The Knowledge Worker Desktop.

The Obama administration has embarked on several bold initiatives in how it interacts with the public.

Less than a week ago it launched data.gov described this way: “The purpose of www.data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable data sets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.

What seems unique to the approach is to ask the public to participate in the development of the site and engage in the evolution of the site – in other words launching a governmental site that will be very dynamic in nature and acknowledging that not all information is available from day one – see the tutorial here.

Terms such as “Government 2.0” and “Context-driven Governmental Services” has been introduced by the administration using layman’s term and with refreshingly straight forward guidelines and tutorials.

Another initiative is http://usaspending.gov (a re-launch of www.fedspending.org) which is described as allowing citizen to verify “when, with whom, and on what the US Government is spending taxpayer funds”. Data will be made available in such a way that users will be able to “combine them into different data sets, conduct analysis and research, or power new information-based products and businesses”.

The third one is www.recovery.gov, which applies the same principles as usaspending.gov to the tracking of funds coming from the Stimulus Package.

The White House document issued together with FY 2010 budget request says that “the Federal IT agenda is focused on helping agencies use developing technologies to inform the work of Government” and “Agencies will be called upon to take creative action in developing new approaches to citizen involvement, including the utilization of social and visual technologies, such as Web 2.0 tools”.

Very little information has been revealed about the tools available to the governmental white collar workers. They will need superior tools to help them live up to the public service expectations created.

We believe that our proven “Knowledge Worker Desktop” concept could be a big help in delivering that public service. We believe our concept can empower the governmental employees to be at the center of this government transformation and make them an active part of the innovation process needed.

Stay tuned for more information about this in future postings on this blog.

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.

Enterprise 2.0 as a concept has gained a lot of momentum since Andrew McAfee from Harvard University (http://andrewmcafee.org/blog/) coined the term a few short years ago. Today there is even a separate exhibition for Enterprise 2.0 – http://www.e2conf.com – with a lot of serious attention and money being paid to the concept.

Enterprise 2.0 has often been described as social software or so-called WEB 2.0 for the enterprise (inside the firewall). AIIM (http://www.aiim.org/What-is-Web-2.0.aspx) defines it as “a system of web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise”.

In contrast to traditional legacy enterprise software, which imposes structure prior to use, enterprise social software as we know it today tends for the most part to encourage use prior to providing structure.

Obviously with FRCP, Sarbanes-Oxley and other compliance issues this is a conflict and corporate management might feel under legal obligation to control and at least monitor the internal communication in order to hold people accountable for their actions communicated to others using Enterprise 2.0 tools.

Now, the question is if this is not all due to the lack of proper tools for today’s white collar knowledge worker?

And will we see Enterprise 2.0 evolve in a similar pattern to when ERP evolved from a bundle of best-of-breed point solutions to fully integrated ERP packages?

We think so and will cover our experiences, opinions and observations in this blog – stay tuned.

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 .