City of Ottawa Case Study: Part 1 of 4
Chris Wightman is an intense and sincere man who’s wry humour becomes obvious as you speak with him. He needs it as he has a daunting task ahead of him: to introduce Web 2.0 technology to the vast (over 15,000 employees) and disparate (100’s of business units) City of Ottawa. For an organization as conservative and segmented as the City of Ottawa, Web 2.0 is not an obvious match. Slowly but surely, however, Chris and his e-Media team are making inroads and having an impact. Chris presented his approach at a meeting at Third Tuesday in June, generously sharing what he has learned about getting started and overcoming resistance within the organization. Later I met with him over coffee to learn more about his experience.
In this post I’ll share with you Chris’ advice on getting started.
1. Build a Business Case:
One of the prompts for the City of Ottawa to want to venture into using and gaining competence with Web 2.0 applications is the need to engage with residents. There have already been a number of online-hosted public consultation events, outsourced to a consulting firm, but it was clear that the city needed to do more to really engage with its constituency. Internally-driven competency was required to overcome some of the roadblocks to developing a truly resident-centred online outreach program. “For example”, says Chris, “There is one department to deal with your flooded basement, another to get a permit to build a deck, and another one to find out about when the water pipes are being replaced on your road. It doesn’t make sense from the resident’s perspective. Its not citizen-centred right now.”
Having started with a need to engage and communicate with residents, the first step was to look at Web 2.0 applications for city staff. “Luckily”, Chris said, “management agreed to start internally. This took a lot of the pressure off getting it right. We were allowed to try things out and make mistakes inside the organization, something we couldn’t have done with the whole community of Ottawa watching us.”
2. Develop a Team:
An e-Media team was created and tasked with getting staff started on learning about and applying social media to City of Ottawa staff needs. Once the team was assembled, the next step was to get full access to the internet, bypassing protocols required for other city staff. Then the team set out to educate itself and to become experts on all social media they could get their hands on. They used anything free and open source including Yammer, Twitter, Wordpress, Facebook, You Tube, Flickr, TikiWiki. “There was some resistance to this, even though it was free – the whole concept of open source was a bit foreign to people and suspect, possibly regarded as a potential communist plot”, Chris said humorously.
3. Educate and Generate Interest:
“The City of Ottawa is a pretty locked down environment” , Chris says. With limited access to the internet, many employees do not know much about what is going on in the world wide web, particularly when it comes to social media-type activities. Chris described a staff meeting where half the attendees were from IT. When asked who at the meeting knew what RSS was, only 6 hands went up out of the 75 people there – and 4 of them were from Chris’ e-Media team.
The e-Media team set out to educate staff on the basics of web 2.0. “Sometimes this happened on a desk-by-desk basis”, says Chris, “We just spoke one-on-one to anyone who was interested. The e-Media team hosted seminars, sent out fact sheets and engaged in face-to-face conversations.
4. Experiment:
“Our mantra became ‘this is just a pilot’”, says Chris. “This allowed us to try all sorts of things that we otherwise couldn’t have done”. An early win was setting up an RSS feed for all information and news related to the city. Another was setting up i-Google for staff. The real coup, though, came through happenstance – when the Transit Union went on strike. See next post: Introducing Web 2.0 to your Organization: Seize Opportunities (City of Ottawa Case Study: Part 2 of 4)
Also, stay tuned for Web 2.0 Strategy: Overcoming Resistance (City of Ottawa Case Study: Part 4 of 4)
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