Web 2.0 Adoption by the Federal Government Shouldn’t be a Surprise

June 24th, 2008 by Julia Lim

Driving back from the dentist today, I was listening to a WTOP story about the adoption of Web 2.0 by the government. With half my mouth numb from being shot up with anesthetics, I decided this was the perfect time to do a blog post on this.

Back at the FOSE show in April, we conducted a survey and one of the questions asked was about Web 2.0 usage. Honestly, we expected low adoption of these kinds of collaborative and often very public communications tools and were very surprised by the results.

Over 65% of government IT workers surveyed said that Web 2.0 tools are important to their operations. 20% were currently using things like wikis, blogs and RSS feeds with over 50% more planning on having these tools in place by next year.

Our take: many of the Web 2.0 tools are cheap or even free. Of course there are some server and maintenance costs, but the costs of Web 2.0 solutions are a drop in the bucket compared to other federal IT projects. You’ve heard the stories. Most of these tools are easy to get up and running and don’t require extensive training to be an active user.

Basically, our expectation of low adoption was rooted in the idea that the federal government would have more policies, i.e., restrictions, around usage and tighter controls around content and the dissemination of information. Interestingly, I just met someone who worked in the Air Force’s public affairs office at BlogPotomac, a local social media event. He told me that he was there because the Air Force already had multiple blogs across what is obviously a very big organization, but that there was no single policy around blogging. Surprising and the opposite of what we thought.

Perhaps in the end, the ease and speed of adoption and the speed of social media conversations are outstripping the agencies’ ability to get in front of them. And that’s a big lesson learned for agencies and enterprises alike.

Another note: check out this presentation by Chris Rasmussen, Knowledge Management Officer, Intellipedia, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Department of Defense (yes, that’s the title they published for him) from FCW’s Spring Government CIO Summit on the use of social media software within the US intelligence community. It’s pretty funny and has nuggets of good info for anyone looking at adopting these tools.

Guess what? Government agency management and communications officers have the same issues and fears that enterprises do. What if people give away (trade) secrets? What if people drop the “f-bomb”? Possibly the funniest thing in the recording of Rasmussen’s presentation is when he shares the “worst” blog comment that he got on Intellipedia where someone likens him to traitors like Chris Hansen…for doing a blog.

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