By: Kenneth A. Smith, Ph.D., CPA
Kenneth A. Smith, Ph.D., CPA, is a founding member of AGA’s Mid-Willamette Valley Chapter, a founding member of the Oregon Public Performance Measurement Association (OPPMA.org) and an assistant professor of accounting and information science at Willamette University.
…Have you heard about that next great technology? They say it is going to solve so many problems, be easier to use and the cost is coming down quickly. Soon it will be everywhere…..
Most of us have learned to be skeptical of such claims. Yet, we have also seen the world change in wondrous ways over the past few decades. In spite of the flops and over-promises, new ideas and technologies routinely invade our lives. The questions today:
• Is Web 2.0 the next great technology?
• Can we use Web 2.0 to more efficiently or effectively learn about financial and performance management?
• Does Web 2.0 facilitate the “clinical” model of teaching and learning?
Is Web 2.0 the next great technology? A common confusion with Web 2.0 is that it relates to upgrading a particular software. Web 2.0 is more about how people use technology to relate to other people and less about the multiple underlying technologies like XML, RSS and APIs. Let’s focus on two pieces of Web 2.0: wikis and blogs.
According to Wikipedia, a wiki is a “collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content.” To my knowledge, no publicly available wikis are solely dedicated to topics within government accounting, government finance or government performance. Wikipedia is very popular and has articles on GASB, the CGFM and government performance auditing. Several topics, however, are noticeably absent, such as an entry on the AGA itself. (Anyone can propose an entry, so we might see AGA there by next week).
Each article has four tabs across the top: article, discussion, edit this page and history. The discussion for performance measurement shows the entry started in 2007 as a class project. Surely the academic readers of this blog can directly encourage students to write more articles on relevant topics. And all of us can make suggestions and corrections to existing articles. Wikipedia notes when articles are limited in some fashion, such as due to disagreements, lack of text or lack of citations.
Blogs are defined by Wikipedia as “a website, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.” Most of us are familiar with blog websites of varying quality and content. We recently started a blog in connection with the annual meeting of the Oregon Public Performance Measurement Association (OPPMA) held on July 17, and welcome your participation.
A newer blogging model (to me at least) is used by NewTalk.org. A panel of 10 to 14 experts discuss a topic from Tuesday morning until Thursday afternoon. The public is also allowed to comment—in essence joining the conversation. The June 19 discussion on “Is it possible to fix government?” included former Comptroller General of the United States David Walker and his views on the financial crisis. The Feb. 14 discussion on using test results in school reform might also be of interest to AGA members.
I am intrigued by the untapped potential of wikis and blogs for both government financial management and performance management. Do you think these tools are the next great technology? What concerns do you have?
Can we use Web 2.0 to more efficiently and effectively learn? My recent fascination with Web 2.0 came as we prepared for the OPPMA annual meeting. The objective for the day-long event was to improve our collective understanding of the challenges and questions surrounding performance measurement and performance management from the 100 attendees. Our desire for “after-the-event” learning is to create a Web 2.0 space where we collaboratively work toward finding solutions and answers.
We face some pretty severe challenges in creating an efficient and effective learning space. This was driven home as I prepared for the section on how to display performance data and was taken on a journey that felt like Dorothy swept up to Oz or Alice falling down to Wonderland. The journey started at a celebrated website for displaying data, the state of Washington’s Transportation Improvement Board—or TIB (quite popular as the site came up as No. 3 on my Google search on “TIB”). One part of the TIB website has links to other sites and blogs.
One of these links led to Dashboards by Example, which has a funky video on TIB by someone or something called “Dashboard Spy.” I found the TIB website a bit confusing, and the links provided more insight and background. Then I stumbled onto a huge alphabetic list of more than 400 dashboard examples. (It took me a long time to find the link (http://www.enterprise-dashboard.com/sitemap/ ) to the list when I went back.) I do not remember how I found this one on using heat maps in Excel to do automatic “stop-light” coding of data into red/yellow/green or other color schemes. I am now a big fan of “Mr. Excel” in the second video. (Note: crisp, cool and creative videos are very Web 2.0)
Boy did I ever learn a lot, but it time-consuming and hard to retrace my steps. My experience was effective but not efficient. What are your comments and suggestions on how to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of our Web 2.0 experiment? Have you had similar experiences? Some high-quality examples?
Does Web 2.0 facilitate the “clinical” model of teaching and learning? As noted in my June 5 AGA blog, I believe we should make greater efforts to use a clinical model of teaching and learning: watch/listen, do, teach others, discuss, repeat. This model requires a high level of collaboration and interaction between the teacher and the student, so Web 2.0 concepts are potentially valuable.
Another aspect of the clinical model is the desire to connect the insights from the “laboratory” and quickly translate them into usable solutions in professional practice. Similarly, the clinical model desires a rapid communication of “real-world” problems from the practicing professionals to the researchers who may study them. We are hoping that our website will evolve into something that facilitates this fast sharing. Web 2.0 certainly seems to have “potential revolutionary effects” for our clinical model along with several challenges. What do you see as our biggest challenges? Opportunities? Any advice?
This entry benefited from discussions with my colleagues Elliot Maltz, Steve Maser, Nicole Thibodeau and Fred Thompson.
NEXT WEEK: Watch for updates from AGA's 57th Annual Professional Development Conference & Exposition in Atltant. The blog resumes regular daily posts on Aug. 8.
Comments