WARNING: This post cov­ers a fair bit of ground, and not always in a direct way. Bear with me.

My col­league, Andrew Boyd has made a good stab at defin­ing the nature of Gov­ern­ment 2.0:

  1. that infor­ma­tion is avail­able from where it is needed regard­less of source.
  2. that processes are trans­par­ent wher­ever possible.
  3. that mass par­tic­i­pa­tion in pol­icy devel­op­ment is not only pos­si­ble but becomes prac­ti­cal, and even­tu­ally expected.

He does so in the con­text of recent state­ments by Gary Nairn, Spe­cial Min­is­ter of State. Min­is­ter Nairn’s speech, deliv­ered at the Aus­tralian CeBIT Con­fer­ence last week, cov­ered a num­ber of areas including:

  • gov­ern­ment blog­ging as a way to encour­age debate and boost dis­cus­sion around pol­icy formation;
  • the increas­ing deliv­ery of gov­ern­ment ser­vices online (one in five peo­ple con­duct person-​​to-​​government busi­ness online), and;
  • the increas­ing use of the aus​tralia​.gov​.au por­tal as the one-​​stop entry point into those online services.

This all bodes extremely well for the sorts of ser­vices offered to gov­ern­ment (and busi­ness) clients by acid­labs — par­tic­u­larly in the con­text of the work I do in increas­ing aware­ness of and assist­ing clients in the imple­men­ta­tion of social com­put­ing tech­nolo­gies as a tool to facil­i­tate knowl­edge man­age­ment and knowl­edge work­ers. It’s frankly the case that a great many work­ers are today by and large knowl­edge work­ers, and indeed, knowl­edge worker 2.0 style work­ers, even if cul­tur­ally, the organ­i­sa­tions they work for aren’t quite ready to deal with that real­ity. Thus the work I do.

Andrew’s post was trig­gered by Matthew Hodgson’s lat­est mis­sive on the whys of blog­ging. I agree whole­heart­edly with Matthew. For the three of us, and many of our other col­leagues who blog, the dri­ving force is to get thoughts and ideas out of our already over­crowded heads (infor­ma­tion overload).

Infor­ma­tion over­load is some­thing that knowl­edge work­ers every­where are try­ing to deal with in increas­ing num­bers. The vol­ume, range of sources and type of infor­ma­tion they are hav­ing to man­age on a daily basis is so over­whelm­ing that they are sim­ply exactly that. Overwhelmed.

Strong, mod­ern knowl­edge man­age­ment strat­egy, imple­mented in such way as to sup­port man­age­ment and facil­i­tate the work of knowl­edge work­ers is crit­i­cal, and some­thing that presently, many busi­ness in both the pub­lic and pri­vate sec­tor strug­gle to do. So much so that a few sta­tis­tics from the Lex­is­Nexis sem­i­nar I attended this morn­ing are worth repeat­ing here:

  • man­agers spend up to two hours each day search­ing for infor­ma­tion;
  • more than 50 per cent of infor­ma­tion found is of no value;
  • 59 per cent miss infor­ma­tion they need due to poor dis­tri­b­u­tion;
  • 42 per cent acci­den­tally use the wrong infor­ma­tion at least once a week;
  • 53 per cent find less than half the infor­ma­tion they do get is of value;
  • 45 per cent found obtain­ing infor­ma­tion about other parts of their busi­ness is dif­fi­cult;
  • only 31 per cent found obtain­ing com­peti­tor infor­ma­tion to be dif­fi­cult;
  • 57 per cent indi­cated that hav­ing to multi-​​source infor­ma­tion is dif­fi­cult, requir­ing on aver­age, three sources;
  • 40 per cent indi­cated that other parts of their busi­ness were unwill­ing to share information;
  • 36 per cent found that too much infor­ma­tion made find­ing the right piece of data a lengthy task.[1]

This is remark­able stuff. What it indi­cates is two very sig­nif­i­cant things. First, that man­age­ment deci­sions are being made badly due to the com­plex­i­ties of find­ing and analysing infor­ma­tion and sec­ond, that the approaches to infor­ma­tion, that is, knowl­edge, dis­tri­b­u­tion in busi­ness are largely at fault. That’s not to say that it’s the fault of the knowl­edge man­agers and knowl­edge work­ers. Far from it. But, as I say above, the sheer vol­ume of infor­ma­tion dealt with on a daily basis is over­load­ing workers.

There are a num­ber of strate­gies busi­ness can adopt in order to begin to deal more effec­tively with infor­ma­tion over­load and the inabil­ity of their knowl­edge work­ers to deal with the load. I would sug­gest that adopt­ing and sup­port­ing, from the top down, the use of social com­put­ing tech­nolo­gies such as wikis to which all staff can con­tribute in an unre­stricted way, cor­po­rate blogs from the CEO to the junior staff and RSS syn­di­ca­tion (both in-​​and out­bound) of infor­ma­tion such as news are all valid approaches. Gen­er­ally this sort of imple­men­ta­tion is dis­cussed in terms of Enter­prise 2.0.

In light of Min­is­ter Nairn’s state­ments, emerg­ing infor­ma­tion about the dam­age inad­e­quate knowl­edge man­age­ment is doing to pol­icy– and decision-​​making and the ben­e­fits that can be gained from adop­tion of social com­put­ing, I’d like to think that we’re approach­ing a tip­ping point where rather than hav­ing to con­vince busi­nesses that they should even con­sider Enter­prise 2.0 tools, very soon, I’ll be talk­ing to busi­ness about Enter­prse 2.0 imple­men­ta­tions.

  1. Lex­is­Nexis (2007, 4 Jan­u­ary). Man­agers say the major­ity of infor­ma­tion obtained for their work is use­less Accen­ture sur­vey finds.