Social Networking Reaches the Halls of Powers
Jinfo Blog

27th January 2009

By Nancy Davis Kho

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With last week’s inauguration of the U.S. President Barack Obama, whose victory was powered by the innovative use of Web 2.0 technologies to energize and expand his voter base, all eyes are on the White House’s IT architecture. The president won his battle to keep his Crackberry (it is presumably easier for him to give up smoking than email) and rolled out a spiffy new web site (http://www.whitehouse.gov/) , so perhaps it is just a matter of time before his team applies their technology savvy to the Byzantine structure of U.S. government data? Don’t hold your breath. Upon moving into their White House quarters last week, Obama’s staff found out of date computers, a spaghetti dish of phone lines, and a laptop shortage. As reported by NowPublic (http://digbig.com/4yeda): ‘Yesterday, Obama officials took command of the White House only to discover outdated PCs, blocked external email log-ins, blocked instant messaging, a scarcity of laptops, and a mess of jumbled, crisscrossed phone lines. Presumably as a result of this no-tech nightmare, not a single update was posted on the White House Web site detailing any of the early "transparent" measures taken on Obama's historic first day on the job.’ It’s going to be a real challenge for an administration steeped in tech savvy to leverage Bush legacy technology and conform to security regulations dictating the protection of the Executive Office. As Gartner analyst Debra Logan, who focuses on issues relating to eDiscovery, told me: ‘They should probably take all those computers out to the loading dock and start all over again. Anything worth reading is probably only on the servers at the Republican National Committee anyway.’ Well, at least they could chalk it up as a bailout for the battered American technology industry. President Obama isn’t the only head of state wrestling with how to leverage social media, of course. Last week the Pope called social networking a ‘gift’ enhancing the fundamental human impulse to communicate, but urged against obsessive use of the tools. In the UK, government workers would like to use it – if only their managers would let them (http://digbig.com/4yedf). Other countries are leading the way, most notably New Zealand, whose policy for use of networking tools in government at http://digbig.com/4yede is publicly available and transparent – which, after all, is the goal, isn’t it?

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