Session Topic: What private sector best practices and methodologies can we leverage for positive change 
Convenor: Kurt Gooden / Tim Yull
Recorder: Sandy Kemsley
Participants: 
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Notes:

What can be leveraged from private industry for use in government so that we're not reinventing the wheel? Potential areas:

• Project management practices
• Marketing, both social media and more traditional media, to reach a broad range of consitutuents
• Enterprise technologies that companies are using to increase "stickiness" with consumers, such as customer relationship management (CRM) and personalization

Industry segments their target market based on various demographics, including age and skill levels. It is common to use personas to define those segments, then build services targetted at the specific personas.

How are metrics gathered with respect to government services or data delivery? In private industry, much of that is done when a sale is made, and information is gathered about the customer.

How do you get the message to people about what services and programs are available, in terms of marketing? Government agencies can build websites, but there is a problem with having people find them: the websites are typically not comparable in quality to business websites, and may be missing search engine optimization so can't easily be found through a broader search. Often, the government is using print or broadcast media to drive traffic to a website.

Government sites are often missing key components such as comprehensive searching within the site and RSS feeds, making it difficult to use the site effectively.

Government sites typically are not task-based, unlikely business sites: a consumer goes to the site to do a specific task, but must dig through the site to find what they want. In constrast, a banking site will have task initiation links such as "open a new account" right on the home page.

Private industry is, for the most part, far ahead of government in terms of customer service due to the competitive nature of business: the government has a monolopy on many services, and the level of customer service will not impact the use of those services, hence there's less motivation to improve the services just for the sake of customer service. Instead, we should be looking at ideas from private industry that help to make the government more efficient and save money: what is private industry doing well in terms of making themselves more efficient, and measure that efficiency? 

There is a need for the skills of people who can execute: how do we match up the skills of the people at ChangeCamp with government-related projects that need resources? Colloboration with government insiders is necessary to figure out the path of least resistance and find internal supporters for ideas and projects.

There needs to be an incentive for government agencies to change: they tend to stick with the status quo because that's the path of least perceived risk. 

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What Happens Next?