This is certainly the goal of movers and shakers in this space, as explored in FastForward’s recent blog-hosted Webcast with Andrew Rasiej of the Personal Democracy Forum and Beth Simone Noveck, US Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government.  Greater collaborative and social networking services present new opportunities to not only open up government and make it more accessible, but also facilitate greater information sharing for addressing complex issues.

But we still have a way to go, as McKinsey and Company recently spelled out in a report that looked at the state of progress of e-government initiatives. McKinsey found that despite spending enormous amounts on Web-based initiatives, government agencies often fail to meet users’ needs online.

The report’s authors, Jason Baumgarten and Michael Chui, say that to succeed, e-government needs new governance models, smarter Web investment, and greater user participation.

There have been some impressive benefits seen from the early days of e-government in terms of services such as being able to file taxes electronically, responding to RFPs, or managing benefits online. But there has not been notable progress beyond these early efficiencies. “Many new e-government initiatives have neither generated the anticipated interest among users nor enabled clear gains in operational efficiency,” the report states.

Baumgarten and Chui recommend greater efforts in terms of adoption of new tools and methodologies, such as blogs, wikis, and social networking or collaborative platforms. In addition, government agencies need to develop capabilities in critical areas such as marketing, usability, Web analytics, and customer insights. Agencies need to proactively get citizens, businesses, and other agencies involved in contributing or creating applications and content.

Where can a well-governed highly collaborative e-government lead us beyond online drivers’ license registrations?  Opening up innovation to outside sources is a powerful tool. For example, the District of Columbia municipal government staged an “Apps for Democracy” contest to encourage developers to create applications that would give residents access to data such as crime reports and pothole repair schedules. Forty-seven applications were created in 30 days. McKinsey notes that “hiring contract developers would have cost approximately $2.6 million, whereas the cost of running the contest was a mere $50,000.”

E-government can mean much, much more than mere online service delivery. For example, look at the impact on internal operations. Citizens and taxpayers aren’t the only ones that get frustrated with government. More often than not, government employees themselves feel stymied in their attempts to serve constituents and share information within one of the world’s largest and most complex organizations.

As Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, put it: “I’m sure many government employees and administrators are frustrated by their own systems that are built on 20th century models, and would love to see a better bird’s eye view of what the agencies are working on, where the budget is, how decisions are made as well as finding people within their own agencies that might have a solution that could work faster and better.”

Rasiej was recently joined in the FASTforward blog-hosted Webcast with Beth Simone Noveck, US Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government, moderated by Renee Hopkins of Strategy and Innovation.

Noveck says she is seeing examples of government employees becoming more engaged as collaborative and innovation opportunities arise. For example, she relates:

“The [Veterans Administration] launched a competition a couple of weeks ago to ask 19,000 employees how to reduce the backlog of veterans’ benefits claims. They are running an employee idea generation platform, essentially. And of those 19,000 eligible employees, 12,000 have already used the platform.  So the notion that central management sitting in Washington is going to know best how to solve a problem that’s occurring out across the country in dealing with people on a day-to-day basis is just ludicrous. It’s the people who are actually in the front lines of dealing with those problems who will know.”

Technology — particularly collaborative and social networking services — present new opportunities to not only open up government and make it more accessible, but also facilitate greater information sharing, Rasiej points out. “If we can get our agencies – let’s call them bureaucracies, our systems of government — to recognize a new collaborative era, we may actually find ways to save money, reduce waste and, most importantly, create transparency that provides for a very important byproduct which is citizen engagement and the dissolution of apathy.”

Then there’s the even broader implications for democracy and open society. We’ve come a long way in a short time, Noveck says. But the government is still only dipping its toes in the waters of collaboration and social networking. “The first generation of e-government was already a sort of Herculean step in itself,” she says. “The ability to deliver some basic things like forms to citizens, the ability then to transact with those forms so that you could, for instance, pay your taxes online.”

The potential impact of e-government extends well beyond simply delivering services online, she says. It will represent “a shift in how we conceive of government itself and, I think, fundamentally how we think about our democracy” — from a client-customer model to a forum in which important decisions are undertaken collaboratively.

Rasiej envisions a day when collaborative multi-stakeholder scenario planning will be available or created with the public to deal with complex public policy issues such as water management or adaptation to climate change. While he admits that theories around collaborative government and collaborative democracy are still “out of the box and not yet been fully understood,” there is potential for greater innovation in problem-solving:

“As more and more networks are built, and more and more data is available and the public itself gets used to be asking for input – which includes digging into data, tapping into personal or professional expertise, collaborating with others of similar interests – to solving long-standing problems, we’re going to see some very unique solutions, some efficiencies and, conceivably, a better governance system, that eliminates waste, creates more transparency and increases civic participation.”

In a new post, ReadWriteWeb’s Jolie O’Dell describes how US Navy CIO Rob Carey wants to use social media is a resource for the US military to build trust and collaboration across all four branches.

However, the mainly unregulated, Wild West aspect to social media has put off a super security-conscious and disciplined operation such as the military. That’s doesn’t mean social media — with its powerful collaboration capabilities — doesn’t have a place in the military, Carey says. O’Dell cites a recent podcast in which Carey observed that “most social networking tools come with no rules of the road. As the Internet moves towards user-generated content, we thought there was a void we could fill… to mitigate some of the security risks associated with social media.”

Carey urges the military to engage social media full force:

“Social media is an inherent part of the toolbox for members of the millennial workforce, while baby boomers are just adopting it. Social media tools should become the standard by which we can share and collaborate on information inside and outside the network boundaries.”

Carey’s comments com eon the heels of last month’s release, by the federal CIO Council, of the Guidelines for Secure Use of Social Media by Federal Departments and Agencies. (PDF download)

The Guidelines address the information security risk head on:

“The decision to embrace social media technology is a risk-based decision, not a technology-based decision. It must be made based on a strong business case, supported at the appropriate level for each department or agency, considering its mission space, threats, technical capabilities, and potential benefits. The goal of the IT organization should not be to say “No” to social media websites and block them completely, but to say “Yes, following security guidance,” with effective and appropriate information assurance security and privacy controls. The decision to authorize access to social media websites is a business decision, and comes from a risk management process made by the management team with inputs from all players, including the CIO, CISO, Office of General Counsel(OGC), privacy official and the mission owner.”

The government breaks social media usage into four categories: Inward Sharing, Outward Sharing, Inbound Sharing, and Outbound Sharing:

Inward Sharing: “The sharing of internal organizational documents through internal collaboration sites such as SharePoint portals and internal wikis.”

Outward Sharing: “Also known as inter-institutional sharing, enables Federal Government information to be shared with external groups, such as state and local governments, law enforcement, large corporations, and individuals.”

Inbound Sharing: “Also known as “crowdsourcing,” is similar to conducting a large online collaborative poll.”

Outbound Sharing: “Federal engagement on public commercial social media Websites.”

The report makes the following recommendations for secure social media adoption by federal agencies:

Policy control: “The senior technology official at each federal agency should develop a social media communications strategy, with the support of their communication office, that accurately addresses the guidelines in this document in conjunction with government-wide policy.”

Acquisition controls: “Federal agencies should require enhanced security and privacy controls through contracted social media services, such as… supporting support stronger authentication mechanisms for federal employee and agency user profiles, including multi-factor authentication…. Ensuring social media websites consider basic security best practices, such as input validation, code security reviews, and strong cookie management.”

Training controls: “Often the best solution is to provide periodic awareness and training of policy, guidance, and best practices. The proper use of social media in the Federal Government should be part of annual security awareness training…  [such as providing] “specialized training to educate users about what information to share, with whom they can share it, and what not to share…. Providing guidance and training based on updated agency social media policies and guidelines, including an updated Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) specific to social media websites…. Providing guidance to employees to be mindful of blurring their personal and professional life. Don’t establish relationships with working groups or affiliations that may reveal sensitive information about their job responsibilities.”

Network controls: “The Federal Trusted Internet Connection (TIC) program provides a series of inspection, monitoring, detection, and blocking technologies that ensure additional security and visibility to defend against a wide array of attacks, including those discussed from a social media perspective…. Current technologies allow for increasingly granular control of web applications, data, and protocols, in accordance with departmental policy. Web content filtering technologies for all Internet traffic should be located in the department TIC or provided as an add-on for offices granted access to social media websites.”

Host controls: “The establishment of a hardened Common Operating Environment (COE) will ensure consistent and comprehensive host configuration and hardening policies across the Federal Government. Hosts may be configured using the Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC), and validated through a Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) compatible scanner….  Two-factor authentication reduces the likelihood an attacker will gain unauthorized access to an information system through a username and password…. Federal agencies should ensure they have strong patching for operating system and application vulnerabilities, and that updating anti-virus signature files and system logging is enabled to report to the SOC on workstations in real time.”

“CIOs are erecting walls around the business, not opening up,” Moore concludes.

The implementations that are out there may be more simplistic in their usage than we like — for example, IDC finds that 70% of users of social networking sites use the sites “to look at pictures only.”  I’m not quite sure what it means to be simply looking at pictures, or what pictures they’re looking at (head shots, graphs?), but it doesn’t sound like very sophisticated or advanced usage.

The IDC findings fly right in the face of other surveys highlighted in this blogspace, such as the recent McKinsey findings, which paint more positive scenarios about social media adoption.

Did IDC interview companies hiding under rocks, perhaps some backwater operations that are still wrestling with the PC invasion? Perhaps — though I have a very good friend who is an IDC analyst, and I know he selects his samples and works his data very carefully. And the 20% increase IDC reported in social media prohibitions is something that would jump out of any sample.

I sense that a clampdown by management and corporate legal departments is at work here. And this is coming from two directions:

1) As noted a couple of months back, a Deloitte study uncovered great concern about damages to corporate brand as a result of unfettered social media usage by employees.

2) In addition — here’s where legal sticks its claws in — there are growing liability and legal concerns about statements being made via blogs, wikis, and other forms of social media communication. E-mail communications are already ensnared in the legal system; social media communications are sure to follow.

But legal and branding concerns shouldn’t be a show-stopper. Here’s how to help organizations keep their eyes on the social media prize:

Recognize the expanding business value of social media, and build that into your corporate strategy. In doing so, social media evolves from informal grassroots movement into methodologies baked into the corporate culture.

Watch what the competition is doing. Companies are getting out oin front of their markets by engaging with customers and partners.

Let common-sense communications guidelines prevail. As with email — and any and all corporate communications for that matter — social media  communications should not be mean-spirited, defamatory, or invoke gutter-speak. Apply the same rules — and training, if necessary — for inter-office communication to the out-of-the-office communications through social media networks.

Don’t let fear or nervousness cause managers to throw out something that is providing such an important competitive edge as social media.

Vince Thompson, a smart commentator who interviews smart people, recently spoke with Dave Knox, corporate marketing brand manager for Digital Business Strategy at P&G.  P&G is way ahead of the curve with social media implementations, and Knox explains how it has enriched and empowered him (and thus P&G) in his own job.

Knox brands himself as a “technopologist, which he defines as a hybrid of marketer, technologist, and social anthropologist. “You might not be a ‘coder,’ but you know your way around the language and culture of tech.  You understand things like API and Open Source or why Facebook Connect working with Open ID is a big deal. .. you can then look at that technology and understand the impact it will have on society and culture.”

Social media is significantly changing the role of marketing, Knox says. The convergence of technology, marketing and social interaction is becoming more important every day, “but at the same time, it is a new skill set for many marketers to learn.” Only 10 years ago, the marketing toolkit for a brand manager was limited to four choices (TV, print, out of home and radio).  “But today, new technology is emerging every day, offering new ways to serve and engage people more effectively.  At work we aim to use these new digital tools to continue to be a leader and innovator in marketing and digital business.”

While Knox is immersed within one of the world’s largest companies, he finds that social media is a valuable tool for bringing in outside points of view as well.

“When working for a big corporation, you have an amazing amount of resources at your fingertips.  And you are surrounded by incredibly smart people,” he points out.  “But most of these people have a similar background to you and are trained to approach problems in the same way.  My blog [hardknoxlife.com] has helped me by giving me access to people with different backgrounds and views on the business world.  It is a way to connect with these people outside of my day to day work and really get a set of different viewpoints on what is going on with marketing.”

Knox says by staying active in social media through his blog and Twitter, he has been able to do his job better. “My external network has emerged as my business filter, allowing me to sort through the noise and keep on top of what is really important.  While it might save time in the short-term to slow down in social media, I think it would hurt me in the long term in terms of personal growth and knowledge.”

Knox sees three major changes on the horizon for marketing:

• Mobile technologies: “I don’t think we have even started to scratch the service on that one.”
• Consumer co-creation/crowdsourcing: “A real change is under foot when a couple of guys in Muncie, Indiana can produce a TV spot for Doritos that is rated tops in the Super Bowl.”
• Smarter advertising: ” For the past 50 years, marketers were able to interrupt entertainment (ie TV shows) with advertising.  But in a world where consumers don’t have to put up with the interruption any longer, brands are going to have to start thinking different about content and entertainment.”

For starters, Pat reports that Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Wisconsin is piloting a program which employs Twitter to “identify members who may have questions or concerns about their health benefits.” The use of Twitter enables the insurer “to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, real-time conversation, and respond to each tweet about Anthem.”

Anthem is also using its Twitter channel to help members with healthy lifestyle choices such as weight loss programs. If that isn’t enough, Pat reports that Anthem has also formed a Facebook channel and a YouTube channel to promote wellness and member interaction.

As Kate Quinn, VP of corporate marketing for Anthem, puts it: “Social media provide a great opportunity for us to engage our members, listen to them and be more responsive.”

At a time when the viability and future direction of the health insurance industry is under debate, social networking is providing a means for insurance companies to reach on on a very personal level to their customers. The perception of “big, bad, greedy insurance companies,” however rightly or wrongly earned, has been part of the discourse for years, and came about because of the sense of impersonalization that created a very high wall between the companies and their constituents.  Social networking may be just the right tool to tear down this wall.

However, social networking appears to be catching on as a tool for some insurers.  According to a recent report, CSC, a consulting and integration firm that services the industry, launched an online service called “WikonnecT,”
a business-to-business social networking site for the property & casualty” sector, and has been seeing impressive growth since its launch last fall.

At last report, WikonnecT now  has 8,000 users from nearly 700 insurance companies interacting across more than 100 communities. The site is now being extended to its life insurance and annuity clients. Unfortunately, the community is only open to CSC clients.

So if an industry as technically conservative as insurance starts embracing social networking, you know the trend has legs. Social networking may even help take some of the “boring” aspect out of insurance products, another industry observer states.

Chad Mitchell, senior analyst with Forrester Research Inc., recently penned a report titled “Crafting an Insurance Social Media Strategy,” in which he comes right out and states that “property/casualty and life insurers market some of the most boring consumer products and brands.”

However, Mitchell adds, emerging direct brands such as Esurance and traditional agent-based insurers such as Liberty Mutual Insurance are developing their social media strategies, and trying to change brand perceptions. Here are some examples:

“Auto and life insurance customers continue to flock online to research and buy insurance. And insurance agents use social networks for training and recruiting. Insurance eBusiness executives should build a social strategy that addresses customers’ and agents’ problems, prepares for risks, and measures what matters.”

The impact on internal operations should also be interesting to watch as social networking permeates the industry. Insurance organizations are full of silos and separate departments. Boosting collaboration between claims processing and field agents, for example, could go a long way toward better expediting claims, resolving disputes, and ultimately in boosting customer satisfaction.

Close to seven out of ten respondents (69%) report that their companies “have gained measurable business benefits [italics mine], including more innovative products and services, more effective marketing, better access to knowledge, lower cost of doing business, and higher revenues.”

This is probably the most significant set of survey findings I have seen yet that document actual benefits being seen from Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 deployments. There has been quite a stir in the blogosphere lately about the lack of actual results being seen from these new methodologies (check out Dennis Howlett’s latest post on the topic, along with my colleague Paula Thornton’s observations).

What kinds of benefits, exactly, does McKinsey see coming out of Web 2.0 sites? In the survey, half of respondents report that Web 2.0 technologies have fostered in-company interactions across geographic borders, 45 percent cite interactions across functions, and 39 percent across business units.

The measurable benefits cited span both knowledge management and simple cost-cutting:

Increasing speed of access to knowledge            68%

Reducing communication costs                           54%

Increasing effectiveness of marketing                  52%

Increasing speed of access to internal experts     43%

Increasing customer satisfaction                          43%

Decreasing travel costs                                       40%

Increasing employee satisfaction                          35%

With the growing availability of services over the network, you can see how there will be increased velocity of knowledge and improved communications. It would be interesting to see how employee satisfaction, cited by more than a third, is measured.

Interestingly, the highest-rated Web 2.0 technologies/services in terms of business benefits delivery among companies are video sharing and blogging.

The top-rated technologies in terms of internal use include the following:

Video sharing         48%

Blogs                     47%

RSS                        42%

Social networking    42%

For external use, such as connecting with partners and suppliers, the following technologies delivered the most benefits:

Blogs                        51%

Video sharing           50%

Social networking      49%

RSS                          45%

The more the technologies are used, the more benefits seen, the survey also shows. As McKinsey puts it:

“Web 2.0 delivers benefits by multiplying the opportunities for collaboration and by allowing knowledge to spread more effectively…. Among respondents who report seeing benefits within their companies, many cite blogs, RSS, and social networks as important means of exchanging knowledge. These networks often help companies coalesce affinity groups internally. Finally, respondents report using Web videos more frequently since the previous survey; technology improvements have made videos easier to produce and disseminate within organizations.”

McKinsey also observes that more than half of the companies in the survey plan to increase their investments in Web 2.0 technologies, while another quarter don’t expect their level of spending to change. The study also suggests that the turbulent economy may have increased interest in Web 2.0 technologies.

Of course, there are still about a third of respondents that absolutely have not yet seen any business benefits from Web 2.0. What is not clear is whether employees at these companies are using Web 2.0 under the radar, and thus progress cannot yet be measured.

Many observers see social networking emerging within organizations in an organic, grassroots fashion. That is, Enterprise 2.0 tools, technologies and techniques are springing up or being adopted to augment existing processes and existing culture. Call center representatives suddenly have a new channel to stay connected with the customers they are dealing with. Managers have a new way to broadcast messages out to the field aside from email or phone. Project teams have a new collaboration platform to replace emails with documents attached.

Some observers say organizations tend to lay out their social media strategies in somewhat predictable patterns. Jeremiah Owyang talks about the best ways to organize for social media in a recent post, and observes that companies tend to organize social media in three distinct patterns:

The Tire (Distributed): “Where each business unit or group may create its own social media programs without a centralized approach. We call this approach the ‘tire,’ as it originates at the edges of the company.

The Tower (Centralized): “A standalone group within a company that’s responsible for social media programs, often within corporate marketing or corporate communicaitons.”

The Hub and Spoke (Cross Functional): “Like the hub on a bicycle wheel, a cross-functional group that represents multiple stakeholders across the company assembles in the middle of the organization. The hub facilitates resource sharing and cross-functional communications (via the ’spokes’ in the wheel) to those at the edge of the organization (or the ‘tire’).”

Owyang says that organizations need to strive for the hub-and-spoke model in laying out their social media strategy. Through this model, the enterprise can provide centralized resources that can support business units, yet the business units “still have the freedom and flexibility to dialog with the market –and should be in alignment with what other spokes are doing.”

Interestingly, the hub and spoke is what always has been proposed or the most well-functioning information technology and network infrastructure. Same reason — there are centralized resources, as well as a form of governance that helps maintain consistency across the autonomous business units.

The study, published by Nielsen Norman Group, concludes that “social software technologies are exposing the holes in corporate communication and collaboration and at times filling them before the enterprise can fully grasp and control the flow.”

It’s clear the tide has turned in favor of social media in the enterprise. My colleague Bill Ives just posted details of a study conducted by Prescient Digital Media, based on 561 organizations, which finds rapid adoption of social media on the corporate intranet in the past year.

The Nielsen Norman Group study was more qualitative than quantitative, based on interviews and analyses of the experiences of 14 companies, including Agilent Technologies, Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research and Development, IBM, Telecom New Zealand Limited and Sun Microsystems.

What’s especially notable about these companies is that they are perhaps among the tech-savviest anywhere. Yet, social media adoption still emerged from the ranks in an informal fashion — not as an enterprise initiative.

Key findings in the study include the following:

Underground efforts yield big results: “Companies are turning a blind eye to underground social software efforts until they prove their worth, after which they integrate them more thoroughly.”

Front-line employees are driving the vision: “Many senior managers still consider social tools something their teenagers use. Young workers, who do not need to be taught or convinced to use these tools, expect them in the workplace.”

The business need is the big driver: “Social software is not about the tools, it is about what the tools enable the users to do and about the business problems the tools address.”

Communities are self-policing: “When left to their own devices, communities within enterprise intranets police themselves. Workers tend to retain their professional identities, leaving little need for the organization to institute controls.”

Organizations must cede power: “As companies have been learning from using Web 2.0 technologies to communicate with their customers, they can no longer fully control their message. This is true, too, when Web 2.0 tools are used in internal communications.”

The last point, that organizations must give up control of their communications and messaging, is going to be the hardest pill to swallow. Perhaps that may help to explain why social media tends not to be “officially” sanctioned so quickly, even among the tech-savviest of the tech-savviest.