Blogs

Facilitating the development of a Web 2.0 strategy

The recent announcement by the Treasury Board Minister regarding the release of Guideline for External Use of Web 2.0 has likely left many departments and agencies of the federal government scratching heads at trying to figure out what it all means. On one hand, the Minister appears to be giving the go-ahead to public servants in making use of web 2.0. On the other hand, the government’s tightly controlled communication practice gives public servants a very different message.

TBS Guidelines on WEB 2.0: Now comes the tough part…

Web 2.0 is not new.  The term was coined in 1999 and really came into its own in 2003 with the first web 2.0 conference.  The Treasury Board Secretariat has provided guidance to federal government departments and agencies that will facilitate the use of web 2.0 by publishing "Guidelines for External Use of Web 2.0".  This is a welcome addition to the Government of Canada policy inventory.

Being Present: a new reality?

Last week a friend tweeted about people taking pictures of presenters' slides at a conference he was attending in the UK. One apparently, was even sending the slides to a colleague so he could be "participating."! He ended his tweet with "WTF?". I was surprised at participants' audacity to be taking pictures of the slides and, even more, of using their phones so obviously, and wondered if it was rude or just a new reality.

Public Service renewal: The kids will be just fine, thank you.

Ok it’s a cheeky title, but it gets to the heart of an interesting question: With a substantial number of boomers retiring from the public service, is the next generation of public servants and executives (Exs) ready? This “readiness debate” as I call it, takes many forms, one in particular is interesting: How can the many “about-to-retire-public-servants” transfer their knowledge to their less experienced colleagues? I think this is a false debate. The reason?

Is crowdsourcing the way of the future?

I have to lead off this post by saying that I'm a bit biased. I'm still jazzed about attending CrowdConf2011 (http://www.crowdconf.com/) in San Francisco last week.

We got to hear all the cutting edge stuff by some of the leaders at Google, Microsoft and Amazon, just to name a few. We also got a glimpse of all of the cool stuff that Nokia is doing in Europe and Asia and what we should expect here in terms of mobile engagement in the near future.

Experimenting with social media…

I’ve been doing a bit of a social experiment recently to see what people know and associate with social media. I ask folks what is social media and I usually get one word answers where folks name their favourite platform such as Twitter or Facebook. It never seems to fail.

Crowdsourcing anyone?

Corporate Culture

Corporate culture has become the biggest source of competitive advantage in business today. Research shows that most of the highest performing organizations in the world believe that organizational culture is their greatest asset.  The data is clear that their beliefs are right.