Discussing Social Media with the Secretary of the Navy

I had the opportunity to chat with the Secretary of the Navy about the Navy’s efforts to become a more transparent, more relationship focused, organization.  Secretary Mabus has an incredible background beginning as a Naval Officer, then as the Ambassador to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, onto the Governor of Mississippi, and now as the Secretary of the Navy.  Oh yes, he has also been the CEO of a successful business.  This background which spans the public and private sector leaves him in a solid position to understand the challenges, and the opportunities, ahead.

My first question for the Secretary went to the core of why an organization like the United States Navy would want to open up, to leverage the social channels.  The reasons are clear, the majority of his internal audience, members of the Navy and Marine Corps, are in the 18 – 25-year-old age groups and have grown up using these tools, are comfortable communicating on these tools.  In order to reach this audience effectively it was critical to leverage these channels.

For what purpose is social media being leveraged?  Recruiting, of course.  Outward communication to non-Naval types.  Outward communication to Naval personnel.

The Navy’s Facebook page has more than 100,000 fans and is used effectively for the goals above.    A few important points to note include:

• Fully leveraging best practices with their detailed Info page that points to the Social Media Policies, lists who the official Navy contributors are, and defines accepted use guidelines.
• Powered by Social RSS official Navy news stories are published.
• Videos, highlighting all that is cool with the Navy, are included on these pages.

The Secretary made an interesting point as well.  The Navy regularly distributes NavAdmin communications (essentially company/org level broadcasts) via teletype throughout the Fleet.  Concurrent with this age-old practice the messages are also published to Facebook (see their Facebook Notes tab).  While he did not have hard numbers available, the Secretary believes that the information is being more broadly read, and achieving better results, through the Facebook distribution than through the old-fashioned teletype format.  Yes Virginia, Social Media does deliver value.

The Secretary is technology savvy, having teenagers at home requires he be comfortable with these channels if he wants to communicate with his kids.  I may stretch the truth a bit there, but I too have teenagers and it’s not as far from the truth as you might think.   In line with this, the Secretary’s Twitter account, @SECNAV, is manned by him and one other person in the Navy.  Considering this fairly low staffing level it is impressive how responsive they are.

One of my areas of concern had been the ever-increasing role of geo social, location-based technologies like Foursquare and Twitter’s optional inclusion of your location on Tweets. The Secretary views these new tools and capabilities as mostly neutral to the Navy.  Navy personnel are trained on the use of these tools, rules and regulations about what can be shared and what cannot be shared, and know the rules.  The two big rules really go to common sense:  Confidential information is never shared; In combat situations limit the information sharing.  While Navy guidelines put it more bluntly, you get the point.

The Secretary understands that there is risk with any communication channel but the ability to reach everyone and give a clear, consistent, message is powerful and makes these tools a must.

While I had the Secretary’s ear I wanted to ask him about the pursuit of an internal networking site, similar to the Army’s MilBook. More specifically, why not leverage the same system instead of investing in another solution.   The technical folks at the Navy are examining all options, including the use of MilBook, so we will just have to wait and see.

John

Google is trying to become my social media client, will it be yours?

In time the answer is a clear Maybe.  Google Replay makes it very easy to see what social media conversations are taking place about any keyword(s) you want to watch.  Google Replay shows you in real-time the conversations that are taking place across a variety of networks and platforms, ranging from Facebook to Google Buzz to Twitter and more.  For example, do you want to see what people think about American Idol?

• Navigate to the Google home page.
• Search for “American Idol”
• Choose Show Options and click on Updates. Search results, updated in the real-time, are now right in front of you.

I know, I know, who wouldn’t want to track American Idol in real-time?

While Google is clearly your social media data store with real-time updates do not get too excited about being able to replace more expensive solutions anytime soon.  While small businesses that are not yet investing in more robust solutions should leverage Replay, others will have to wait for more features to either be built on top of,  or around, these additions.

In line with Google’s efforts to become my Twitter client, or rather my social client, it has also added Follow Finder, a recommendation engine for Twitter users.  Expect to see a lot more coming out of this tool, or similar tools, as Google works to mine the data to build unique insights on influencers and power users.

2010 is continuing to shape up as an interesting year on the social scene and guess what…. It is only April.

John

Washington DC is opening up its budgets, will you?

Sonny Hashmi, Deputy Chief Information Officer, OCFO at DC Government, sent me a note highlighting the new CFOInfo DC Dashboard, which is in Beta.  This dashboard is exposing details of the District of Columbia’s budget to a degree I have never seen before, and making it easy for your average user to dig in and see how money is being spent.  Amazing!

I sent Sonny a few questions, questions he was happy to answer.  Give a read, let me know if you’d like to know more.

Q. Did you bring in external expertise to design and architect the data warehouse?
A. Our data warehouse was built over the past 3-4 years in an incremental fashion.  We have been using it for internal budget analysis and it drives all financial reporting including the yearly audits.  Implementing CFOInfo on top of the data warehouse involved designing and implementing a data mart.  The infrastructure and data model was primarily done in-house.  We relied on some external Cognos expertise during the development of the dashboard.

Q. What technologies are you using (SQL, Oracle,etc), for the warehouse?
A. Our data warehouse is a very large multi-dimensional database that includes data from many sources including financial, tax, procurement, HR and budget data.  The database resides on a multi-node Oracle Cluster.  We re-architected our entire BI layer to be an internal center of excellence for all financial reporting.  It is a multi-tiered solution that uses Cognos 8.4 as the BI engine.

Q. If another city/town wanted to replicate what you have done, what would it cost?
A. It all depends on your current technology stack.  In our case, the data warehouse and BI solution was already in place.  We just leveraged the existing investment.  It took one calendar month to implement CFOInfo from concept to go-live with some external cognos expertise. 

Depending on the complexity and format of the underlying data source (Excel spreadsheets? ERP? Home Grown systems? Mainframe?), the most challenging aspect of any BI project including CFOInfo is the data modeling.  Data modeling for BI solutions is somewhat different from a traditional operational database.  The schema and normalization is key to system performance.  That is when Data Marks become very useful.  Depending on the state of current systems, data and existing data warehouses, cost would be determined by if the jurisdiction has internal data modelers or external resources are needed.  I would estimate a total of 4-8 weeks of database development and modeling effort would be about average.

The other component of the solution is the BI solution.  An advanced BI solution (such as Business objects, Cognos, OBIEE) provides a flexible foundation to develop and deploy interactive reports and dashboards quickly without a lot of development needed.  These systems are typically expensive, but if business intelligence and enterprise performance management is part of the strategic plan, its a worthwhile investment, especially to enable transparency, gov20 and open data initiatives.  High end solutions can cost anywhere between $150,000 – $500,000 in licensing costs alone.

The good news is that there are a variety of mid-market and lower tier solutions available in the market place.  Gartner has extensive industry research in this area.  Although these solutions do not have the same level of analytics and presentation options (no converged meta data, etc.), for specific targeted projects such as CFOInfo, they may fit the bill for smaller jurisdictions. 

There is also an insurgence of open source and cloud based solutions entering the market such as google analytics, yahoo mashups and variety of other more specialized solutions.  these solutions are great for very targeted presentation solutions, but if the jurisdiction wants real-time analytics, or tight control over presentation and flexibility, these may not fit the bill. 

An alternative approach is to implement dashboards using in-house coding using open standards (such as J2EE or .Net with Flash/Google charts API.  It is a low cost solution but requires high level of internal skill.  The downside of this approach is if business requirements change frequently, and if solutions are needed to be agile, this approach requires development and redevelopment of solutions to keep pace with demand.  Moreover, there is a high risk of data integrity issues, bugs and security risks.

Each jurisdiction needs to make these decisions based on budget availability, internal skill set, and strategic direction.

Q. How many different data sources is this data being pulled in from?
A. Our internal data ware house pulls data from HR, procurement, financials, tax, budget and grants management systems.  However, CFOInfo currently only displays data from the budget and financial systems.

Q. Is the data updated in real-time (or near real-time)?
A. CFOInfo currently only contains budget data (as well as past year actual expenditures).  By nature of the business process, this data does not change day to day.  proposed budgets only change at defined milestones in the yearly budget process.  Past year actual expenditures and approved budgets don’t change. 

However, the technical architecture allows for daily data refreshes for data that does change constantly.  As we roll in new data sources, this would allow for the dashboard to be updated daily.

Q. I love the current drill-down reports, is the data available in XML, CSV, or some other developer-friendly format?
A. Currently, data is available to be exported in a variety of formats including CSV.  Since the current data set does not update very often, it should prove sufficient for people to create their own analyses, especially in the “tabular” or detailed view. 

There are several policy and legal risks involved in enabling real time financial data reporting that are often overlooked.  Financial data must be accurate and consistent to drive informed policy and decision making.  The risk of raw data misrepresentation, misinterpretation or misuse can carry great consequences such as misinformed policy decision making.  This risk must be carefully analyzed, understood and mitigated when exposing raw financial data. 

Q. How detailed will the data be?  For example, in my town people love discussing what the chief of police or the school superintendent makes, will you be able to get to the individual salary level, to the individual purchase level?
A. We have financial and HR data at this level available in our internal data warehouse and is used internally all the time.  We also provide individual’s salary information in PDF format online at http://grc.dc.gov/grc/lib/grc/foia/publicbodyinformation.pdf .  If budget and business priorities demand, this information can be presented in an interactive fashion.

As I mentioned earlier, there are legal and policy implications that needs to be carefully worked out when embarking on any such initiative.  Questions such as “When do the numbers become official? Which system is the system or record? How does one reconcile the numbers reported to the public and privately recorded elsewhere that may not always agree?”.  These issues must be resolved.  The technology is the easy part.

How Orange County, CA built its Social Media Guide

Ted Nguyen, the Manager of Public Communications, for the Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA), has done some very good work developing Social Media Guidelines for the OCTA.  I asked him if he would share the process that he and his team went through, as well as the guidelines they produced.  Here are Ted’s thoughts, in his own words.

Social media is the latest buzz with even the most ardent critics now acknowledging that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are more than just mere frivolous entertainment.That’s because organizations – businesses, nonprofits, government and public agencies – are using social networking tools to engage with their customers, stakeholders and/ or constituents.

We’re leading a quiet revolution in Orange County by using social media to boost transparency and openness in government like never before.

It’s a low-key approach because it’s more about connecting with our constituents – transit riders, toll road customers, freeway users, business and community leaders, taxpayers, elected officials, the news media and other key stakeholders – in personalized ways by providing information to their questions or an active listening ear to their suggestions or complaints.

It’s also the Nordstrom model of customer service excellence applied to serving community members as a public agency. We didn’t build the social media program overnight without guiding principles. Like everything I do, it’s based on research, research, research.

Before setting off to launch our public involvement program using social media in what we’ve coined our public “e-volvement” program, we talked to social media practitioners in Southern California and throughout the United States. We asked for examples of best practices in the development of a social media guide throughout the country and tailored it for the Orange County Transportation Authority.

There simply is no big social media bag that fits all. After participating and speaking at numerous local, regional and national panels and conferences where social media best practices and guidelines were discussed and debated, I came away with the realization that there was no “right” way because of the diversity of organizational structure, values and business goals. 

But I did find some strong common threads that created a fabric of openness, transparency, engagement and authenticity.

Because our success in social media depended upon those with which we engaged, why not ask them for their thoughts and feedback. That’s exactly what we did. It’s not about using these social media tools and … poof … your organization will be more transparent and engaging.

You’ve got to simply practice what you preach or it’s meaningless. Social media users can spot hype and hypocrisy instantly.

During several panels and workshops, I’ve shared our draft social media guide and asked for feedback from social media users. I also posted the guide on my blog. After all, isn’t that what public engagement is all about?    You can download the guidelines here.

CIOs, please stop erecting those walls

Back in October of 2009 I noted that, according to IDC and Robert Half Technology, 54% of all US CIOs prohibit social networking sites at work.  While the numbers were a cause for discussion at that time, many experts in the field have told me that the walls have been crumbling down.  Well, John Cougar Mellencamp may have sung it, but the reality is that those walls are still going up around many businesses and agencies.

According to Robert Half’s latest survey of 1400 CIOs we see that 38 percent of CIOs interviewed are implementing stricter social networking policies.  In fact, the CIOs are becoming more strict with respect to the use of social networking for both personal and business use with only 17% becoming more lenient.

While there is great value, in my opinion, in the strategic deployment of social networking and collaboration efforts there remain a many skeptics in the executive rank.  Be ready to make a solid business case and involve everyone in the process.  If you don’t, you may just find those walls going up even higher in your organization.

John

Looking for a customer service solution? Consider Zendesk

I began looking at Zendesk  two or three weeks ago and, due to a busy schedule, did not complete checking the product out until recently.   Here are a few of my thoughts on the solution and why I feel it is worth your time to check out.

Could you give us a little background on Zendesk?

While I would love to, Robert Scoble just did a great video interview with the company’s CEO and founder.  The interview is worth watching, check it out.

Alright, you cheated, any other general product info before the review?

No…..  Alright, just kidding.  The company claims to have thousands of customers ranging from SAP to the Denver Broncos football team and they have done a nice job of posting several case studies on their website.

I am impressed with the price of the product, with three pricing options that should work for most companies.

• Solo.  This is a good starter option priced at $9/month.
  • Support is limited to the Zendesk customer community but this is probably reasonable for a small company with only one support engineer.
• Regular.  For the slightly smaller team you can begin using the product at a cost of  $19/month per agent with a minimum of 3 agents required.
  • The support option is slightly better at this level with community and Zendesk e-mail support included during normal business hours (8 hours a day, 5 days a week)  
  • The inclusion of non-community support is useful but I am skeptical that it is worth the extra cost.
• Plus+.  Teams of any size should consider skipping the Regular option, which I consider somewhat extraneous, and go straight to the Plus+ option.  The option provides backup, reporting, views management, security capabilities and more.   It does cost $39/month per agent, with a minimum of 5 agents being required.
  • The support options improve significantly as you now have support available by phone or email 24 hours a day for the five standard business days.

Getting started

It is easy to get started with Zendesk, just navigate to the sign-up page, enter your name, e-mail address, and password, you are then off to the races.  You will receive an e-mail in a few minutes explaining how to login and get started with your new help desk.  Logging in brings you to an informative page with pointers to get started.  My favorite part, however, is the Zendesk Buddha.

Come on, any product with the courage to put an image of buddha with a phone headset on is alright by me.  While buddist might be offended I feel the Buddha was a fairly laid back and helpful guy.  I suspect he would probably get a chuckle from it.

Note that you can create a sandbox environment, a playground, within which you can play with the look and feel of your site. This is one of the most common problems with systems that allow customization, you rarely have a place to test them out.  Zendesk eliminates this problem.  The downside, which is minor but worth noting, is that you must copy/paste changes made in the sandbox to your main production site, there is no automatic push/merge process available today.  However, I have been told that this is on the roadmap.

Alright, you’ve hinted at customization, tell us more…

Basic customization is extremely simple.  This includes customizing the header, background, and sidebar colors, uploading a logo for your header (and defining the URL that it navigates to), defining your Favicon.  Your Favicon, if you do not know, is the image that shows up in the location window (and tabs in IE), for your site.  For example, my site shows a picture of me.

The more advanced users can add one of several included widgets to add more customization.  You can easily insert JavaScript, custom HTML and CSS, to pages, customizing the product to your heart’s content.

Zendesk has also done a good job of making it easy to customize SLAs, e-mail triggers, and define basic business rules.  Rules range from sending e-mails to setting priorities, changing assignments, sending notifications.  This workflow creation (Automation) is straight-forward and an average user should have no problem creating rules.  For example, do you want to escalate the priority of a ticket and tell the support lead when a ticket was opened 2 hours ago and has not been updated in those 2 hours.  Easy.

Integration with other systems?

Yes, Zendesk has an API available for those of you that want to take your solution to the next level.  They have also integrated with multiple CRM solutions including Salesforce, BatchBook, Highrise, and Tactile CRM.

While it is cliche I feel that Zendesk has done an excellent job of making the easy stuff easy and the hard stuff doable.  I have no problem recommending this as one of the solutions that should be on any company’s short list when evaluating help desk solutions.

John

Some thoughts on Apple’s recent licensing changes

Many of us believe that collaborative, social, strategies and tools can benefit the marketplace, companies, their vendors, their customers.  Countless case studies, interviews, and various other examples abound that show the positive benefits to sales, marketing, customer support, and throughout and across all functions.  The benefits range from product and service co-creation to improved customer satisfaction to more seemless sharing of knowledge within organizations.

A push for transparency, engagement, and collaboration has swept the public and private sector, with politicians, federal agencies, businesses, and people seeking to understand how they can leverage new strategies and tools to improve their ability to meet their goals.  While we are not experiencing a revolution, we are clearly seeing an evolution of business and governments.

Apple, however, remains one of the more successful companies determined to do its own thing.  It’s own thing in this case, however, is to act every bit the anti-social, monopolistic, and self-centric company that represents the old way of doing business.  It’s recent move to block out its partners and competitors from developing the widest set of applications for the iPhone 4.0 SDK demonstrates this point clearly:

“Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited)…”

If Microsoft had made a similar move back in the late 1990s it would have been dragged into court immediately.  Apple, beyond reversing this ridiculous licensing change, should consider becoming a more collaborative company and embrace your developer community.  Form a working counsel to review licensing changes, hearing alternative viewpoints could be beneficial.  While you are at it, consider a more open review process for applications to make it into your App Store, this is too opaque a process as it stands today.

While customers are in love with your hardware today we have all seen how proprietary solutions and products fair in the long run.  You are having your day in the sun now, consider making changes before it turns cloudy outside.

John

Following up with the eDiplomacy Team at the State Department

The United States Department of State (aka The State Department) is clearly a leader in the Federal Government in many ways including, in my opinion, making the change necessary to make open government a reality.  As you may remember, I chatted with Richard Boly, Director of eDiplomacy, a couple of months ago, at which point he gave me a behind the scenes view into all that his organization has been working on.

I participated in a conference call this morning with members of the press, fellow bloggers, and members of the State Department as Richard gave us a quick update.  The invite to the call included key info:

“Richard will discuss how this vision is becoming a reality through resources like Diplopedia (an internal wiki), Communities@State (an internal inter-agency blogging platform), and the Secretary’s Sounding Board (a suggestion board for improving ideas within the department). Over 2,500 Department of State contributors have posted more than 10,500 articles on Diplopedia, and during the Haiti earthquake, the State Department used the wiki format to coordinate relief efforts. There are over 70 internal Communities@State blogs, that combine the knowledge of inter-agency and inter-country contributors, working to share information and perspective. Blogs range in discussion from the economic climate of Japan, to the strategic communications mission in Afghanistan, to the shared interests of all USG personnel who work in our diplomatic missions around the globe. Over the last year, the Sounding Board has gathered thousands of ideas about how to improve the Department, many have been implemented, and others began a people to people conversation about new ways to put good ideas to work.  ”

Also, Elizabeth Montalbano of InformationWeek, who was also on the call, has excellent coverage of the call available here, it is worth reviewing.

What are the important takeaways, beyond what I’ve shared before, beyond what InformationWeek shares:

• Businesses and government agencies must stay focused on their key strategic goals.  All members of the organization must focus on this mission.
• While social networking tools may feel like the norm for many of us, the thought of using these tools is terrifying to others.  The digital divide is real and your approach to deploying collaborative strategies must take this into account.  Richard’s team is focused on this challenge and working to build solutions that work for people on both sides of this divide.  All members of your team are critical, remember that.
• Do not be afraid to duct tape together technology solutions in the short-term as you move forward with your strategy.  With budgets tight and no proof of return on investment, the eDiplomacy group has deployed some impressive solutions.  Now that value is clear, and the short-coming of these tools are clearly understood, they will be spending money on better tools.  No, they are not going out to buy the Rolls Royce, but they are working to upgrade their Schwinn bicycle to a Toyota Corolla (with functioning brakes).
• Provide training , and training grounds, for your team.  The eDiplomacy internal social networks are providing safe training grounds for State Department employees before they talk on more public networks.  People are learning how to effectively write for blogging, forums, discussion groups, twitter, etc..  If you want to use tools like this to reach customers/citizens, use them internally too.  You will gain benefits in terms of tighter collaboration, and you will be training your staff at the same time.

John

Charging for carryon bags? Spirit Airlines misses an opportunity

The airline industry is always looking for more ways of making money and I have no problem with that.  However, when I saw that Spirit Airlines was going to begin charging for carry-on luggage my first thought was that they missed a great opportunity to leverage the power of social media to collaborate with their customers on alternative solutions, alternative ways of both benefiting their customers, the company itself, and the entire airline industry.

Here is my advice to the Airline Industry, and each Airlines, on how to correctly engage your customers and vendors to decide the best approaches to cost management.  Let me know what you think.

First….  Why is it that the Airline Industry is constantly complaining about the inability to make money? Should we all go back to taking the train?

While I love a good train ride we all understand this is not the answer.

• You, the airline industry, understand your cost per passenger.  Share this on a publicly available dashboard, including the up to the minute number.  In other words, gas is constantly changing price, keep it real-time.
  • Provide a simple cost calculator around this cost per passenger and let your customers play with the data.  The learnings, the thought process invoked, will feed directly into the Ideation Platform…
• The GSA has done a fantastic job with it’s Better Buy Project, still in it’s infancy.  Leverage the learnings of how they are working with their vendors to come up with alternative solutions to both open up, but also reduce the cost of, engaging with the federal government.
• The Ideation Platform:  As part of this dashboard add a very simple ideation platform, similar to what the Federal Government has done with its Agency Dashboard or that HP and others do with their Ideation platforms.  Bring your customers into the conversation, hear their ideas.

I can almost picture a day in the future when our baggage costs, meal costs, etc.., fluctuate daily based upon the market conditions around the airline industry…. 

Why are you not leveraging your CRM system?

Flat fees, without any consideration about the flyer, should be a thing of the past.  The sales guy that flies Boston to New York 5 times week should have a different cost structure than the infrequent vacationer.  The systems are there, use them.

What else should the airline industry be focused on to engage customers, and vendors, in the cost conversation?

John

What would you ask the Secretary of the Navy?

I will be speaking directly with the Secretary of the Navy later next week, focused on the use of Social and Collaborative tools to more efficiently meet their mission. Would you like to take part by giving me a question to ask the Secretary?

Feel free to leave a comment, DM me on Twitter, or simply e-mail me your questions.  I will try to summarize and use some of the best ones for the discussion.

John