My friend and for­mer SMS col­league, Matthew Hodg­son, has posted an insight­ful look into some of the rea­sons why gov­ern­ment as a whole is resis­tant to the adop­tion of social net­work­ing tools.

Matthew argues that bureau­cracy — red tape, silos, com­mand and con­trol net­works — is a sig­nif­i­cant fac­tor, as is fear of what is not under­stood. Matthew quotes Toby Ward of Cor​po​rateWeb​site​.com on the issue of social tool use, par­tic­u­larly Facebook:

“About half of the medium to large-​​sized organ­i­sa­tions (it’s even higher in Gov­ern­ment and Finan­cial Ser­vices) for­bid and block employ­ees from using it.”

Matthew also ref­er­ences this ZDNet Aus­tralia arti­cle that dis­cusses the same issue. In that piece, Research vice pres­i­dent at ana­lyst firm Gart­ner, Richard Har­ris, is quoted as saying:

It’s mainly because of the risk aver­sion men­tal­ity in the pub­lic sec­tor, they won’t start tak­ing chances with unproven tech­nolo­gies just yet, though it is likely that some of the more inno­v­a­tive agen­cies will be exper­i­ment­ing with them this year.

Har­ris also sug­gests that 2008 is unlikely to be the year adop­tion in gov­ern­ment takes off in Australia.

Matthew argues that edu­ca­tion is a key fac­tor in influ­enc­ing deci­sion mak­ers when it comes to use and adop­tion of social tools. Fear and loathing of the unknown in the large pub­lic sec­tor organ­i­sa­tions I worked in for much of my career before launch­ing acid­labs was a key fac­tor to actu­ally pre­vent­ing staff from doing their jobs prop­erly. New tools were banned sim­ply because IT didn’t under­stand them and couldn’t be both­ered learn­ing. New ways of doing things, online or not, were dis­cour­aged because learn­ing about them and imple­ment­ing some change might be a has­sle or a dis­trac­tion. Never mind what the ROI might have been — sim­ply an irrel­e­vant concern.

I know Matthew and I have dis­cussed this, at least as a part of other dis­cus­sions, but I would like to sug­gest that the bar­ri­ers to adop­tion in bureau­cra­cies, and espe­cially gov­ern­ment, is the bureau­cracy itself. The very fact that there are com­plex com­mand and con­trol struc­tures where indi­vid­u­als and groups silo infor­ma­tion and tightly con­trol its shar­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion seems to me to be a major hur­dle. I dis­cussed this dur­ing my OnThe­Pod chat with Dun­can Riley a few weeks ago and it’s also some­thing that I’ve pushed back against in all of my con­fer­ence pre­sen­ta­tions last year.

There are so many poten­tial ben­e­fits should gov­ern­ment be a will­ing adopter and per­mit­ter of social tool use. I find it dis­heart­en­ing, and frankly even annoy­ing at times that the bureau­crats and tech­nocrats that con­trol our pub­lic sec­tor agen­cies are so blind to the oppor­tu­ni­ties, espe­cially when many of them are push­ing hard for bet­ter shar­ing of infor­ma­tion in their organ­i­sa­tions and bet­ter con­nec­tions with their con­stituent and client com­mu­ni­ties. As for the issue of effi­ciency improve­ments, where agen­cies are pro­gres­sively given smaller bud­gets to do the same work, I can only imag­ine that open­ing minds and eyes to some of the pos­si­bil­i­ties of social tools could be a sig­nif­i­cant fac­tor in improv­ing pro­duc­tiv­ity and efficiency.

I’m not sug­gest­ing that gov­ern­ment needs to blindly open up its net­works to any and all social tools. That’s demon­stra­bly inap­pro­pri­ate and fraught with risk. What I am sug­gest­ing is that moves to test social tools ini­tially within the wall, in the same way organ­i­sa­tions such as IBM does and pro­gres­sive, care­ful and appro­pri­ate approaches to con­nec­tion with client bases through appro­pri­ate adop­tion of social net­work­ing tools is a way for gov­ern­ment to test the waters while min­imis­ing risk.