Any venture worth undertaking will present challenges.
To not plan for the significant challenges that any Local Authority will face when developing and implementing a web strategy would, at best, make it less credible and at worst leave the strategy open to avoidable risks of becoming derailed.
Recognising, anticipating and preparing for challenges must be a component of a web strategy in order to increase its chances of success.
Ignoring the web is not an option, it is akin to ignoring the incoming tide.
The time that is available to adapt to the changes it will bring should be used to equip the organisation to cope with those changes. As the nature of changes can’t be predicted with any certainty, the organisation should ready itself to be able to cope with any change; to build the Council’s capacity to adapt.
After all, the only thing that is constant is change.
Leaders within Local Authorities must create the time to learn and think.
With so much change happening, it is important that Local Authority leaders create the time to learn, think about and discuss the implications of the changes, and of the opportunities offered by technology. Unless they do this, there is increased risk of opportunities not being grasped and decisions being made with only superficial understanding of the implications. This is especially true of decisions which enable certain things, but that prevent the development of others. Creating this time can be very hard to do in management cultures in which ‘being seen to be doing something’ is more important than strategic oversight.
Everything is in a constant state of flux.
People’s behaviours change, their expectations change, the technology they use changes.
(This strategy itself is neither comprehensive nor future-proof and will therefore also be subject to constant reassessment and change.)
It is extremely important that an organisation understands how and why change happens, how behaviours move through a cycle from novel to pervasive to redundant, and how quickly. The assessment of change, and the willingness to change, must become a normal part of the organisation’s culture.
Internal staff will have to adapt to changes in their tools, knowledge and expected behaviours.
The successful implementation of this strategy is going to depend on the ability of Local Authority staff to adapt to changes in working practices, tools, expectations and opportunities. Put another way: ‘change management’ is a crucial component of this strategy and must be carefully considered, executed and monitored in order to ensure that the organisation moves to embrace these new concepts with confidence, commitment and capability.
Things the Local Authority does are only successful in as far as they succeed in getting people to adopt behaviours.
Information only becomes truly useful when behaviours are established such that people are aware of and know how to access, use, interact with and benefit from the things that are available to them. This is especially important online where behaviours frequently don’t yet exist at all.
Establishing behaviours involves the provision of simple, obvious ways for people to do things, connecting these things to existing behaviours, and then actively encouraging people to adopt the new behaviours until they becomes habitual.
This also involves being highly consistent, and not continually changing the way you want people to behave.
The Connected City 