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John Glover, Director at INOVEM,speaks to eGov monitor about the core capabilities of INOVEM, its solutions and how it envisions online collaboration to become a critical factor in delivering better governance now and in the future.

q1.  Could you give us an insight into how INOVEM has evolved since it was first started?

INOVEM was formed in 2001 to ‘handover’ SmartGroups.com, Europe’s leading free-to-use community site, to FreeServe following the purchase of the original operation.  During the hand-over of SmartGroups.com quite a few organisations, especially in the public and non-for-profit sector, expressed an interest in how they might, under a Service Level Agreement, use, administrate and brand the community software to improve communications and empower their various stakeholder groups.  

The core of the development team of SmartGroups.com decided to address this challenge and develop a solution to meet the growing needs for effective engagement with stakeholders.

That was 7 years ago. Since its inception INOVEM has been pioneering the use of ‘social networking’ tools, particularly in the area of public sector stakeholder engagement. Our experiences in successful implementation have enabled us to improve upon our core capability for online group collaboration and the solution now includes added tools to support both e-consultation and collaborative document creation and publishing.

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q2.  Recently, INOVEM has coined the term Inclusionware -- could you tell us what it means especially with regard to your product and services especially how it relates to Web 2.0 and social networking tools?
 
Our software has been specifically designed to fit the gap between complex and expensive enterprise solutions and free-to-use informal social networking sites. During the development of our products we have used our past experiences to take the benefits offered by community software, such as empowerment, ease-of-use and low-cost deployment and added many of those tools required in an enterprise solution, such as administrative control, productivity and governance.

Typically stakeholders work with you, not for you. In addition, stakeholder projects often need to be setup quickly or might be organic in growth and purpose. This dynamic does not suit formal enterprise systems that are designed to control more formal processes and often require a business case, significant IT resources and time to deploy.  Likewise, the idea of using an unregulated social networking site to provide an official communication platform for government stakeholder projects can be problematic, especially with regard to the ownership of content and personal data.

By filling that gap, INOVEM focuses on providing products to our clients that: are easy to access, manage and use; allow more people to get involved in decision making; and help authorities and companies to be more inclusive. Hence InclusionwareTM.

Our software has been designed to allow community and project managers, with little or no IT training, to quickly setup and deploy online groups and shape and evolve them to suit the activity in question. This has allowed our users to find many new and innovative uses for our software, for both internal and external stakeholders.

q3.  How is Inclusionware helping public sector organisations in achieving better governance and administration?  Could you highlight some examples.
 
InclusionwareTM is designed to support a multi-tier communication strategy to inform, consult and collaborate. Without exception, all of our public sector stakeholder projects will have an element of each of these levels of involvement.

For example, we are currently helping the Land Registry to engage their stakeholders in the development and roll-out of a National e-conveyancing platform. There is an ongoing need to keep all stakeholders informed as to new developments, to formally consult with them on changes to regulations and to collectively work on the detail of the new infrastructure. Our software allows the Land Registry to scale and effectively manage their stakeholder engagement programme extremely cost effectively.

Recently, we also worked with the Planning Portal and enabled them to bring together local authorities to develop and manage a dynamic national database that enabled councils to effectively enforce planning laws. 

The scalability and versatility of InclusionwareTM allows our clients to use the solution for various different activities.  In Land Registry, without any external resource they were able to re-purpose our software to support a Bid & Tender Management System, which included secure public and private deal rooms for prospective suppliers, project teams and external legal consultants.  Similarly, Communities and Local Government have chosen INOVEM Inclusionware TM to manage their outsourced IT projects. 

q4. What would you suggest to public sector professionals who are looking to improve the way they communicate with various stakeholders both within and beyond their respective organisations?
 
The biggest challenge for both the IT and Communications professional is how to move from broadcast communications to devolved empowerment and user-driven content on both internal and external facing web sites. This is also the challenge and debate around Web 2.0 and the energetic unregulated chaos it can introduce.

The first step is to recognise that a modern e-communications platform should be able to support the inform - consult - collaborate ladder of participation. 

It is also equally important to identify the control parameters and policies that need to be put in place to enable a service to be deployed in a controlled yet not over restrictive manner.

We advise our clients to think of a few simple principles that lead to successful deployment:

·    Purpose – What objectives are you trying to meet? What are your goals? Where is it useful to use e-participation tools in support of your stakeholder project?
·    Scope – What types of communities are you trying to build? Are they Interest Groups or are they Work Groups? How many people will be involved and will you need to develop more specialist sub-groups to keep your stakeholders interested and focussed?
·    Governance – Who will manage and facilitate the online community/group? Will you empower group members to create and modify content? Will you moderate content?
·    Activities – How will you stimulate, guide and facilitate membership contributions? Is there an agreed timeline for the life of the online community or project?

 

q5.  What's next for INOVEM and what do you seek to achieve over the next few years?

Now that we have a clear understanding of our value and position in the market I believe the next step for us is to strengthen our partnership approach with other companies that can help to add value to our solutions. Given where we position ourselves this will mean more integration with back-office systems from CRM and EDMRS vendors as well with formal and informal integration with social networking sites. The aim is to complement, not compete with, such services.

We have already started this programme by linking our software to mapping systems such as GoogleMaps and MultiMap and other proprietary GIS software. We are also working closely with a variety of large consultancy companies who use our software to complete their service offering, especially on stakeholder engagement projects involving both partnership and project collaboration and wider community engagement.  A recent example would be community consultation on one of the governments new Eco-town projects.

We are also starting to see some traction in the US with recent sales to Bainbridge Island Council and Coca Cola Enterprises. I can only see interest growing as we work with our clients and partners to develop our Inclusionware solutions in what we see as a rapidly developing market with an ever-growing range of opportunity and application.