The Knowledge Worker Desktop.

The Obama Administration has taken a number of initiatives to deliver on the campaign promise to bring more transparency and openness to government.

One of the latest initiatives receiving a lot of attention is described below. It encourages all stakeholders to participate in shaping the way government communicates about its work and outlines how the private sector and ordinary citizens can provide input to the process.

Below are excerpts from the Office of Science and Technology Policy filed 5/20/09 (FR Doc. 2009-12026):
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The White House is looking for help formulating a directive on open government:

Executive Office of the President
Office of Science and Technology Policy

SUMMARY: The President’s January 21, 2009, memorandum entitled, Transparency and Open Government, directed the Chief Technology Officer, in coordination with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the General Services Administration (GSA), to develop a set of recommendations that will inform an Open Government Directive. This directive will be issued by OMB and will instruct executive departments and agencies on specific actions to implement the principles set forth in the Presidents memorandum. Members of the public are invited to participate in the process of developing recommendations via email or the White House website at http://www.whitehouse.gov/open offering comments, ideas, and proposals about possible initiatives and about how to increase openness and transparency in government.

DATES: Comments must be received by June 19, 2009.
ADDRESSES: Submit comments by one of the following methods:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/open
E-mail: opengov@ostp.gov
Mail: Office of Science and Technology Policy, Attn: Open Government
Recommendations, 725 17th Street, ATTN: Jim Wickliffe, Washington, DC 20502.

The President outlined three principles for promoting a transparent and open government:

• Transparency promotes accountability and provides information to citizens about what their Government is doing.
• Participation enhances the Government’s effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions by tapping knowledge that is widely dispersed in society.
• Collaboration harnesses innovative tools, methods, and systems to promote cooperation across all levels of Government and with the private sector.

The Presidential Memorandum requests recommendations to inform an OMB Directive that will instruct executive departments and agencies on specific actions to implement the three principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration.

The purpose of this Federal Register notice is to solicit public participation in the development of those recommendations. There is a great deal of dispersed information among the nation’s citizens.

With twenty-first century tools, the United States is in a unique position to take advantage of that dispersed information to inform the policymaking process. Our goal is to use the principles of open government to obtain fresh ideas about open government itself.

Comments on open government may relate to government-wide or agency-specific policy, project ideas, and relevant examples. Comments may address law, policy, technology, culture, and practice on issues such as:

• What government information should be more readily available on-line or more easily searched?
• How might the operations of government be made more transparent and accountable?
• How might federal advisory committees, rulemaking, or electronic rulemaking be better used to improve decision making?
• What alternative models exist to improve the quality of decision making and increase opportunities for citizen participation?
• What are the limitations to transparency?
• What strategies might be employed to adopt greater use of Web 2.0 in agencies?
• What policy impediments to innovation in government currently exist?
• What changes in training or hiring of personnel would enhance innovation?
• What performance measures are necessary to determine the effectiveness of open government policies?

This public process is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.
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The full report can be found at http://www.federalregister.gov/OFRUpload/OFRData/2009-12026_PI.pdf

The FY 2010 budget request has in an accompanying document an entire section referring to “Government 2.0” – including transparency, participation and collaboration – see page 143 in this PDF version http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2010/assets/crosscutting.pdf .

This debate will intensify and cBrain will certainly follow this closely and provide input based upon the experiences we have had with our “Knowledge Worker Desktop” concept implemented within several governmental agencies.

How do governmental agencies help the public locate relevant information online and make more informed decision about services available AND at the same time navigate the fine line between privacy and serving the public efficiently?

Vivek Kundra, Obama’s new federal CIO, in April 2009 moderated a panel discussion where one of the questions Kundra asked was how governmental agencies are helping the public make more informed decisions about public services based on information available online.

According to nextgov.com Kundra used the analogy of a grocery store where studies of consumers’ buying patterns have shown that consumers buying milk most often also buy bread. Therefore store shelves are arranged so these items are placed closely together.

For the public sector, Kundra referred to this kind of process as “context-driven government” where how citizens search and retrieve information about public services could be monitored and analyzed to drive better policies and improve the way information is made available.

Providing public service to citizens, almost anticipating their wishes would seem to be a major improvement of the online experience – that is what Amazon is famous for. BUT will people be happy to know that their behavior is being monitored, analyzed and profiled by the government just like Amazon does for people’s buying habits?

I think we can find the balance between privacy, transparency and public service to the citizens and the term “context-driven government” just might catch on as an important concept that can reduce cost and provide better service to the non-trivial cases.

This concept of “context-driven government” will also apply to governmental white collar workers dealing with these non-trivial cases and free up the time and resources for them to concentrate on the non-trivial cases of citizen’s requests and complains.

Our “Knowledge Worker Desktop” concept is context-driven by the nature of the cases presented to the case worker.

This will be discussed and described in this blog over the next few months and it appears to be very much in line with Vivek Kundra’s thinking as we interpret his words.

We could be in for a new phase of governmental productivity improvements that will leapfrog what we have seen of incremental improvements over the last 10-15 years.

Many work routines for white collar workers within government and business enterprises (Customer Relationship Management, Employee Hiring and Case Management are examples) have common issues when people need to collaborate and share information along a timeline with milestones and deadlines galore.

Traditional software tools for white collar workers today are not integrated.

Often the process of archiving information (emails, documents, notes, etc.) is a separate work routine after the work has been performed involving the knowledge worker deciding what to archive and what META data to add for the purpose of later information search and retrieval.

New integrated productivity tools like the Knowledge Worker Desktop are automating the archiving process and assuring that META data are derived automatically from the context of the work performed and NOT as a separate after-the-fact process. This has shown major improvements in productivity and quality of work.

Regulatory compliance (Sarbanes-Oxley, FRCP and HIPAA) demands that companies establish and maintain an adequate internal control structure and procedure for their business processes and for Sarbanes-Oxley also control points for their financial reporting.

The kitchen sink approach to archiving everything will NOT work. Archiving and indexing according to content (words and phrases) is better. BUT automatically archiving and indexing emails and documents (WORD, EXCEL, POWERPOINT, PDFs, E-Mails, IMs, etc.) according to context is the only viable way to ensure that you later can actually produce messages and documents that someone considers legally material, a term often referred to as eDiscovery.

Again, integration is the key driver of this paradigm shift .