I’ve been reading a fantastic book recommended to me by my DGM, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith. It discusses 20 habits that hold back successful people and key behavioural changes that can help overcome them. One behaviour discussed is listening, where Marshall makes the statement, 80 percent of our…
One of the challenges with the Web 2.0 phenomenon is to gather an effective picture of what Web 2.0 actually is, and how it can be applied for the benefit of your organisation and customers. It’s often a case of the Blind men and the Elephant – the view people take away is based on…
With regular changes in departmental structures across State and Federal government, there’s significantly greater need for public agencies to have the skills to manage the merger and demerger of intranets and websites than is faced in most sections of the private sector. The NSW Department of Primary Industry has taken the step of sharing some…
I really admired the efforts of our New Zealand cousins in the egovernment arena as I’ve mentioned before. One of their initiatives is their ParticipationNZ wiki, which is allowing NZ public servants to collaboratively develop, assess and reflect on the overall approach to online participation by government agencies. If your agency is considering participating in…
It can be very daunting for communications professionals to build an understanding of the social media landscape, grasping its scope and diversity and use this knowledge to select the right tools to meet their communications needs. On occasion I’ve spoken to other marketers and PR professionals who have said that the sheer diversity and complexity…
I believe that one of the keys to successful projects is to maximise time spent on the project goals and minimise time spent dealing with project tools. In the past I’ve seen projects fail or delayed due to the difficulty in managing project teams across different areas of a single organisation or, worse yet, across…
Catherine Grenfell of Step Two Designs has written an excellent article on how intranet teams should spend their time, divided between day-to-day maintenance, new projects and initiatives and relationship management with internal stakeholders. She left out one small area – networking with peers for fresh ideas and approaches to common issues. For this, the Intranet…
Prediction markets are a technique used to predict the likelihood of outcomes using values tied to events. So far they’ve proven to be at least as accurate as other predictive approaches, and significantly more engaging. A popular example is the Hollywood Stock Exchange which allows individuals using virtual money to buy and sell shares in…
In the ‘old days’ before the internet, the boundaries of government reports, brochures, fact sheets, policy statements and other discrete documents were hard and unyielding. While a document might feature several attributed quotes and some purchased stock art, all of the content was owned by the organisation that created it. This was a logical approach…
No matter how well designed, structured and written, an intranet has little value if it isn’t top of mind for your staff. One of my primary goals in managing my agency’s intranet is to ensure it remains well used – high on the list of resources used by staff when they require information or need…
This archive mirrors the original eGov AU blog — Craig’s professional commentary on AI, digital government and technology in public life, running since 2006.
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