The Scottish Health Council (part of Healthcare Improvement Scotland) has just published a set of helpful guidelines which include lots of case studies (including one from IRISS) on the use of social media. The guidelines are aimed at NHS Boards who are seeking to use social media during periods of major service change –

specifically the Scottish Government’s requirements to inform, engage and consult people in developing health and community care services (CEL (2010) 04).

It suggests ways in which social media and online technologies may complement traditional methods of informing, engaging and consulting people when planning and carrying out NHS service changes. It includes examples of how technology is currently being used for two-way dialogue with patients, carers and communities, and also discusses general considerations when using social media.

This well written report provides yet more support for opening up access to social media in the workplace.  How can you have two way dialogue if your workforce doesn’t have full and unfettered access to the web?

The web service…  is a very limited and popular resource, not only the fixed bandwidth we have available but also the resources available to manage, monitor and police its use. Currently we do not offer media streaming from YouTube…

…micro managing individual staff access to individual internet sites and resources would be a complicated and time consuming task, therefore this is very much an exception rather than the norm.’

The week before, Scotland’s Deputy First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, announced

Technology and access to high speed internet is a vital part of Scotland’s infrastructure, and that is why we are committed to delivering a world class digital infrastructure to the people of Scotland by 2020.

Well, the people of Scotland includes the workforce. A world class digital infrastructure needs a world class workforce competent and comfortable using web-based resources. The government is actually preventing its staff from becoming more innovative and cost effective by blocking access and spending time ‘policing’ rather than encouraging and supporting.  Arguably the workforce represents one of the biggest digitally excluded groups: they have bandwidth, they have computers, they have creativity. All they need is support, encouragement, and trust. The Society for Information Management thinks so too:

If our aspirations for digital inclusion or participation are to be achieved, the Government has to set an example by encouraging a change in culture similar to what is happening in Devon and advocated by the Head of the Civil Service:

Most staff can be trusted to use these technologies appropriately if they are aware of the constraints and the risks. And appropriate line management intervention may, in some cases, be a better solution than tighter technical controls that hinder business use.

A very welcome report form Silverman Research for the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) chimes well with the sentiments often expressed in this blog.

The report argues that, as a result of the relentless advance of social media, the employee voice is evolving rapidly. The greatest difference is the shifting patterns of communication, from being one-way or two-way to being multi-directional: social technologies are allowing new forms of collaboration that comprise mechanisms for making collective decisions.  The result is a new form of collective employee voice that is mobile, organised and intelligent.

The report concludes:

To date, much of the conversation [about social media] within organisations has been about the risks and threats (especially to employers) that may be associated with social media. However, the perils of an open approach to employee voice and the benefits of more traditional closed systems are often overrated. Moreover, there is little organisations can do to stem the rise of social media. Organisations should be designing their future in employee voice, before it designs them.

I don’t think there is much to add to that except to say read this report (only about 26 pages) and show it to people in your organisation who see more risk than opportunity.

Social media and employee voice: the current landscape

This month saw the publication of a really excellent report from the Government Office for Science (Foresight Future identities. Changing identities in the UK: the next 10 years) that should be read by anyone (especially senior executives, IT managers and data security managers) who still thinks that social media and social networking are remote and separate from daily work and life.

In essence the report notes that people are becoming more engaged in online networks, are working out how to manage their online identities, and can switch seamlessly between multiple identities. Public policy and public services have to take account of this rapidly changing world.

Here are a few snippets:

• Sixty percent of internet users are members of a social network, compared to 17% in 2007.
• Transitional life stages are defined by attitudes and roles, rather than age.
• The boundaries between social and work identities are becoming blurred.
• People are accustomed to switching seamlessly between the internet and the physical world, and use social media to conduct their lives in a way that dissolves the divide between online and offline identities.
• A critical issue will be to ensure individuals have the knowledge and understanding to take control of their online identities and to be aware of how their online presence could be used by others.
• Policy making will need to be iterative, adaptive, nuanced and agile, taking into consideration the multifaceted nature of people’s identities.
• The UK needs to be considered as as much part of the virtual world as a real place

The Scottish Government is running a series of workshops for public sector employees on ‘Scotland’s Digital Future: Delivery of Public Services’.  The event will focus on ‘new ways of working – not just deploying new technology but ensuring that we focus on the user and deliver cost‐effectively’.

To book a place, one has to download the booking form in Microsoft Word format, complete it and email it back. It’s rather depressing that a department charged with looking at the future should use such an inefficient way of booking.  Eventbrite, for example, is a free online booking system that I can use from my smartphone or tablet (I can’t edit a Word document on my smartphone or tablet, and even on a PC this is an efficient way of working). Someone in government will have to transcribe all the information from hundreds of Word documents and compile attendance lists.  Eventbrite does this automatically, saving hours on administration.

Online booking is not the future: it’s here now. It’s easy to set up and easier for the user. Should we not expect the government to lead by example?

The Government must be more vigorous in its approach to cyber security, says the Defence Committee in a report published on 9 January. Interviewed on BBC Radio 4 Today programme Major General Jonathan Shaw, former head of cyber security programme at the Ministry of Defence, argued that everyone using the internet had to become much more aware of the dangers of cybercrime in general.  He called for a public education campaign similar to those in the 1980s aimed at raising the public’s awareness of its responsibilities regarding HIV and AIDS.

I would argue that this means LESS restrictive policies on access to the web in the workplace and more encouragement and education on how to use the web safely. There is little point in asking people to be more aware of dangers if they they have no idea of what these dangers are.

As the Guardian’s Secret Council Officer recently observed

I am not a young upstart or internet techie, but it breaks my heart to see local government believing that it is engaging with social media while describing its approach to new media as “cautious”. This type of presence without engagement is far more damaging to a local authority’s reputation than no presence at all.

He goes to argue that to be effective in social media, officers at all levels need to have their own personal experience of using it as part of their job. They should embrace the challenge to be able to explain their role using just 140 characters.

This level of engagement might not be what the Select Committee had in mind when warning about cyber security, but awareness has to start somewhere and the workplace, where we all spend a lot of time, might be a good place to start.

Five million businesses use Google Apps and an estimated 425 million individuals actively use Gmail, a free email service.  We at IRISS use Google Apps for our email, calendar and other services.  For a business Google Apps is very cost effective (about £33 per person per year) and also keeps us pretty much free of spam email. In short, it’s a respected and reliable service provider.

So we were intrigued when a colleague at IRISS found that her emails to a local authority in the north of Scotland were not reaching their intended recipients because the council, apparently, classes email from Google email accounts as spam and bins them. Employees can ask to have Gmail unblocked, but they’d have to know they hadn’t received an email.

It seems an odd policy which, apart from being a rather blunt method of filtering out spam, must add to internal administration costs as well as frustrating those clients and customers who number amongst Google’s millions of users: their communications will treated a spam and binned.  It’s worth reflecting that, far form seeing Google mail as a threat, some local authorities, as noted in a previous blog post, themselves use Google Apps because it saves money and makes life easier for everyone. Something Christie would surely applaud.

This month the UK cabinet office published its Government Digital Strategy, which restates the objective that government should be ‘digital by default’.

Andrea Di Maio of Gartner has written a useful critique which argues that the strategy is ‘smart, but not smart enough’.  Two criticisms are relevant to the theme of this blog and I’ll quote them verbatim (with my emphasis):

Despite the objectives of increasing the digital capabilities in the civil service, there is very little on the digitalization of the workplace and the role that individual employees can have in leading the transformation of their job. The strategy is imbalanced toward transactions, and does not address employee-intensive interactions, such as case management.

It addresses social media in a very traditional way, focusing on citizen participation in policy making and missing almost entirely how social media can transform transactional and other services, as well as the role of employees on social media as key component of the connective tissue between government and citizens.

These are exactly the points we keep on about in this blog, but progress is slow.  The workforce in the public sector will be unable to transform their own jobs until corporate policies stop being ‘blocked by default’ and allow people more control over which sites and tools they use.

If you are frustrated by blocked access the the internet visit our website to see how you can join the debate.

Mindreel is a database of over 100 films submitted the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival over the last six years.  SMAFF is a world class festival and we at IRISS were really pleased work with SMAFF and the University of Strathclyde to create Mindreel, a resource of global educational value.

So why is the above message typical of what many people in the public sector see when they try to use Mindreel?  The answer is really quite frustrating. This message indicates that this council’s filtering software by default blocks access to sites offering ‘streaming media’, usually video.   In order to use public money wisely we use a streaming media service called Vimeo to host films on Mindreel.  Why?  Well, as mentioned before in this blog, streaming media is a very cost effective way of sharing video.  For around £160 per year Vimeo will take care of all technical format issues – including the enormous task of testing playback on the increasing variety of mobile devices - to ensure that the videos will almost certainly play on any device. That is, unless the organisation has gone to the trouble of blocking access to streaming media.

In case the message is not clear let me repeat that it costs IRISS only £160 per year to provide access to more than 100 films of exceptional educational value. The cost of burning the films to DVD or renting a dedicated server and testing playback on the various mobile devices would far exceed this sum.

This ‘blocked access’ message is commonplace in local authorities, and indeed in government – despite Civil Service guidelines which encourage more liberal access to social media in the workplace :

Most staff can be trusted to use these technologies appropriately if they are aware of the constraints and the risks. And appropriate line management intervention may, in some cases, be a better solution than tighter technical controls that hinder business use.

( as quoted in a previous Just Do It! post)

The fact that the message advises the user to present ‘valid business reason’ may be of some comfort, but surely this just creates hassle and adds to administrative overhead costs?

As noted in previous blog post the  Christie Commission urged public bodies to be more creative and forward looking in its use of ICT:

…the public sector, at all levels, can do more to transform how it procures, manages and uses digital technology to drive better public service delivery.

What this means in practice is that if third parties, such as IRISS, adopt cost effective technologies to deliver educational materials online, local authorities are swimming against the tide by routinely blocking access to such technologies.