Uncle Sam wants to share: Social Collaboration in the Public Sector.

The public sector is leading the charge in adopting collaborative technologies. Why?

1. They are mission focused – their goal is not profit, but service. In the case of the real leaders and innovators, the military and intelligence communities, their mission is life and death. They are keen to embrace methods and technologies that further the mission.

2. They are complex bureaucracies – the Federal government employs some 200,000 people. Policies and processes can be complex and less than agile. People within these bureaucracies must rely on their knowledge and relationships to improve effectiveness.

3. They must do more with less. The mission of government rarely shrinks, but their resources do. The resourcefulness and dedication of civil servants is what drives them ever forward.

4. The leadership of these agencies recognizes the talent within and the complexity of the mission.

5. Obama told them to. He’s demanding a new perspective of government effectiveness and how technology can enable it.

So – who’s sharing what? A very short list of examples, pulled from a very long list of initiatives:

1. The intelligence community is sharing via A-Space and Intellipedia, and its next generation, Intellipublia, among other initiatives.

2. The army is sharing via The Warfighters Forum and has instituted a set of 12 Principles to support collaborative, knowledge-growing, organizations.

3. The State Department is working to get embassy personnel up to speed quickly and retain knowledge as they rotate through different assignments with Diplopedia.

4. The Navy is using Tripwire, among other tools.

There are a dozen more great examples of government adopting collaborative concepts and technologies. What are they hoping to gain?

1. Effectiveness

2. Situational awareness

3. Retention and reuse of work, knowledge, process and capability.

4. Leveraging the full passion of committed employees.

Join me on Friday at 1pm eastern time for a review of how some of Open Text’s latest technology helps meet these objectives with an easy to use, easy to deploy application to support collaboration in the public and commercial sectors. Go ahead and register here.

I hope to hear from you on this webinar, and here, on this blog about your challenges, successes and questions about how social collaboration can make your organization more effective.