Government Networks

Informal Networks in Government

Informal networks have proven helpful for knowledge sharing in the public sector, which is traditionally regulated through rules, a clear sense of hierarchy with fixed reporting structures, standard operating procedures, and laws that tend to restrict the free flow of information across organizational boundaries. The result is that innovation produced in one agency might not be available to entities in other corners of the overall system. This often leads to reinventing the wheel and innovative knowledge being detained within knowledge silos. Consequently, ideas that might meet the knowledge needs of several similar stakeholders in government are prevented from spreading through the whole system. In addition, the nature of the mission every agency and department has to accomplish is usually so complex, it has to be divided into fine-grained and independent components that can be treated separately while still contributing to the overall objective of the task: service delivery to the public. Most of the time, not all knowledge that is needed to fulfill the mission is readily available in each and every agency, and government has to either hire additional human capital—contractors, consultants, or external vendors—to temporarily add what is needed. When the project is done, the social and human capital and slack capacity leaves the agency and is no longer obtainable for similar knowledge needs.

A prominent example of the lack of knowledge sharing is the intelligence community that was not able to “connect the dots” in the months leading up to the September 11, 2001, catastrophe. Knowledge created on the vertical as well as horizontal levels across different agencies within government was not integrated to break up knowledge silos and to build a basis for better-informed decision making. This has led to the creation of an information-sharing environment supported by a host of Web 2.0 applications, such as video-sharing tools, blogs, shared document and collaboration spaces, and photo galleries. Prominent examples are wikis such as Diplopedia in the State Department and DODTechpedia in the Department of Defense. U.S. Army soldiers in the battlefield have implemented wiki technology to speed up peer-to-peer information about battlefield conditions.

These examples of increased collaboration in such unlikely environments as the highly regulated and compartmentalized command-and-control culture of the intelligence community can serve as a model for other cross-organizational collaboration and government networking activities. In addition, they have the potential to move government from a need-to-know to a need-to-share information paradigm.

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