changes, sign and return.

Conclusion
Some good presentations, and good insights into what is wrong with Government's use (or misuse) of technology. Nothing really new - the Government can't do agile project management, is crippled by over-large and over-complex projects and only listens to itself! Systems and datasets are designed and developed for one specific use and can't be (easily) re-purposed. The user (citizen) remains a distant - and often annoying - dependency who generally can't be trusted to manage any aspect of his/her life.  Government knows best and will continue to think for us.  In the mean-time, those who live and work in the real world and understand the frustrations of dealing with government departments will continue to strive to be heard and must rely on the handful of innovators and entrepreneurs in the private sector to make small and incremental improvements to their lives.      

Web 2.0 – The Sharepoint Fallacy

I guess most people choose the conferences they attend with care. There’s nothing worse than having shelled out good money (my own in most instances since I work as an independent consultant) on a 2-day conference when you realise within the first day that the general level of knowledge and expertise is at best equivalent to your own, and at worst, somewhere below your own level of competence. In other words, you’re not going to learn anything you didn’t already know. I accept there are still networking opportunities to be had, but this doesn’t always compensate for the time and money you’ve already invested in attending the event.

I was intrigued therefore by the recent avalanche of fliers and emails I’ve received since the start of the New Year advertising conferences on the general topic of 'Web 2.0 in Government'. Even more intriguing was that most of the speakers seem to be from various (UK) government departments, and not – as I might have expected – renowned and acknowledged experts from academia or the private sector. Please excuse my cynicism, but I’m not sure how much I would have gained from one particular session entitled “Web 2.0 – was is it?” that was being led by a senior civil servant from the Home Office.

On digging a little deeper into the backgrounds of some of the ‘expert’ presenters, I found a fairly common theme – they have all implemented Sharepoint somewhere within their departments (usually their Intranet).

I find this slightly worrying from a professional point of view since some delegates at these conferences may come away with the perception that Sharepoint is an exemplar for Web 2.0 technology. I’ll admit that Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 – or MOSS 2007 – is a quantum leap ahead of its predecessor (Sharepoint 2003), but if anyone seriously thinks that the integration of a few collaboration tools and an improved content management system make this a serious contender for ‘Web 2.0 application of the year’ then they are sadly misinformed.

I can’t quite put my finger on why (once again) Microsoft have got it so wrong, other than they have taken a simple concept (networking and collaboration) and made it so complex to implement. What would take weeks to set up using MOSS can be implemented on something like Ning in a matter of hours. They also appear to have missed (or misunderstood) the difference between teamwork collaboration (which MOSS can do fairly well) with the development and support of communities of interest or communities of practice etc. In particular, the cost and complexity of using MOSS for supporting unbounded communities would be phenomenal – and why would anyone bother to even contemplate doing so when there are ‘proper’ Web 2.0 products out there such as Ning (previously mentioned, Community Server, Blogtronix or the hundreds of others too numerous to mention?

Maybe it’s a case of re-applying the old adage that “no-one ever got sacked for buying IBM” to Microsoft. However, I feel that some organisations will be regretting their choice very soon, and particularly if they really want to exploit the ‘community’ approach to learning and sharing – as we’ve done for the communities of practice in local government.

So – choose your conferences well. Unless you adopt a blended learning approach, where conferences are just one of many information sources, you may not know when you are being misinformed!

Social Networking with Sharepoint Server 2007 - a limited solution to a wider business requirement

The most comprehensive summary I've read so far on Microsoft's foray into social networking via their Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) product. The article is an extract from a forthcoming white paper written by three Microsoft gurus - Eric Charran, Dino Dato-on and Greg Lang.

The article seems a bit too preoccupied with the profiles, active directory and people search facilities at the expense of how they've implemented tools such as RSS, wikis and blogs. However, it does seem to be a vast improvement over the facilities offered on Sharepoint 2003. Given the usual complexity that Microsoft seem to automatically build into the deployment of any of their products, it looks like it could meet the  social networking requirements of most organisations, provided that networking and collaboration is limited to within the organisation's firewall. My guess is that it would be hugely expensive to deploy as a social networking solution across and between organisations,  e.g. for connecting councils in local government or for collaboration between agencies and learning providers in the education sector. Sector-wide social networking solutions for business still seem to be limited platforms such as GovX or I&DeA, and products such as Blogtronix and CommunityServer. Still, given the huge investment that many organisations have already made in Microsoft's Office products, I anticipate a huge take-up for MOSS 2007. I just hope they'll also recognise its limitations for (social) networking outside the firewall.

Del.icio.us and social bookmarking

An excellent article on del.icio.us and social bookmarking. From a Librarian as well! I take back what I said in an earlier posting on this topic!

Google are getting serious about social networking

Interesting things happening at Google, with much speculation that they intend making a more serious and focussed foray into the social media arena. The recent purchase of Jaiku (similar to Twitter, but with more features), and the growing interest in Orkut  – their current social networking site - may make uncomfortable reading for the folks over at Facebook, if the report by the Scolbleizer is anything to go by. I have to admit that I do like most of what Google do, and indeed use most of their web applications. However, they do seem to have a scatter-gun approach to acquisitions, so I’m hoping this latest Web 2.0/social media/social networking/communities buying spree will ultimately provide a more integrated  (or rational) environment for their products.

Communities of Practice in Local Government

The Community of Practice platform at the Improvement and Development Agency is an integrated set of Web 2.0 tools that is being used to support and facilitate collaboration and knowledge sharing across local government communities. I produced the specification for the platform early in 2006, and the platform was launched in September 2006. I was encouraged by a recent news item on how the strategy continues to flourish, with the following quote from Marilyn Leask, the IDeA's Head of Knowledge & Learning:

"This is a terrific example of how the knowledge and learning of local government colleagues is being better harnessed. Having an avenue where peers can voice their opinion, share their problems and seek assistance on a national network is another step forward in the journey towards ensuring best practice is disseminated across local authorities. A benefit of these CoPs is that they are both secure and confidential. CoPs are part of the Knowledge's team's structured progress with web2."

"There are more than 110 communities listed at the website www.communities.idea.gov.uk. The CoPs have proven to be of assistance to councillors and senior managers who have used the medium to discuss issues of concern and use their collective knowledge to deliver the best outcomes for their community."

"At the IDeA we believe that the sector has within it the knowledge to support improvement but that this knowledge needs to be more easily accessible".

I will be working with Marilyn and my IDeA colleagues again in the near future, so looking forward to participating in the support and cultivation of the CoP's that have been established, and evangelising the benefits of the platform to those areas of local government that haven't yet grasped the benefits of this new way of working.