by Jon Husband
May 27, 2008 at 3:10 pm
· Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Blogging, Change, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Enterprise Software, IT Department, Social Computing, User Revolution, Web 2.0
Today I noticed this piece in Canada’s national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, announcing that Open Text has just signed a 7-year contract to lay "the foundation for the government’s 2.0 strategy".
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Open Text strikes Web 2.0 deal with Ottawa
MATT HARTLEY
The Canadian government is getting a Web 2.0 upgrade.
Waterloo, Ont.-based business software maker Open Text Corp. [OTC-T] announced Tuesday it has landed a seven-year maintenance contract with the federal government to supply the tools that will “provide the foundation for the government’s 2.0 strategy.”
Open Text said the agreement will see its software used in all federal departments, agencies and crown corporations helping to create internal wikis, forums and blogs to help the government be more responsive to Canadians.
Open Text, which became Canada’s largest software company when International Business Machines Corp. purchased Ottawa-based Cognos Inc. last year, produces “enterprise content management software” that helps businesses to store, organize and analyze records and documents.
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Perhaps I’m mistaken, I can’t help but think that this will be the knowledge-worker equivalent of acquiring and implementing a large ERP system which will require enormous amounts of training so that everyone uses the tools in the same way, so that they push and pull content to and from each other in the same ways. Will it become a new form of email for use internally ?
From what I have been able to understand about using social software to carry out social computing inside the firewall, this approach (or my interpretation of it) flies in the face of much of what we have learned about social computing. I strongly suspect that different government departments of varying size and scope will carry out different kinds of knowledge work, and have different requirements for when and how to use collaboration to develop policy and deliver services. However, I am sure that there will have been consultant studies and recommendations backing this decision.
I think it might be better to consider a 2.0 strategy that takes into consideration those different requirements and look at a range of possible solutions, with the intention of acquiring and implementing that which will work best. After all, many of the 2.0 collaboration platforms can co-exist nicely with existing information technology architecture and what differentiates with respect to effectiveness is the take-up and use of the 2.0 capabilities by the end-user.
My sketchy opinion notwithstanding, it may be the case that such issues have been considered will be addressed with the Open Text solution. Open Text has been a leader in the collaboration space for some time now, and my thinly-informed interpretation of a short newspaper article does not have the benefit of the details of the Canadian government’s 2.0 strategy.
But my knowledge of the structure and dynamics of the work of government departments (I have consulted to a number of them in the past) suggests to me that there will be many procedural binders and lots of day-long training sessions trying to help workers become familiar with the new tools and which categories to use for which piece of content, etc.
I believe that control is still a very important consideration, if not the primary factor, in the design of work in government departments.
It will be interesting to check in 3 or 4 years down the road and see how things are going. Nothing would be more pleasing than to discover that my country’s government is reaping the benefits of using social computing inside its firewalls.
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What a load of crap. My opinion of Open Text is not so sketchy. I’ve used it and it is sub-optimal, to say the least. It isn’t anywhere near Web 2.0. I assume that the the other option was something from M$? This is not Web 2.0, it’s just another monolithic system being forced on workers who won’t use the damn thing anyway. It will ensure that there is control from the top, and I guess that’s what it’s all about.
I assume my job prospects at Open Text are now toast 
Well, given all the systems I know you have worked with and used, and your knowledge of learning, collaboration and productivity tools, I am not surprised you have a less sketchy and better informed opinion than me.
`How very un-Canadian of you, Harold Yeah, I wouldn’t pitch OT on any consulting work just yet .. maybe next month …
(Disclosure: Harold and I are professional friends).
I’ve had a few government clients who have asked for help in setting up online collaborative communities, mostly for training & education purposes. These clients already had site licenses for some centralised platform, similar to Open Text’s LiveLink. However, these clients found these monolithic system useless for their needs and were looking for something lighter and more flexible. Another consideration was that additional site licenses were required if people from outside the agency were involved, and these additional licenses added up to significant money.
On three occasions the solution I proposed was based on Drupal, meaning no license fees, quick set up and a broad tech community to support it. The Drupal solution was only a fraction of the cost of the in-place proprietary, monolithic platform.
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JevonMay 28th, 2008 at 8:04 am |
Wow, that is a disappointment.
and,… a 7-year contract? Oi. That is an eternity^2 in the so called “web 2.0″ world.
What are you talking about web 2.0? There is no mention of web 2.0. It is government 2.0.
Jimmy … The title of the newspaper article is Open Text Strikes Web 2.0 Deal With Ottawa”.
The first line of the newspaper article states:
“The Canadian government is getting a Web 2.0 upgrade”.
I may be mistaken, but I think that the Open Text deal is about providing Canadian government departments with access to the Open Text collaboration platform which has Web 2.0 tools and capabilities embedded in it.
You are right on the money to be concerned. This deal does smell of a very typical one size fits all, Big Bang, structured approach that is unfortunately all too typical of Canadian government.
I’ve been doing a number of presentations to various levels of government, (mostly Ontario provincial) relating to government 2.0, and I have been keen to stress that starting with a number of tightly scoped, incubation style prototypes is the way to go.
Focus on a couple of “lab experiments” with some eager adopters and focused on creativity, and learning by doing, there is a lot to figure out concerning government and Web 2.0 solutions before widespread adoption of any technology should be considered.
Notwithstanding the fact that no “one” solution is going to be an answer to Web 2.0, there’s just too many different types of needs and requirements out there…
Jeff Anderson
Thanks for stopping by, Jeff. As noted in the post, that was my take too, but I was trying to be diplomatic because of course I was not privy to the details of either the requirements or the proposed responses to the requirements.
But it’s typical of a government approach to be concerned about standardization, stability etc. However, it’s also easy to argue that it’s way to soon to define a “2.0″ approach to a wide range of different types of work, information flows, service-to-citizens and so on. And that said .. one of the major problems facing government (IMHO is the relative rigidity of the way(s) it defines, designs and structures work.
So, all things considered .. it probably won’t change things much. As I said in the post, there’s likely to be lots of “that goes in this category” and “this goes in that category”, and “these are the 2.0 tools you must (or if they are being flexible, are recommended) use …
I suspect that this decision will go down into the annals of another wrong-headed government decision ..
Interesting stuff Jon – Traditional, ECM-centric collaboration vendors seem to see the nascent “Government 2.0″ market as a subset of ECM. OpentText even says as much:
“Open Text’s plans to help organizations take full advantage of social collaboration tools, such as wikis, forums, blogs, tagging, communities and real-time chat, while managing related content within the context of an organization’s broader ECM strategy, including business processes and compliance initiatives.”
- http://www.opentext.com/blogs/ecm_briefs/2008/03/ecm_brief_the_time_is_right_fo.html
Thanks for you additional perspective, Jay.
It’s a pity, really … and for those of us who have been around organizations, especially large ones like the gov’t, it’s unfortunately all too predictable.
In a sense you can’t blame a substantial aspect of their approach, because some kinds of “innovation” might be very counter-productive to providing effective government services.
On the other hand, in societies where the complexity of providing services to citizens and constituents of all types is increasing, the government needs all the pertinent, useful and actionable knowledge that distributed social computing, less rigid structures and more open organizational culture(s) could provide them (the various depts).
The Webby world will affect gov’t services and government work just as much as it affects business or media or entertainment .. and trying to manage it and control using the mindsets and processes of the current decision-making and management frameworks is likely to be increasingly ineffective.
I’m guessing this “integrated” system will be problematic. To be fair, I think we could see how using social computing to work with the appropriate aspects of existing service processes and compliance requirements (I use the word “service” because the gov’t isn’t really a business and I’ve never agreed with the wholesale businessification of gov’t services … some yes, for the right reasons .. all just because it’s supposed to be more efficient, no).
However, what I think will lead to all sorts of problems and spending more time and $$$ training people is the phrase “within the context of an organization’s broader ECM strategy“. In other words, I think it’s an attitude / org culture type of thing, and I don’t think this will help change things much for the better.
tell you what .. let’s keep an eye peeled for some one of the big-league business journals (like HBR or Sloan Mgt Review) or a firm like Forrester or KPMG or Deloitte to write something in the next 2 – 3 years about how this kind of approach doesn’t work, for some of the reasons expressed above in the comments and post.
If we find one, we’ll find somewhere to have a virtual beer
jon,
I agree a one-size-fits-all approach will never fit for the organization as complex with as many diverse interests as any level of government.
I’m trying to put some of my thoughts together concerning Government 2.0 at the following,
http://innovationsinpublicsector.blogspot.com/2008/06/online-collaboration-making-first-move.html
Feel free to post any comments or insights would be welcome.
[...] The FASTForward Blog » Web 2.0 for Government Knowledge Workers … Smart or Stodgy ?: Enterprise 2… Decent appraisal of the state of play in government (tags: government social media enterprise2.0) [...]
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