The AGA Weblog

All aTwitter?—The Utilization of Social Networking by Public and Nonprofit Managers in an Economic Recession

By: Sara R. Dickson, MPA candidate, BS/BA, AS/BA

Sara R. Dickson, MPA candidate, BS/BA, AS/BA, is currently serving as special events coordinator for the National Newspaper Association. She has served as a legislator assistant for the Missouri House of Representatives, administrative assistant and Veterans Certifying Official for Columbia College—Jefferson City.

Working at a Rapid Pace

Downsizing, rightsizing, layoffs and cutbacks… in times of recession, all sectors (private, public and nonprofit) are at a higher risk for experiencing a reduction in employees. However, unlike the private sector—where if demand drops, supply eventually drops and it is plainly understood that the company will simply cease to exist—in the public and nonprofit sectors, the job must go on. The public expects, and rightfully so, to continue to be served as long as the department or organization is funded and administratively charged with a mission. Yet, those who survive and remain often find their job description expanded to include the tasks of those who are no longer employed. Practical training, association memberships and trade publications are vital to effective and efficient public service, but with departmental budget cuts, often these areas get slashed first. This effectively removes public/nonprofit managers from their wide spectrum of information network loops, leaving them overworked and in a silo of whatever limited forms of communication and training are spared from the chopping block.

Further, negotiating budget cutbacks is often out of the question or ineffective (for the nonprofit, donors may be overtapped) and this leaves these public and nonprofit administrators searching for any and all free or inexpensive tools that are available to aid busy government/nonprofit professionals. They need fast, effective tools to connect with peers, colleagues, donors, volunteers and constituents, keep abreast of new regulations and legislation, and to keep a watchful eye open for job opportunities, should their job be eliminated next.

In the Private Sector, Social Media is Becoming Increasingly Important

Here’s an example drawn from the private sector: CPAs should find some comfort in the expanding role that social media is playing and its significance in today’s professional (albeit private) networks. According to a recent report by CPATrendlines’ Rick Telberg (president and chief executive of Bay Street Group LLC), it is becoming increasingly important for CPAs to be informed of the various forms of social media available to reach potential employees and clients. In order to obtain an insider’s perspective, Telberg interviewed Tom Hood, chief executive of the Maryland Association of CPAs, and shares the following guide incorporating Hood’s advice regarding “the new world of social media for CPAs”:

• LinkedIn is a professional’s version of Facebook, a social networking site for business professionals and groups. Hood calls it a great place to start as CPAs. It works on the “six degrees of separation” concept. Hood’s network has 229 “trusted connections,” 25,000 second-level connections (friends of friends), and 2,057,400 third-degree connections.
• Plaxo is another business and professional network much like LinkedIn. It’s a great way of keeping up with changes in people’s contact information and current activities. Both Plaxo and LinkedIn provide a method for CPAs to exchange referrals and recommendations, which Hood calls “a very useful application.”
• Facebook, long the preeminent application for college students, is fast going mainstream. “I am seeing many CPA firms and employers using Facebook to reach the college student community,” Hood says. “There are also business groups and many other ‘social’ uses of Facebook for many areas of special interest.”
• MySpace has evolved into mainly a high school and music social networking site. Hood sees less use for CPAs on this site than any of the others.
• Twitter, the micro-blogging site, asks “what are you working on?” and your answer has to be in 140 characters or less. Hood says, “I have made more valuable connections on this tool than any other. I have also found a vibrant community of CPAs, CFOs, regulatory watchers, and others who provide amazing insights and information about a lot of important accounting topics. Did you know the SEC is on Twitter? That certainly got my attention.”

According to their website, CPATrendlines has more than 400 people “following them” on Twitter. That’s a substantial number.

The Public Sector Should Consider Pros and Cons of Social Media and Plan a Gradual Transition

The public and nonprofit sector is in the infancy stage of recognizing there is such a thing as social media and has not yet discovered or set down best practices for its use. However, it is still important for public and nonprofit managers to consider how they might best implement such a tool for enhanced communication, transparency and outreach between the agency and its staff, volunteers, clients and the public. It is a good idea to first perform a cost-benefit analysis and then plan a gradual transition. The current trend suggested by many advertising and marketing publications is to use a mix of traditional and social media to reach consumers/clients with the agency’s message. It is also important to recognize there is a massive shift toward low-cost marketing campaigns (namely, e-mail) that are causing electronic communications to lose their effectiveness in communicating with the public due to the flood of communications competing for the recipient’s attention. 

Final Thoughts and Questions

There are many potential negative and positive externalities (costs) involved with social media implementation in your agency/organization: 

·      How much time will be spent on social networking that is not job-related? How can or should this be monitored/measured?

·      What are the rules of proper etiquette in this new dimension of cyberspace? If a “friend” request is ignored, what are the personal and professional ramifications for government employees?

·      What is the policy impact of using the tool of social media for public agencies? (that is, legal ramifications, privacy violations, inappropriate release of confidential information)

Other thoughts? Ideas?

This essay represents the views of the author only, and does not necessarily represent the views of the National Newspaper Association or any other entity.

New Tools for a Government Financial Manager

By: Anthony Rainey

Anthony Rainey is a member of AGA’s Washington D.C. Chapter, the Emerging Issues Committee and the Steering Committee Partnership for Intergovernmental Management and Accountability. He is the agency fiscal officer for the Office of the Chief Technology Officer, District of Columbia. He has also held financial management positions at District of Columbia Courts (federal), and the cities of Norfolk, VA, Gresham, OR, and Seattle, WA.

The presidential campaigns used new tools in their strategies to engage people. The financial manager and their staffs need to become familiar with these new tools and incorporate them into their strategies. The major change required for these new tools is that finance must be more proactive rather than reactive, with results examined in real time.

·      Internet —We need to monitor the changes in the Internet (the enormous network of networks connecting disparate computers using languages called protocols). Internet Protocol Version 6 (aka IPV6) has now expanded the addresses and tags that can be used. Have our governments transitioned to IPV6?

·      Web—We need to accommodate the different vehicles that customers use to travel on the “http” protocol to visit our sites. Can the different vehicles (MS Internet Explorer or Firefox or Safari or on a Web-enabled phone or PDA) that visitors use to access out sites allow them to seamlessly navigate through our Web pages?

·      XML—Do our Web pages use of “eXtensible Markup Language” utilize well-formed and valid smart tags with corresponding end tags to get the user where she or he needs to go?

·      XBRL—Are we presenting our financial documents—PAR, budget, CAFR or PAFR—into “eXtensible Business Reporting Language” to our customers so that they are not seeing a large financial document as a mere block of text but rather as a set of smart tags for the different parts (assets, liabilities, net assets, revenues, expenditures) that can be drilled down to the lowest level?

·      Wikis—Are we using “What I Know Is” tools, internally and externally, to aggregate and share financial information on an ongoing basis in a collaborative manner?

·      Blogs—Are we utilizing blogs to discuss financial topics and issues, internally and externally, to enhance and refine ideas, opinions and approaches in a collaborative manner?

·      Social Bookmarking—Are we engaging the customers of our financial information by inquiring what they want to know (categorize whether it is a salary or revenue query) and where they go (assigning a tag—bookmark) to find it? Do we examine these social bookmarks to modify or adapt our financial information based on user trends?

·      Social Media —Are we creating financial information forums utilizing blogs, Wikis, podcasts, MySpace, Facebook, Youmeo, Twitter or Plaxo to keep in touch with our users of financial information?

·      Collaboration—If we do not manage collaboratively now, then what do we need to learn about it to enable us to take advantage of collaborative tools like Google Docs or MS SharePoint? Do our Intranet websites allow for collaboration? What is our government’s or agency’s strategy on collaboration?

If you expect that citizens and customers will wait for you to implement the above, or come to you asking you to implement the above, then nothing will change. I believe that we must engage our customers about government finance with these existing tools. I believe that the government budget, accounting and auditing professions must incorporate these tools into their existing strategies. The easiest way to implement them is to incorporate them, where appropriate, into your defined business processes. If presidential campaigns can use these tools with people all across the country, many of whom never met face-to-face, then why can’t government finance do the same?

Digital Preservation

By: Robert Horton

Robert Horton is the director of the Library, Publications and Collections Division of the Minnesota Historical Society.

There are a lot of questions about how to preserve digital content. Some of them are getting easier to answer—for example, the popularity of open source applications, the growing use of non-proprietary formats such as XML and the decreasing costs of storage all significantly lower the barriers to preservation over time, principally by making technological obsolescence a less pressing issue.

But lowered barriers don’t mean that preservation will be easy or cheap—just possible. We still don’t do a very good job of preserving digital content and, more important, we don’t have a really good, successful model at hand. This is not a new problem. We have already experienced massive losses of valuable information resources. Basically, every medium developed in the 20th century has overwhelmed our preservation capacities. If we examine our track record with preserving film, radio, audio or television resources, we’ll see the loss of a huge percentage of the content (for a discussion, see the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ recent publication, The Digital Dilemma).

So when we think about how to preserve digital content, we know what to expect: Any successful program will have to include conversion, as one storage medium replaces another; migration, as data formats evolve; innovation, to enhance the value of content as new applications arrive on the market; and investment, as all of these efforts will demand staff, money and time.

Efforts on that scale will demand a compelling business case. That is especially true for government entities; pressed by budget deficits, increasing demands for services and higher expectations from citizens, they have to establish priorities. Accountability is one argument—government needs to provide access to its records in order to justify its actions and decisions to voters, legislators, auditors and, internally, management. Both candidates for president have called for greater transparency in government, noting that technology now allows for much greater access to government information. Risk management is another—the costs of litigation and particularly of e-discovery require government to think carefully about managing its electronic records.

Perhaps the most important argument for investing in digital preservation is use. Current technology has greatly enhanced the value of digital content. We can use the Web to share information; we can mash-up content from disparate sources to support all sorts of research; we can use Web 2.0 applications to engage and enlist communities to participate in government; and we can use all of these technologies and more to re-invent what we do in government and how we do it. But having the content is key. We do not invest in information technology for the sake of the technology, but because it makes the information more valuable. That is the reason to invest in digital preservation.

Along the way, we have to consider the legal framework in which government operates. Every jurisdiction has statutes governing the creation, management and use of government records and data. Most all of these were written when the medium of government was paper, and they have to be re-considered in the light of technology. Issues such as privacy and trustworthiness are most critical to address. Everyone has reason to wonder about who is using the personal information that government collects, and the reliability of that information as it is shared, manipulated and mashed up among a variety of entities, both public and private. Current laws don’t really do the situation justice; in a recent editorial, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune commented on the electronic records management statutes in Minnesota, saying, “The current law is just completely unhelpful. The Legislature has to get to this. ... it'll be messy and quite ungratifying, but it has to be done.” (July 13, 2008).

There are some places to start. The National Archives is developing an electronic records archives that will encompass electronic records management and preservation on a vast scale; the Library of Congress, through its National Digital Information and Infrastructure Preservation Program, is supporting initiatives to develop digital archives in a variety of communities, including state government; a variety of organizations, including the National Electronic Commerce Coordinating Council and the Sedona Conference, have looked at the ROI and legal issues; and the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) has thoroughly explored the questions relating to managing digital content in the overall framework of enterprise technology in state government.

What are your thoughts? Is your government entity committed to digital preservation of records?