Online Social Networking & Business Collaboration World - Government stream

Phillip Bower, Director of Midrange Architecture, Centrelink

[NOTE: these are notes, not verbatim]

Centrelink:
6.5 million clients
27,000 staff
5 portals: customer, staff, business, human services, national emergency

Digitisation vision:
Customer centric model, speed and accuracy of decision-making, not limited by geography.

It’s all paper based at the moment, though a major direction is digitising the flow. There are many massive warehouses full of paper.

Part of the Digitisation strategy is to use collaboration tools. But people shudder when you mention social networks.

Digitisation goals:
Distribute work across Australia to available resources (National Queue)
Provide better services
Automate more processes
Develop and deliver services quicker
Reduce paper

Easy identification and contact of previous step processing staff
Communities of knowledge sharing and decision making
Collaboration

To do this are implementing Lotus Connections as an off-the-shelf software solution
Creating staff profiles – giving them an identity and enable them to find others
Retrieve data from multiple sources to build a staff member profile
Will move to new capabilities of Connections, including social bookmarking
Have set up Lotus Connections client on Blackberry (all senior execs have them)

Why implement collaboration tools?
Connect geographically dispersed teams
Provide new generation staff with familiar tools
Integrate multiple systems into a single interface
Give staff easier access to content and experts
Enhance Service Delivery speed and accuracy

For successful implementation:
Organisational support
Come to terms with what future staff are going to expect to use in their communication – otherwise they will go elsewhere
Understand how staff currently communicate and get communicated to
Awareness of organisation’s future geographic positioning

Presence functionality allows people to IM or videoconference when colleagues are available

Staff profiles allow people to edit their ‘About Me’
There is an ongoing debate on whether people can add any tags to their profile, or choose from a pre-populated list – however tagging will allow you to find people far more easily than before, particularly in a very large organization such as Centrelink
The ‘Report to chain’ function on the profile allows you to know who people report to – it can be very useful internally.
Also has social bookmarking, which shows ‘your links’ of what you have noted

E-GOVERNMENT PANEL

Dheeraj Chowdhury, Department of Education NSW (DC)
Paul Salvati, smartservice Queensland (PS)
Phillip Bower, Centrelink (PB)

PS: First point is fear from senior government people about collaborating externally.

PB: Across government it is very difficult. Government organizations need to identify how they want to collaborate and exchange information. It’s a lot harder for collaboration with smaller agencies, that don’t have the resources or interest in collaboration. So how can the bigger agencies deal with

DC: There are a few perspectives on the opportunities. First is the ability to reduce cost in communicating with customers. Traditional media is using these tools to engage with their clientele. We call fear ‘duty of care’, particularly for our students.

PS: The driving force should be how engage with our customers. The citizens and the public are telling us that they want to engage with us in new ways.

PB: It’s all about how we’re providing a better service to the customer. Do we start opening up to the agencies that own the policies that we’re implementing?

PB: Australia.gov.au should be the centre of initiatives to link the community to government.

DC: Brickipedia is an initiative for building community. Industry and association can update issues online. Sharing learning resources is not part of the Dept of Education now, but social bookmarking is allowing sharing to be embedded into how we work.

PB: Should we provide collaboration tools as Software as a Service? This would make it easier for government departments to implement this. Government is a hell of a long way behind.