Social media impacts on ICT teams – presentation from the Technology in Government conference

Over the last two days I’ve been down at the Technology in Government conference – an event I thought went very well, with a great group of speakers (including the UK Government’s CIO Liam Maxwell).

I gave a presentation this morning, and chaired the afternoon, for the Connected Government stream and have uploaded my presentation for wider access.

In it I discussed the impact of social media on agency ICT teams and some potential approaches they can take to work with business areas to ensure that agency goals are met with a minimum of intra-agency friction.

Overall my message was that social media must be engaged with, not ignored, in government and agency ICT teams have a role to play.

There’s several stances ICT teams can take – whether as a leader, supporter or observer of agency social media efforts and, depending on this stance, they could take on a greater or lesser involvement in the various roles required to implement a successful social media approach.

Social media offers benefits for ICT teams, as it does for other areas of agencies – it is simply up to ICT leadership to either step up and work with business areas in a closer ongoing way, or stay out of the way and allow other areas of an agency to move forward.