Instant Messaging

The first is that it picks Enterprise Instant Messaging as on the rise in government. This is something that I believe we should be pushing for really hard. As I posted last year, this should be in widespread use now, at least as an inter-agency tool, if not hooked into the PSI.

The report notes that there are two reasons for the slow take up in government: IT Managers concerns about it being a vector for malware, and cultural. The cultural reason is substantiated by a quote from an (unnamed) state’s deputy CIO:

Instant Messaging is the biggest waste of time ever created.

This guy obviously hasn’t spent enough time managing his emails…

The authors then go on to note that, in terms of business impact, IM is the communications tool of choice for next generation government workers. And this is, I think, something that cannot be overstated. Every bright, hopeful and shiny-eyed inductee into the public sector today will expect to be able to connnect with their peers using the tools they use in their personal lives. Imagine being shown to your desk/cubicle and there not being a phone: what would be your response?

Semantic Web

The authors also comment on sematic web markup, for both public and corporate content (by corporate, they appear to mean intra- and extranets) as an emerging trend. This is particularly encouraging, for a number of reasons. As the report notes:

…microformats represent a change in direction from a top-down model to define ontologies with RDF/OWL to a bottom-up model to annotate content.

Delivering information across the Web with machine-readable and interpretable semantics offers the potential for enhanced application/site interoperability, automation of information discovery, more contextually relevant searches and options that are difficult or impossible (for example, show doctors in Minneapolis, Minnesota that are open on Saturday morning).

The sematic web should be driven by the public sector. Making information accessible, discoverable and usable should be the minimum standard expected for the expenditure of taxpayer dollars. I have posted on microformats before, so it is encouraging to see that this message is being conveyed back to government business and IT managers through the Gartner briefs.

Social Media

Any excitement about the inclusion of microformats should, however, be tempered by the complete absence of any evaluation of social media. No blogs. No wikis. Nada.

Oddly, The Hype Cycle for Content Management, published a fortnight later (July, 2006), does touch on these tools. Does this mean that government aren’t using these tools, so they don’t rate a mention? I am not so sure. The CM paper notes that, in private enterprise at least, Wikis are “sliding into the trough” (their terminology), with a market penetration of 1-5% of the target audience. It gets weirder. The authors then talk about “RSS: Blogs,” as if RSS was exclusively tied to blogging or the terms were somehow synonymous.

Perhaps this is just a symptom of Gartner’s focus on the tools themselves, rather than the way people use all of these tools to communicate with each other and their publics. In any case, I find it a little disappointing for a firm that is selling analysis to conflate the two. Any other thoughts on the Gartner methodology?