In today's knowledge economy, during an unprecedented time of economic crisis, current public sector practices, resources, and skills are challenged as never before. We have a multigenerational society that continues to diversify and be more distributed geographically. Increasingly, people who are strangers to one another are gathering in communities to produce value for each other. The volume of data, information, and ideas that we produce and consume is rising exponentially. Our carbon footprint and energy costs are rising.
Expectations of service and response times and communications have radically increased. Yet according to a Sage Research report, with the average business person using more than six different types of (unintegrated) communications devices, more than one-third of the time we can’t reach someone on the first try, resulting in delays and missed deadlines. The net result is that we waste about 13 percent of our time weekly.
All the while, our financial, cultural, and human capital resources continue to be flat, causing a growing "gap." This gap may only widen when considering the Gartner Group's prediction that by 2015, workers will spend more than 80 percent of their time working collaboratively, and only a small portion of collaborative work will be done at the same time in the same place.
To deal with this gap today and our growing collaborative culture of information, people, buildings, and devices, we need a new business model that integrates collaboration as a business process. This collaboration model converges process, technology, and our 21st century culture. It has become an imperative if the public sector is to deliver timely, interactive, personalized service to citizens where they live, not in government offices.
This collaboration model is the convergence of all forms of communications into experiences that accelerate productivity and decision making at any time, in any place, on any device. It empowers not just today's mobile workforce but also our connected devices and our citizens, who themselves are moving beyond self-service to become participatory designers and deliverers of the very services they and their neighbors need.
This model is measurable, business-case based, and a clear driver of performance. Consider the value and return-on-investment:
- Saving time to reach coworkers, citizens, and suppliers: Presence information for individuals, visible on an IP phone, PC, or mobile phone, shows whether people are currently available and how they prefer to be reached, eliminating time spent dialing multiple phone numbers and leaving messages. This accelerates decision making and normal and emergency response times and reduces case durations.
- Reducing travel time, costs, and environmental impact: Collaboration tools like Cisco WebEx, IP video phones, and TelePresence reduce travel requirements to support green initiatives in government, while actually increasing collaboration.
- Enhancing citizen interaction: Agencies can take advantage of integrated, interactive, collaboration technologies like wikis and discussion boards, Cisco WebEx, and IP contact centers to make it easier for citizens to obtain information and services, create new ones themselves, and solve each other's problems. Citizen self-service reduces contact center staffing requirements and costs.
- Providing a recruitment and retention advantage: A new generation of employees accustomed to instant messaging and social networking sites already works with advanced communication and collaboration technologies. These same technologies allow the expertise and experience of transitioning generations to keep in contact, mentor, and deliver critical knowledge inventories on-demand from remote and mobile locations.
In another post soon I'll examine the collaboration model, looking at its key dimensions and how to manage it in an organization.
Comments
I am a great fan of presence - the ability to know who is online and how best to contact them - and think there are lots of applications in the public sector - from being able to query what some case notes meant with the person who actually wrote them to a social worker having a quick word with the last co-worker who had contact with a particular family just before a visit to them. The two most obvious barriers are:
1) even more information overload - how do I focus when people are constantly getting in touch because they see I am online and I once did something or am an expert on X etc
2) fear of management big brother - people (and unions) will resist any new technology that highlights and records when they are available and what they are doing during all their working hours.
I suppose both issues are cultural and will get sorted out in time, but from my experience this is a fairly typical public sector reaction at least to the idea of presence.
posted over 2 years ago
Interesting point - i suspect that, in many countries, the potential resistance to the collaboration model that Gerald has outlined, and its implications, could well be much fiercer than we think. Perhaps the evolution of the model will be accelerated to the extent the discussion more openly engages the potential risks and how they might be confronted.
posted over 2 years ago
I like your case for a ccomprehensive ollaboration model, so much so that I joined and became a member here.
What I understand as the bottom line is that you say "we should lower the cost of collaboration because collaboration is a basic need and form of public interaction in the 21st century" - and lowering the cost is a business model. I'm looking forward to hearing more about it.
I've linked to your post and commented on it over in my own blog. Please do check it out.
posted over 2 years ago
Diagoal, I am glad you liked Gerald's post and signed up. From your blog it looks like you are interested in collaboration between citizens and public sector organisations, while I think Gerald is probably more focussed on collaboration within public sector organisations and between them. But I suppose collaboration is pretty important in all directions!
posted over 2 years ago
Diagoal, thanks for the comment and link (I liked your own blog).
Yes, but we should not only lower collaboration's costs, we need to understand how to manage it as a fundamental business strategy. We have learned that collaboration has ""dimensions" that once an organization understands, it can use as levers to drive business productivity. Paul and msweeks comments also illustrate a key perspective in managing these dimensions - culture. Culture is as much a part of managing collaboration as anything else, pehaps even more so given the dynamics and diversity of this era's multi-generational workforce.
My last point to Paul's last post is that collaboration is connecting Us (with a capital U), everything, not just people or organizations, but all of Us in this connected world of people, places, devices, organizations, etc. So our citizens, consumers, places, and devices are as much a part of the design and delivery process as they are of its consumption.
posted over 2 years ago