What, asks Steph Gray in his Postbureaucrat blog, holds people back from using digital tools and techniques at work?
- Do they need someone to tell them what Twitter is for?
- Or does the system block it and their boss disapprove?
- Maybe the press office runs a tight ship on the corporate channels and other people don’t know or dare to do it themselves
Followers of Just Do It will know that this question has been troubling us for some time too. After observing the Department of Work and Pensions Digital Academy, Steph has concluded that there are just two things needed to get change going in large organisations: attitude and critical mass.
Attitude picks the fights, and critical mass wins them
So we need individuals unwilling to put up with bad ways of doing things and a group of these rebels large enough that their ‘energy can be harnessed, opportunities taken, occasional failures accepted, and the crucial sense of inevitability created’.
Digital Leaders Scotland touched on a similar topic at a Salon event on whether security was an enabler or barrier to digital services. The Salon report notes that trust more than security is the problem: the NHS trusts people to do all sort of things, such as open heart surgery, but gets twitchy about people using Twitter (echoes here of the oft quoted former Deputy Chief Constable Gordon Scobbie ‘We trust you with a baton and with the right to take away someone’s liberty, I think we can trust you with a Twitter account’). This despite evidence from people like Michael Seres who has demonstrated beyond question how social media can be used for effective and efficient communication between doctor and patient.
The discussion heard that moves to towards a more trusting regime were hampered by reports, again from the NHS, saying things like ‘online social networks are by their very nature home grown and ungovernable … universal blocking may seem like the best approach’. That looks like a fight waiting to be picked!
Just Do It will be attending a couple of events next month. The first, on 5 June, is another Salon Event: Digital Participation – whose responsibility is this, and how can we make it happen? The second is the SCVO (Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations) Digital Scotland Festival on 16 June.
Let’s hope we find some some people with attitude and enough of them create that crucial sense of inevitability.