The Future is Young...

Information Technology managers have to deal with "new" often as technology itself changes daily, but as the work force gets younger, IT managers also have to deal with "young".

The challenge, in my mind, is going to be how to "Manage IT", but provide the resources and creative outlets to meet the demands of the next "young" generation. The generation growing up in the socially connected world of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, and beyond... WAY beyond in fact as new ways to communicate and work are added every day. Where time at work and time at play have no clean edges. Sometimes that is good - the melding of personal communication and work skills at least in the Government world where MORE transparency, collaboration, and participation is not only desired but ENCOURAGED and not only for our citizens and customers of the government, but for it's employees as well.

"UnManaging" Managed IT

For those that have managed networks, systems, applications and Internet access for very long, you know the challenges faced to keep that balance - Secured and controlled, but not restraining. Of course 'restraining' seems to be quite relative depending upon if you are "in" IT or not. To some not being able to spend all work day on Myspace, Facebook and Youtube IS 'restraining', for others anything besides official "approved" websites is insubordination. Finding the balance both technically and administratively is one of the bigger challenges I see facing IT and management in the future.


Obviously you have to empower your employees, citizens and customers to use the modern tools of communicating and getting things done while insuring all this is done without wasted time, resources, and money. Letting things "be free" while not giving away the farm... or City... or country in the process. A place where fewer FILTERED SITE ACCESS LOGGED screens are encountered but more productivity is obtained through true collaboration and communication.

But it takes more than just empowering citizens and employees to use social media tools to do their job better, it also takes the mature use of those tools by employees AND citizens for the betterment of the entity, not just the enjoyment and entertainment of the employee or the anonymous bashing of public officials or entities by the Citizens.

Can it be done? Sure. HOW can it be done? Not sure..... yet.

It should be very interesting in the next few years as "Gov2.0" concepts take over the historically bland world of local, state, and national governments entities.


Stay tuned - the ride should be worth watching.

-Stephen W Nolen

Working in Government

Working in Government is different. I've spent 18 years in government one way or another and I can personally attest to the differences between government and private enterprise. Many are good, many are bad but it is different.

While working in government you always have a mission, a very important one in fact, of providing critical services to the Citizens of your city/state/tribe or nation in one way or another. Unlike private entities where the almighty dollar (or Yen, Euro, Peso, whatever...) is the driving factor, government has a clearly defined goal of helping those you work for and are one of. Sure businesses have owners and stock holders but again the dollar is the driver. They have customers as well which is the closest connection to citizens in a government but it still is different, the customer is the means for the dollar. In government, the customers, i.e. citizens, are point of your existence. Governments have citizens that literally depend upon you and your job as a government employee for their living standards, their safety, their water, sewer or even their life.

It seems a large number of the general public seem to think that "government workers" sit around all day long and just waste their taxpaying money but from eighteen years I've seen much different. Sure there are the time wasters, but I would imagine any business you look at has the same situation. There is also silo building where one department has deemed themselves more important to the mission than others and try to force issues one way or another. But overall, if your average citizen could spend a day or two shadowing a public servant, I believe they would be satisfied with what happens every day just to keep your city, state, nation or tribal government running. Is there waste in government operations? Sure there is. Is there waste in the corporate world? Just look at the current 'bail out' efforts.

It still irks me when some friend, family member or stranger makes the blanket statement of "the government" did this to them or "the government" did that to someone. Inside I'm thinking, "Hey, I may be THAT GOVERNMENT" that you despise and you have no clue what you are talking about.

More on Change

Recently I commented on 'change' and the point of insuring that Good Change is what is accomplished when change is demanded. If 'change' is presented as a platform it works quite well for those promoting themselves since each one of us then creates our very own image of what that 'change' may be. Our vision of the change may, or more likely may not, reflect the intent of those pressing for 'change'.

Over the years of being in Government I have seen many 'changes' - most elections rally on the 'need for change' platform during the campaign process. Many have no clue what they are going to change but we just 'need change'. I have watched great talented individuals with wonderful abilities in government be forced out because 'change' was demanded only to see the 'winners' of such battles later realize they have no clue what to change.

It is true that either you "change or you die" or "you grow or you die" - I work in the technology field so change, growth, and technology death is a daily occurrence. You truly due change or die in this field. But when people demand 'change', they need to define what change they want or they will be right back where they started and everyone will be demanding 'change' again.

Worth it...

To me, all in all working in government allows me to go home after work with the thought that I helped in some small, large, or medium way, to make things better for the citizens of the government I work for and not some top executive or stock holder wealthier. That in itself is a satisfaction that cannot be measured by any stock ticker.

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Tweeting Local Government: Revisited - Results and Tools

Having discussed using Twitter in a local government operation before and now having things running for a few weeks I thought I would follow up on the subject. I setup the Twitter accounts for the local municipal government, the City of Shawnee, Oklahoma, automated some of the postings using various pieces of our website, found some online tools that make it easier to review/manage the accounts, and have just watched the activity. Nothing awesome or wonderful to report but steady results have followed. I thought I would follow up on how I accomplished what we've done so far and the tools used. There should be a local newspaper story in mid-February which I hope will increase the local awareness of what we are doing and help participation.

Online tools used...

TweetLater.com
For those notices that need to be sent out at a later date such as notices for Commission Meeting broadcast, planning sessions, or general reoccurring news and information, we use TweetLater.com. TweetLater lets you manage multiple Twitter accounts and schedule future tweets across one or more accounts. TweetLater will also scan for any @Replies to your accounts and send hourly notices which allows you to be notified of replies but not have to constantly monitor the feeds. If you want to follow all those that follow you, you can enable the auto-follow feature that can also send a welcome to the follower. At this time we are not following those that follow us from the 'big brother' feeling it may present to some. As our follower base grows, we will poll in the future to see what their opinion of being followed by the ShawneePD, ShawneeFD, of Cityof ShawneeOK are and make changes if applicable. I have not figured out if TweetLater has an API to allow feeding/posting scheduled tweets automatically from outside of their website but we can work around that for now.

Twitrak.com
I use Twitrak.com to get a full overview of the followers and any friends we are following on one page. The Friend / Follower layout works fine for me and the interface is easy enough to use. Plus the WallTrak is just kind of fun to play with.

Splitweet.com
For real time monitoring of the City of Shawnee accounts, Splitweet.com works well. It allows the monitoring of multiple Twitter accounts and the ability to Tweet across one or more in real time if desired. Splitweet auto-refreshes every minute or so and tracks 'brand mentions' and @Replies making it much easier to manage multiple Twitter accounts. Splitweet has a fun interface that is laid out well and easy to use. If you manage multiple Twitter accounts it can be quite useful for real-time activity.

Now on to the custom tools used...

CADCom - Computer Aided Dispatch Communicator

"How are are you posting those Police and Fire calls?"

That is a common question about the service. This is accomplished by a custom portion of the Shawnee Twitter engine developed in-house. It actually is a simple internal Active Server Page (ASP) that reloads every minute, checks the CAD database for new calls, checks to see if the Twitter accounts are to Tweet those calls and then sends the Tweets if needed.

The CADCom application was originally developed to allow Police, Fire, City employees and citizens to sign up for localized call notices through email. The user selects which call types to be notified, what time of day to be alerted, and an optional location center and radius to be alerted if the call was in that area. The application has not been pushed out for public use yet even though it was written years ago but should see the light of day in 2009.

By setting up the ShawneePD, ShawneeFD, and CityofShawneeOK twitter accounts up as CADCom 'users', and adding the bit of code that says Tweet these calls instead of emailing them the solution was born.

Integration with News, Agenda, Jobs postings
With the open API that Twitter provides, it makes it quite easy to integrate with web site code and we have used that to our advantage to automate postings. News releases that are posted by City employees to the front of the website can automatically Tweeted for the main City account with the headline and a link back to the front page. When Minutes or Agenda documents are posted to the website the information is Tweeted as well allowing citizens to easily follow what is available without having to manually check the RSS feed or the site.

We already email out job posting notifications but will add Tweets of the openings in the near future since the process is quite simple once the PostTwitter() function was built. With this function in place we can actually Tweet out anything of importance from the websites and will be reviewing and developing more solutions as they are uncovered.

Another feature that will be added in the near future is a basic 'Tweeting Page' for employees to post Tweets to the various accounts directly from their desktops. This avoids having to share the account passwords and allows Police, Fire and other employees to post short bursts of information from their desktops.

Closing...

There are the basics of what I have done in regard to Tweeting Local Government for the City of Shawnee, Oklahoma. Even without the custom code that auto-Tweets activity, local governments can use the free online Tweeting tools to keep their citizens better informed with little effort and no other costs.

Citizens should challenge local governments to look around at the options they have to help keep their citizens better informed and use those technologies whenever they can.

-Stephen W Nolen

Twittering Away Local Government

How should a local government use Twitter, the micro blogging service that has gained so much popularity? Should it be 1.0 broadcast only? Should it be totally 2.0 interactive or should it be somewhere in the middle? Or should Twitter even be in the mix for local governments?

Some time ago I setup a simple Twitter account for the local government I work for to use as a test for keeping people up to date without them having to check our RSS feed, sign up for a notification system, or visit our site. Right now it is a test, no publicity, no front page story, just testing the waters. The @CityofShawneeOK account picked up a few followers just based on our location but we haven't done much with the account yet. The long(er) term plan is to use the account for notifications when formal meeting Agendas and Minutes are posted, when local news is updated on the main website or when general information needs to be sent out to concerned citizens.

More recently I added some code to an internal notification program I wrote that is used to update key people inside our local government via email, when certain types of Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) or 9-1-1 calls come in, to allow posting to a Twitter account. The accounts @ShawneePD and @ShawneeFD push out certain Police and Fire related calls and updates. This is basically the same process used at the Charlette NC South police department. My solutions builds on the CADCOM (Computer Aided Dispatch COMmunicator) program I build a few years ago but never fully implemented.

Then I read THIS ARTICLE and now I question the initial concept, or at least the total concept. Obviously push only is not what Twitter is necessarily about, although it is often used that way. I like to see the activity come up in my Twitter window better than email and I can easily determine if mobile notifications are desired through my Twitter profile setup for those accounts.

However, my current concept seems to break all the rules of Top 5 Ways to Screw up your Corp Twitter account so is the solution useful at all?

Comments anyone - Should we Twitter away Local Government or not?

What else in a local government could Twitter be used for?