Bill's Notebook

I believe that the best argument made by Eggers and O’Leary in If We Can Put a Man on the Moon was the need for lawmakers to consider how their proposals will be implemented when the programs are passed to the agencies. I was thinking about this when I was visiting the Woodrow Wilson Center’s electronic archives for the (now defunct) Office of Technology Assessment.

For those not familiar with OTA, it was an agency that performed deep technical analysis of current science and technology topics. Founded in 1972, it produced reports on the impact of the supersonic transports, how to best prepare citizens for disasters, and the benefits of early childhood health programs. OTA provided objective and succinct guidance to Congress on technology issues until it was shut down in 1995. The science community has continually called for OTA’s reestablishment and in 2008, GAO was tasked with producing technical assessment reports.

This year, the Woodrow Wilson Center argued [PDF] for creating a network of nonpartisan organizations to provide objective technical assessments (Expert & Citizen Assessment of Science & Technology – ECAST Network). This is a great idea but I think it should be taken one step further: a nonpartisan network of scholars and practitioners to provide analysis and strategies for implementing major legislation.

Now, your first response is probably that we already have more than enough organizations that provide detailed advice on how to implement almost every bill before Congress. Very true but the problem with their advice is that it is often politically-motivated and rarely deals with the realities of how the agencies will make the programs work effectively and efficiently. Also, I’ve yet to see these proposals consider how their strategies will impact other program and government operations as a whole.

We have a unique community of practitioners and scholars from all levels of American government on GovLoop. I envision developing some type of online structure that could tap into the expertise and practical knowledge that this community possesses and channel it into implementation strategies for such topics like health care, emergency preparedness, and similar topics. We already have tools for collecting ideas, judging those ideas, and crowdsourcing innovations and best practices.

I’m just tossing this idea out there to see if anyone would be interested in discussing it further. I have a few concepts for next steps but I really want to just start the dialogue. This could also serve as a general conversation on creating virtual agencies and better citizen engagement through crowdsourcing (like Beth Noveck’s concepts in Wiki Government).

“Breitbart is, in short, expert in making the journalism industry his bitch. ‘The market has forced me to come up with techniques to be noticed,’ Breitbart says. ‘And now that I have them, I’m like, wow, this is actually great. This is fun.’”

How Andrew Breitbart Hacks the Media – Wired, April 2010.

By now, you have probably heard of how Shirley Sherrod, a former(?) Federal official, was forced to resign after a heavily-edited video of a recent speech she gave at an NAACP event was used as evidence of reverse-racism in Obama’s administration.  After the tape was released by Mr. Breitbart to FOX News, both the NAACP and White House called for Ms. Sherrod’s resignation.

Then, the unedited video was released (you can view it here).  Basically, the videotape shows that Ms. Sherrod’s statements were the exact opposite of what FOX News reported.  The NAACP apologized last night for being “snookered“  and called for her case to be reconsidered.  The farm family that Sherrod referred to even defended her while, just a few hours ago, the White House apologized.

Of course, all of this could have been avoided if the White House and the USDA remembered one basic fact – FOX News is not an actual news station.  Also, once they realized that Mr. Breitbart was behind the videotape, they should have remembered how an earlier, heavily-edited videotape falsely accused ACORN (and let to that organization’s demise).  At the very least, someone should have asked to see the complete unedited tape.  Even Mr. Breitbart admits that viewing the entire tape demonstrates that Ms. Sherrod is not a racist.

Mr. Breitbart and others like him are taking advantage of the decline of journalism.  Newsrooms are cutting back on staff and especially investigate reporters.  At the same time, they have to fill the 24-hour news hole and compete with other cable stations and local news.  Ratings are more essential now than ever.  Media manipulators know these weaknesses and use them to their partisan advantage.  As the Sherrod case shows, reputations can be damaged in just a few hours.  What is unusual about the Sherrod case is that the true picture came just as quickly.  In cases such as ACORN or Climategate, it was several months before the truth came out but was of little help in averting the damage.

It is imperative that the audience become more skeptical and reserve judgment before all of the facts are in.  More and more media manipulators are taking advantage of the decline of traditional journalism to spread their falsehoods.  Unfortunately, I don’t hold much hope as when obviously fictional news events (such as this from the Onion) are viewed as investigative journalism.

You have a strange idea of “fun,” Mr. Breitbart.

There is an experiment at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management to change how government works. The idea is to stop measuring how much time an employee spends at the office but rather to measure how productive the employee is. The employee sets their own working hours and negotiates with their supervisor on what they should be producing and how it will be measured. It is a revolutionary concept and has worked in private industry.

A great example of this is how IBM has reinvented itself to use a ROWE-like environment. As Robert Paterson explains, IBM employees can live where they want and work in virtual teams based on their own schedules. What holds the workforce together is the use of social networking tools and the occasional face-to-face meeting. As Paterson writes, “If IBM can do this with 200,000 people so can you.”

One aspect that he mentions is the use of chat tools in place of meetings. This is not revolutionary as places I have worked at have using instant messaging systems to hold impromptu meetings. You can quickly get to the point, bring in people as needed, and there is a record of the meeting when you are finished.  And this was easily done with 2001 technology. I do not understand why more organizations don’t hold meetings this way instead of dragging everyone into the conference room for the weekly staff meeting.

Another great example from IBM is how well the virtual team works even though employees are in different countries and different time zones.  Allowing people to work at their natural productive hours means you will have better work and happier people.  An interesting point in the IBM experience is that face-to-face meetings are used to help workers build trust and tend to be about team-building rather than doing work.  I wonder how much more effective government workers would be if agencies devoted substantial time to team-building?

ROWE solves a lot of problems from the time wasted to commuting to balancing work-life issues. I’m hoping the OPM experiment is a success.  ROWE is clearly working in the private sector.

According to Mark Drapeau of O’Reilly.

“This is an age of Knowledge Economy, where an intelligent organization, whether in the public or private sector, should be a learning organization.”  So writes Khan who argues for the creation of formal communities of practice in the public sector.  The formal communities of practice would be called knowledge groups and would consist of cross-agency teams that work on a shared problem with the goal of producing a body of knowledge to manage the problem. 

Khan starts his argument for knowledge groups by describing the benefits of knowledge and how knowledge is created.  Nothing surprising here and these sections serve as a good review of basic knowledge management concepts.  He then describes how learning organizations learn by using Peter Senge’s framework of the five core competencies.  What I found especially valuable was the description of barriers by public organizations to each of the five competencies:

1)      Shared purpose and vision – public organizations often have conflicting goals that makes creating a shared vision impossible.

2)      Systems approach – public organizations are divided into virtual fiefdoms that compete with each other for resources thus blocking the systems approach to problems.

3)      Personal mastery – Government functions follow routine standardized procedures and individual employees are not recognized for improving their skills.

4)      Mental models – The fiefdom mindset of “us versus them” precludes sharing of mental models for team learning.

5)      Capacity for team leaning – Again, public agency fiefdoms prevent team learning.

Khan further describes the process of organizational unlearning where time and change have rendered existing processes obsolete.  Organizations must unlearn the old process and create a new process in response to the new environment.  Public agencies learn from six major sources – internal resources and experience; citizens and customers; partners, rival, and comparators; top-down direction and review; and critiques, advice, and media.  Even so, agencies tend to ignore outside sources in favor of internal learning sources thus hindering the unlearning process.

Despite these barriers, public organizations do share knowledge in informal groups and through social networking.  Khan argues that these informal structures are constantly at risk of disintegration and he advocates creating formal Knowledge Groups (KG) that can withstand the pressures of being torn apart as members seek their own self-interests.  A KG is created by selecting a professional in a particular field and granting him or her authority from an executive sponsor.  The KG Lead selects relevant subject matter experts and manages stakeholders while setting the vision and direction of the KG.  Khan describes several advantages of the KG:

1)      Governments are more receptive to internally-generated information.

2)      The process of creating and disseminating the information is formalized.

3)      Synergy is created from the diversity of agencies and viewpoints.

4)      The relevant stakeholders are identified and recruited to support the KG.

5)      Avoiding an overdependence on consultants.

I agree with Khan on the importance of knowledge and organizational learning.  His analysis of the barriers that prevent organizational learning in public agencies is also on target but I just don’t agree with the need for a formal Knowledge Group.  There are numerous examples of informal communities of practice and social networks that are robust and provide the same benefits as a formal KG.  Having worked on a top-down KG, I found it to be less valuable for innovation and learning than an informal network.  One just has to look at the example of GovLoop to see the power of a set of informal communities of practice.  So, while the barriers to organizational learning in public agencies are very real they can be overcome without having to create yet another formal organizational layer in government.

Reference:

Khan, I.A. (2010). Knowledge groups: A model for creating synergy across the public sector. Public Organization Review 10. 139-152.

White House released the self-evaluations of the agencies open government plans.  Only three agencies (Health and Human Services,  Department of Transportation, and NASA) fully met the requirements while the rest made progress on their goals.

I’ve fully read both NASA’s plan and the Office of Personnel Management’s plan while skimming the rest of the plans.  NASA does have a great plan that is detailed and just well thought out.  Other plans used the right buzzwords but you can tell that there is not a strategy for fully realizing the capabilities of social networking.

It would be good to see some independent reviews of the plans.  Might be an interesting project for the summer.

As we work on how to use social networking technologies in Gov 2.0, I thought this article from IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management might be of some interest to practitioners. “The Strategic Implications of Web Technologies: A Process Model of How Web Technologies Enhance Organizational Performance” answers two questions:

1) “How do Web technologies support the strategies of an organization?”
2) “How do Web technologies enhance organizational performance?”

The authors of the study argue that existing efforts to use Web technologies are not being effectively utilized because the organizations do not know how to align the technologies with the strategic goals of the organization due to a limited understanding of how to achieve such an alignment. Using a case study of a Singapore IT publication (Hardwarezone.com), the authors list the seven capabilities of Web technologies:

1) “Enable an organization to transcend geographical and temporal boundaries.”
2) “Facilitate improvements to processes in an organization’s value chain.”
3) “Provide an effective means of collecting customer information and feedback.”
4) “Enhance the timeliness of organizational information.”
5) “Reinforce offline business models and facilitate the creation of new business models.”
6) “Reduce the capital outlay involved in establishing and expanding a business.”
7) “Enable the development of virtual communities.”

None of the above should be surprising to Gov 2.0 practitioners. Having listed the seven capabilities, the authors then describe their process model which consists of the three core logics of strategic management and the two core logics of organizational sociology:

1) Strategic Management
a. Logic of Positioning – how a company strategically positions itself in the marketplace
b. Logic of Leverage – effectively using strategic resources and capabilities
c. Logic of Opportunity – innovating effectively in response to a changing external environment
2) Organizational Sociology
a. Logic of Optimality – creation of the optimal organizational form for the current environment
b. Logic of Social Congruence – organization harmonizes relationships with key stakeholders

So, what does this mean for Gov 2.0 practitioners? Even though the process model applies to business organizations, the same logics can be transformed into public administration equivalents. For example, when selling a new social networking technology to agency management, you can demonstrate how the technology’s capabilities can fulfill one of the logics.

Let’s say you want to start up a Twitter feed to publicize agency activities. The Twitter feed meets capabilities 1, 3, 4, and 7. These capabilities meet the logics of Positioning, Opportunity, and Social Congruence. By demonstrating how the new technology aligns with some of the strategic goals of the organization, Gov 2.0 practitioners can better sell these new technologies to upper agency management.

References:
Tan, B.C.C., Pan, S.L., & Hackney, R. (2010). The strategic implications of web technologies: A process model of how web technologies enhance organizational performance. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 57: 2. 181-197.

(Cross-posted on GovLoop)

The Public Strategist argues that government working with tech companies is like an elephant partnering with a mouse.

As Walter Anderson predicted close to 20 years ago, the ability to create personal realities has led to the increasing rise of online hate sites.  Is there an app that PREVENTS groupthink and group polarization?

I was not impressed by Google Wave and I think Google Buzz was a better idea because it was based on GMail.  But I was confused on how I would actually use Buzz.  Now O’Reilly tells you how to Google Buzz can combine blogging, Tweeting, and Facebooking into a hybrid blog.  I need to read further and see what I can do with this new tool.