1. R I C H A R D B O LY ( @ B EAU R I C H LY )
U. S . STAT E D E PA RT M E N T, O F F I C E O F E D I P LO M AC Y
8 M AY 2 0 1 3
P H I L A D E L P H I A
So Powerful on the Web,
So Lame at Work
2. About Your Speaker, Richard Boly . . .
Career Diplomat
Director of eDiplomacy
Founded and ran a shrimp hatchery in coastal Ecuador
Helped launch the first Apple Macintosh
Innovator in risk-averse environments
3. What to Expect
Signs of Collaboration Tipping Point
KM vs. KL
Getting Started
Cloud vs. Behind-the-Firewall
First Steps
• Little Bets
• Pain Points
• Cultivating Advocates
Handling the “Incumbents”
Realistic Expectations
21. Content With Conversation
Blogs are great for . . .
Replacing newsletter
Change management (rumor control)
Cross-over commonalities (bicyclists, runners,
newcomers, etc.)
Humanizing leadership
On-ramp for the “voiceless”
25. Ideation . . .
Turning water cooler conversation into action
Requires credible follow-through
Double-edged sword
Companies do this better with customers than
with the employees
27. Internal Networking Platform
Find Expertise in Unexpected People:
How digital natives work
Personalized profiles
Freely form groups
Link to work output
Link to personal interests
Make serendipity routine.
The U.S. State Department is the oldest federal cabinet level agencyDiplomats are risk averse, by design
Once diplomacy moved at the pace of wax sealed diplomatic notes sent between embassies and foreign ministries.But as the world’s communication moved from the speed of snail mail to the speed of electrons . . .
… the rest of the world was moving at the speed of electrons. The results of this disconnect were . . .
. . . disastrous.
"Bondi Blue" iMac G3,
State kept Wang on life support
Nothing begets success like failure. It took three big ones to ignite the spark that led to the State Department's Office of eDiplomacy. following the 1998 bombings of American embassies in East Africa, when a blue-ribbon commission pointed out that State needed to do much, much better at sharing knowledge and communicating with other foreign affairs agencies. 9/11, which underscored that knowledge-sharing had become a critical, government-wide necessity for national security. was an expensive flop at addressing the first two; State's proposed online foreign affairs collaboration zone received no buy-in from other agencies or from State's users, who found the system too complex. So, State set up eDiplomacy in 2002 to do three things; give State's end users a voice in IT decision-making;improve communication and collaboration within State and with foreign affairs partner agencies; and design and implement a better ways to share knowledge and information.
What are your top methods for sharing information? Discussion forums (listserv)? email? meetings? phone? audio/video conference? IM?Does a clogged email inbox take more of your time than the rest combined?Not persistent, not discoverable, not very 2.0Informational v. transactional
Institutional knowledge based on a centralized taxonomy and organizational “data-basements” don’t work and never will.Social software has transformed how we retain, share and find information.
Your IT team will say, “we have a solution which integrates into the rest of our tools.”But it requires too much training and things just don’t work like they do on the web.David WeinbergerOpen structure and open permissions
Find an institutional home.Ad hoc efforts, without roots won’t have the staying powerIf the organization won’t commit the resources, don’t bother
Your network security and information assurance teams will drive this decision, as will the technical strengths of your team.State Department didn’t have an option . . . Behind the firewall for us
Make little bets on clearly defined pain points.Design thinking helpsWhere are work arounds common?Where is morale low?Where has email broken down as a core tool?Where are the innovators?
Ideation tools ARE NOT suggestion boxes!But management must be committed to hearing and in some cases acting (or empowering others) to actMeaningful tags: - community review - in the works – actively being implemented - under consideration – official review - in planning - on hold - not currently feasible - on the shelf (may be reconsidered later) - already available - DIY - building block (helped inform other action) - completed
Proven enterprise valueMakes serendipity happenFind expertise where it exists, not just were it is expectedRight person for the right taskFaster collaboration
Grassroots requestNo direct top coverSurveyPlatformWildly collaborative with ALL stakeholdersAlpha, beta launchesSplashy video launch
Amazon’s Mechanical TurkState Department’s Virtual Student Foreign Service Digital natives resist being pinned to their desk, with finite tasksThe cognitive surplus is being spent on Mafia Wars and Farmville, but also saving lives online after disaster (Haiti) and helping NASA map MarsTap into your internal (and external crowd)
Amazon’s Mechanical TurkState Department’s Virtual Student Foreign Service Digital natives resist being pinned to their desk, with finite tasksThe cognitive surplus is being spent on Mafia Wars and Farmville, but also saving lives online after disaster (Haiti) and helping NASA map MarsTap into your internal (and external crowd)
Can leadership hear that they are wrong?Can leadership face the embarrassment that their rank and file disagree?Google’s notable useHP’s successful useThe Policy Analysis Market (PAM), part of the FutureMAP project, was a proposed futures exchange developed by DARPA -- Congressional pressure caused it to be shut down.
Videracy, not only for a subsetWhat can be a video, will be a video