Why Is Google Even Involved In The Yahoo! Acquisition Talks?
There’s been numerous news reports about Google considering “buying” Yahoo!, or at least teaming up with private equity companies to do so.
While most of the articles at least mention in passing that it’d be unlikely for this to pass government review, I haven’t seen many people actually discuss why Google is involved.
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How Technology Is Impacting Government And Other Management Areas
We’ve tossed around a lot of ideas on {grow} about how technology is impacting our lives, but I’m also really interested in how it is impacting the culture of our companies. Read More…
Update on the Migration of Geodata.gov to Data.gov
The team at Geodata.gov has announced that the migration to Data.gov is well underway and will officially take effect on September 30, 2011, at that time all traffic hitting geodata.gov will be automatically redirected to the new home at Data.gov. According to Geodata.gov, “This starts another exciting new chapter in Open Government, and the evolution to make government data more accessible and usable than before.” Read More…
IBM Enables Cloud-based Social Business for Government
IBM introduced a new set of social collaboration offerings on the IBM Federal Community Cloud. The services include the industry’s broadest capabilities for social software such as wikis, micro-blogs, staff profiles, instant messaging, web conferencing, messaging and collaboration, and email. It also includes support for popular mobile devices including Android phones and tablets, Apple iPhone 4 and iPad, BlackBerry, and Nokia Symbian platform.
Taking Link Licensing To A Higher Level
A new development in the ‘pay per click’ links licensing conflict in the UK is about to move things up a level, one designed to raise awareness among members of Parliament and which might influence the future of a system that has won little support in the public relations industry. Read More…
China Infuriated at Google’s Implied Accusations
Earlier this month Google revealed that they’d uncovered a series of cyber-attack attempts against U.S. Government officials, U.S. military leaders, Asian political leaders, Chinese activists, and journalists. These attacks happened in the form of “spear phishing” efforts that sent highly personalized messages to the Google accounts of specific users, attempting to get access to secure data. Read More…
FTC Seeking Your Guidance on Disclosure in Online Advertising
The FTC is formally asking people just like you and me (the public) for advice and guidance when it comes to disclosure in online advertising. Now is your chance to help the FTC decide the rules. The FTC will seek public comment for 45 days, beginning today and continuing through July 11, 2011.
Back in October 2009, you might recall the huge uproar over the fact that the FTC said that bloggers must disclose their advertisers and sponsors or face stiff penalties or maybe even a huge fine. Here is part of what I said:
Public Sector (.Gov) Sites and Two-Tiered Segmentation
Greetings from Seoul! Perhaps it’s a bit ironic, particularly for someone who rarely travels overseas, that I find myself writing about public sector sites while abroad. There is nothing like a 12 hour flight to produce a flow of words, however, and I’ve just finished off a post for Clicktale’s May Madness. So as promised, my topic today is the application of Semphonic’s Two-Tiered Digital Segmentation to the Public Sector.
Why Public Sector? First, because Semphonic’s Public Sector practice has grown dramatically in the last few years. It’s become so important to us that we actually went through the process of GSA certification (about as painful from a corporate perspective as giving birth). I also think it’s a fascinating practice area.
Implementing Enterprise 2.0 for the Federal Government: User Adoption
This is part five in a multi-part series on how the federal government is implementing Enterprise 2.0. This was done through extensive interviews with Booz Allen Hamilton who has led many of the efforts for various Government agencies. The full series on Enterprise 2.0 for the Federal Government (which includes additional information and specific examples) can be downloaded(registration required) for free. I recommend that you start with the first post: Implementing Enterprise 2.0 for the Federal Government Part One: Business Drivers, the second post: Implementing Enterprise 2.0 for the Federal Government Part Two: Who Drives the Tools?, the third post: Implementing Enterprise 2.0 for the Federal Government Part Three: Obstacles, and the fourth post: Implementing Enterprise 2.0 for the Federal Government Part Four: More Obstacles
Implementing Enterprise 2.0 for the Federal Government: Obstacles
This is part three in a multi-part series on how the federal government is implementing Enterprise 2.0. This was done through extensive interviews with Booz Allen Hamilton who has led many of the efforts for various Government agencies. The full series on Enterprise 2.0 for the Federal Government (which includes additional information and specific examples) can be downloaded(registration required) for free. I recommend that you start with the first post: Implementing Enterprise 2.0 for the Federal Government Part One: Business Drivers the second post: Implementing Enterprise 2.0 for the Federal Government Part Two: Who Drives the Tools?
Today we are going to be looking at what obstacles have to be overcome before enterprise collaboration technologies can be adopted.
It’s hard to motivate people to change how they currently do things. The status quo is perhaps the biggest obstacle that needs to be overcome and there is no cookie cutter approach to make this happen. Status quo combines culture, norms, processes, knowledge, expertise, perceptions, and more to become a formidable challenge to change. It is always important to focus on the business drivers and start from there. Understanding your workforce and stakeholders, supporting ‘what change will do for each group’, and aligning their needs to the business drivers will aid in navigating the status quo.
The best implementations include a cross-functional team. Enterprise 2.0 isn’t a traditional IT project where you test something out, release it, and then put out some patches. In order to make E2.0 work, you must integrate with other existing applications and systems. It’s important to bring in experts from other areas of IT and across the organization that relate to what you’re doing; subject matter experts are crucial for success including change management staff. Some effective implementations have invested half their budget on change management and communication, alone. As a whole, the organization must transform and focus on messages that are tailored for each market segment while providing value across all. Oftentimes organizations focus on the tools instead of the business drivers, this should be vice versa.
Developing a temporary E2.0 adoption team to examine the business cases and provide guidance throughout the process is shown to be invaluable. At Booz Allen we’re bringing together select representatives from across our various teams to form a committee, primarily to ensure that open, cross-team collaboration becomes the norm, not the exception. One of the primary roles for this committee will be to ensure that not only does everyone feel ownership but it is a reality.
Empower your users. More than a way for an organization to gain insight from its users, users must feel that this is a place to build relationships with their coworkers. Provide them the ability to meet like-minded users and enable them to not only express their interests but to cultivate them! Provide incentive for using the site correctly, education for when they don’t get how and ownership for their ideas on how to improve it. Your users want to help, they want to improve and they want to feel valued for their opinions – meeting these needs will get your users excited about the community and they will want to use it.
Perception of data security and control must be changed. When successfully implemented, Enterprise 2.0 technologies have an opportunity to provide safe and secure collaboration networks for employees and contractors. However, due to the public use of social networks such as flickr, Facebook and Twitter, the perception of E2.0 tools is that security is unreliable at best. On the contrary, most IT organizations already use the very same firewall and security technologies that can protect data within an E2.0 space.
A big concern is always what happens if the information gets out or if the wrong information is being shared. The reality is this is already happening and has been happening since the days of the water-cooler conversation. One of the guiding principles in Enterprise 2.0 tools is that they provide easy and intuitive access to content and users – this very same principal provides an additional tool that security professionals can use to help secure their networks. Through a series of automated search processes, analytics applications and automatic moderation security professionals have the ability to track unwanted data spill and easily clean the data where necessary.
In the next post we’re going to continue looking at other obstacles.