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Yesterday, I was on a blogger’s conference call with Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen, who discussed the efforts by the Coast Guard to use social media tools both as ways to improve internal communication and management and to improve communication between the Coast Guard and it’s stakeholders.
I’ve had some exposure to the military’s adoption of commercial tools like IM, blogging and wiki within secure military networks, but it was interesting to hear the guy at the top of the command chain say things like this:
If you look at the recent coordination in our response to Hurricane Ike, I knew from my own experience as the principal federal official in Hurricane Katrina that we can only be effective to the extent that we empower our leaders on scene and make what they are doing visible to senior leaders without endless routing of information through echelons.
To that extent, we empowered Admiral Papp as the Atlantic Area commander to coordinate directly as the lead operational responder. And to the extent that he needed resources from Pacific Area, they actually coordinated that between themselves without any Coast Guard headquarters intervention, which is probably a first for a major operation.
That said, what they are doing has to be visible to us and using things like chat rooms among senior leaders at the same time we’re using conference calls to using all the modern IT tools we have within the Coast Guard suite to simultaneously make all senior leaders aware of the situation and the operational picture down there is what we’ve got to do. And we should endlessly restless and curious about new ways to do that and flatten the organization.
…it’s everywhere.
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