A small startup in Waterloo is testing the waters with an online service that aims to bridge the digital-analogue divide by turning the weekly checkins, photos, tweets and blogs of social media savvy parents into a printed story sheet delivered by mail to their children's grandparents.

The service, dubbed Flockwire, is Inflolabs second attempt to closing this particular gap. The company won a number of awards with their debut offering photoflo which allowed users to send digital images directly from their computers to their grandparent's TV by deploying an interesting an inexpensive piece of equipment called Raspberry Pi. But despite testing well, the group ran into some trouble during deployment with their core demographic. Many retirement residences are still slow to adopt WiFi — the backbone delivery mechanism for the service — into their operations. The availability of WiFi, the reliability of onsite technical support and installing the hardware ultimately forced the group to rethink their offering.

I came across an interesting paper published by Deloitte called Fed Cloud; the idea of which was that the benefits of cloud computing (shared resources, cost effective, dynamically scalable) could also be realized if an organization managed it's human resources like it managed it's IT resources. It sparked a couple of things for me.

For starters the idea makes intuitive sense, but I recognize that it may never seen implementation in my life time (at least in the public sector where I earn my living). The reason it makes sense to me is that I am a gamer, and much of what underpins the idea of FedCloud is the gamification of the Human Resources system. The paper proposes a large pool of candidates to choose from, those candidates are ranked by a set of criteria and have a given set of skills. The idea would be that I would be assigned a project, assemble a team from available resources, execute, evaluate performance, release resources back to the pool and start over again. Managing a project in this way would be no different than managing my franchise in GM Mode in NHL 12 for my Xbox. Want to win the cup? Field a team, tweak it, perform (or don't) and face the consequences.

"In the age of Gov 2.0, the public served by a government program expects to see “alignment” between the policy presented by their elected leaders, the architecture of the program, and, most importantly, the user experience.

The citizens of 2011 Canada who access a government program have the same expectations for quality service as they have come to expect from their favourite shopping outlet, bank, or service provider. Today’s “consumers” don’t think consciously about these expectations — it’s what they have been trained to expect.

It should be obvious to the political and public service leaders that this is the case. But scanning the newspaper, one can quickly identify any number of current events that highlight a “misalignment” within some government service."

-- Alcide DeGagné, in Strategic & Operational Reviews: We Can't Agree to Disagree

I've spent the better part of the last five years working at the confluence of public policy, people, and technology and can say with certainty that the experts in the field agree: the proliferation of digital communication technologies is fundamentally reshaping all sectors of society. While this may be most apparent in the newspaper, music, or television industries, to think that governments are somehow immune to the changing environment is irresponsible. Thus far governments have managed to operate under the radar, espousing collaboration as the new modus operandi of the public service while hiding in the murky rhetoric of ‘doing more with less'; but frankly it’s no longer a viable option for dealing with the coming change.

Digital is different, so let's do things differently

If you don't believe me, look at what is happening across the pond in the United Kingdom where budgets are being slashed on average of 20% but up to 35% in some cases. The harsh reality, as the Brits are learning, is that they can't even afford to do more with less. Being more collaborative isn't the same thing as being innovative. Similarly, all the collaboration in the world doesn't break you out of old mental models or help you re-imagine your role in a rapidly and ever changing society. We need to cut through the noise of ‘greater efficiency through greater collaboration’ and the rhetoric of ‘doing more with less’ and focus instead on doing things fundamentally differently. Given the profound impact of digital communication technologies on our society, I think that doing things differently starts with cultivating a better understanding of how digital is reshaping what citizens expect from their public institutions and how public institutions can best respond to those needs.