Using Web 2.0 tools the correct way to accomplish your agency mission

There is a lot of talk about how Web 2.0, or collaboration, tools can help government executives accomplish their missions.

Andrew McAfee is a associate professor at the Harvard Business School and is credited with inventing the term enterprise 2.0.

His new book, Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges, is out today and looks at enterprise 2.0 overall, but also incorporates successful examples from the federal government.

McAfee said that these 2.0 tools aren't about automating the behavior of people or eliminating them altogether, but actually their goal is to put people front and center and fostering collaboration.

Therefore, he said calling the use of such tools 'social networking' is not wrong, but it does lead many to jump to the wrong conclusions.

No matter what one calls it, though, McAfee said it is important.

"I keep on using the word 'emergent' and then I try to give examples of what I mean. I usually bring up the fact that, with every organization I've worked with, they are very comfortable using technology to impose structure. For example, they use big enterprise systems to define a bunch of business processes and then roll those out throughout the organization. Those processes specify, in great detail, who does what when and in what sequence [et cetera]."

He added that this isn't bad for any group to do, because every good organization has that kind of definition and standardization. There is more to the story, though.

"What we can do now is take exactly the opposite approach. Stop trying to dictate terms in advance and throw out some kind of technological green field and let people come to it as they will, contribute as they will, participate as they will. The really interesting thing is, while that sounds like a recipe for chaos, with the newly available tools, it's actually not. Good stuff emerges over time -- in patterns and structure and workflow -- and all these things emerge over time and then the benefit, if you're sitting on top of that organization, is that you get to harvest that good stuff as it emerges."

There are psychological phenomena at work, however. McAfee said there is often a tendancy to try and use an emergent technology in exactly the same manner as legacy technology, such as email.

"When you have incumbent technology, like email, and you evaluate a prospect technology, like some of these new 2.0 tools, we are wired as people to overweigh the advantages of our incumbent . . . and underweigh the the advantages of the prospect out there. That makes getting people to give up email and collaborate using a different tool kit a real uphill battle, which is why a lot of companies find that their enterprise 2.0 efforts are slow going, at least initially."

McAfee said organizations need to take the next step after deploying 2.0 technology -- they need to keep the discussion going, coach and conduct internal cheerleading, though he acknowledges that change won't occur immediately.

His book uses the Intelligence Community's Intellipedia as an example of what that type of behavior from the top can accomplish.

"Keep in mind that the intelligence agencies are long-standing organizations. They're large. They're very deeply entrenched in a lot of ways and, since their inception, their guiding principle has been that {they} will share information on a need-to-know basis. This was the stated policy of most of these agencies. All of a sudden, in the wake of 9/11, the deep shortcomings of that approach became apparent, and the official policy of the [IC] moved from need-to-know to responsibility-to-share."

This new mentality fostered the 2.0 transition. McAfee stated that he doesn't think there is a better dot-connecting mechanism than the Web, which led to a change in behavior for the IC.

"[They have] tried to bring Web tools and approaches and philosophies inside, but it's at odds with the way the organizations have been managed, the way they've thought about themselves, and the way a lot of people inside them have been doing their jobs for quite a long time. There are really exciting pockets of energy and change, but we can't expect this huge 16-agency set of bureaucracies to turn itself around overnight."

This doesn't mean that one has to lower expectations in order to move into the 21st century.

"There is, usually, in the successful examples, a really interesting combination of bottom-up enthusiasm and organic support and momentum from the grass roots of the organization, supported by, at some point in time, official top-down support -- some kind of blessing. To me, one of the really important success factors is beyond just official support. [It is] official use or official signaling by things like executive blogs where comments are turned on and leaders of the organization who use a Twitter . . . or who set up a profile and who jump in and actually start participating in these new environments."

Read more about the book on Dorobek Insider.

Learn more with the Federal News Radio tag search: Gov 2.0.