Policy, Technology

UK civil servants want more access to Web 2.0 tools

By James Smith | 6 August 2008

A new study by Huddle.net - ‘Social Collaboration and Public Sector’ - has indicated that local government workers in the UK are straining at the IT department’s leash to use social internet tools.

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The Social Collaboration in Public Sector study was carried out amongst 202 United Kingdom local authority officials, between 16 and 23 July 2008.

Despite social networks such as Facebook banned in more than half of respondents’ organisations (56%), public sector workers are eager to take advantage of it in the workplace. A third (31%) would like to set up a social network for their own local organisation, while 38 per cent would support a government-wide social network.

“IT departments hear ‘Facebook’ and clam up. But there’s more to social networking than just consumer sites. Public sector workers already know that efficiencies can be made with using collaborative technologies for work, so it’s time that IT heads caught up,” Mitchell said.

In Huddle’s study, public sector workers admitted struggling with existing IT infrastructure. Eighty per cent claimed they received too many emails, while almost a third (26%) could not access information they required to perform their job. A few respondents confessed the majority of their tasks still comprise of managing paper, letters and memos.

“In our experience public sector workers are already leading their private sector counterparts in adopting new technologies – but there is obvious demand to go a lot further,” said Alastair Mitchell, co-founder and CEO at Huddle.net, the social collaboration firm that enables employees to work together both inside and outside their organisations.