Connecting People
One of the Digital Engagement team’s responsibilities is the ‘Connecting People’ program. This looks to improve internal engagement within the Civil Service by providing a series of digital tools to all users of the Government Secure Intranet. The CivilMedia Suite comprises the Civil Pages, Civil Talk, Civil Blogs and Civil Wiki tools. These are the first knowledge sharing tools accessible across the whole of government and have already proved useful in sharing best practise and information between organisations.
The development and introduction of the products was innovative in so far as it was not about creating a large IT programme and has used existing expertise and resources alongside open source software in the ongoing development of the suite. To date the cost has been £500k in total to develop – a fraction of the resources given to similar solutions in the private sector. Cross departmental groups are building communities and embracing the shared work space provided by both Civil Pages and Civil Talk. A diverse range of departments are involved including the UK Location Council and Bank of England whilst some departments are now looking to use Civil Pages and the other Connecting People applications (such as the Cabinet Office) as an integral part of their departmental communications infrastructure. Currently there are over 21,000 users of the CivilMedia suite.
Through facilitating knowledge sharing and collaborating working there are cost and efficiency savings compared to present working practices. It provides a cross-departmental directory service enabling people to find other’s contact details as well as enabling links to be made between Civil Servants with similar professional interests or working on overlapping project areas in different Departments. And by providing a collaborative working space it has enabled people from different regions to work jointly on projects creating a wide range of cost savings across government.
Collectively these have proved a useful prototype for a single collaboration platform. We are currently working on creating a single sign-on and improving integration with cross Government programmes. Encouraging Civil Servants to work more collaboratively holds out the promise of efficiency savings and enhanced transparency as understanding of each others agendas are made clear.
I lead internal communications at NHS Connecting for Health. We are in an unusual position as having NHS operating structures – the majority of our staff are employed by the NHS and we are not on the civil service network but we are a major part of the Department of Health Informatics Directorate. therefore, we do not hace access to your media suite of tools and collaborative opportunities, which is a pity as we are operating with first generation online services which are way behind the curve in terms of collaborative and new [social] media technology. I am now trying to introduce a solution using Sharepoint2010 but with little development support. I would be very keen to explore the possibility of using existing expertise and resources. Sadly, I have tried a number of avenues and got nowhere. For example, I am a member of the NHS Comms Link which is run by DH and is used by 1200 communications professionals in the NHS. It’s based on Ning and is fundamentally a social media platform. I joined the social media group and asked if anyone could provide insights into my Sharepoint project and I got no response at all. The upshot of all of this is that this is leading me to the conclusion that I just have to get on and develop our own platform otherwise it will never happen. I have alreay had 18 months of setbacks and holdups on this project – and this is extremely disappointing when the body of evidence grows daily about the business paybacks of using collaborative technology.
Chris, I think this has been a fairly common issue. We have come across a few cases and will put you in touch to see if there is any experience others can share to set you up.
James Taylor,
Digital Engagement team