Doing more with digital

Seaworthiness

• 

  Many organisations still use old browsers – like IE6 and IE7 – which discourage innovation

• Thin client (ok, dumb terminal), elderly Intranets and lack of sound cards present obstacles using multimedia internally
• Concern within IT that social media takes lots of storage space and eats bandwidth
• lack of time to stop and think – focus on delivering the service (turning the handle) rather than thinking of different ways to achieve an end (or even redefining the end)
• there’s always something more urgent
• digital activists need to speak ‘business’, not geek
• Not enough positive case studies – yet
• Conflict for infrastructure guardians – radical change disrupts. As Clay Shirky says in his excellent book: Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age:

Another scenario would be “Traditionalist Approval”: the fate of any new technology would be put in the hands of the people responsible for the current way of doing things. It would like be leaving it up to the monks to decide how to use the printing press or to the post office to decide what to do with e-mail.

• Social media still ‘something that corporate comms does’ in many orgs

• 

  Nothing wrong with a bit of horizon scanning

  Digital evangelism by ‘the usual suspects’ can be counter-productive, with proponents seen to be single-issue, ‘scratched records’

• Open by default will take years to become common practice – even with buy in at senior level, it will take time to permeate middle management ranks
• Low personal take up of digital results in evangelists being a small, albeit vocal, minority
• Gov and localgov are not traditionally risk-takers, so people are often more inclined to wait for instruction than try new stuff
• Policies written ages ago, and not updated to take account of the new realities
• Social Media policies tend to be written by senior staff rather than practitioners