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.
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