Welcome to Government to Business, the go-to location for executives delivering
digital services to business. And now here's your host, Gavin Atkinson.
Gavin: G'day folks. My name is Gavin Atkinson and welcome to another episode of Government
to Business. First up an apology though, I've been off the air for a good
six weeks or so and that's got a lot to do with the fact that I've been
basically celebrating my son's graduation from high school. Having a
well deserved family holiday, basically tripping all around the world. So it's
been actually a really, really invigorating experience. So my apologies though
that I haven't actually been putting any of the episodes out. That being said
there's obviously plenty of content and plenty of information to be talking
about at the moment when it comes to government to business service delivery
around the world. The most obvious one that springs to mind at the moment is
the current government shutdown in the United States which is now well and
truly entering into its third week. At the time of recording there has been
some conciliatory approaches between the new Democratic leadership within the
House of Representatives and the White House. There's some positive elements
that have been discussed there from both the president but at the same time
there's also the messaging coming through very clear that, you know, that
perhaps this shutdown will be continuing for a long time. It's currently actually
getting close to the second longest if not probably the longest shutdown within
the US Government history. And that has a really big impact when it comes to
businesses and to the way that government continues to service them
digitally. One of the things that I guess I really, really want to touch on is the
importance of maintaining continuity of service when basically nobody is paying
the bills. So within the United States the way the actual system of government
works, obviously as in any government around the world, there needs to be
appropriations approved from a budget to be able to continue to fund the services
and the activities of government and that's currently obviously on hiatus in
a number of different elements across the US federal government.
It's not impacting on all so I had a bit of a look around at the moment and
wearing the hat of an actual business owner or a small business owner, if you
can kind of go at the moment to the Internal Revenue Service, the IRS, I can
go to their pages that are actually dealing with for small business people
and also for self-employed people. And basically going to their tax
center, it's basically it's business as usual. There's no impact at all. The
website works. The websites being updated. There's nothing there talking
about any actual shutdown of government services at all. That said there are
many, many other websites across the US federal government at the moment that
are actually maintaining little warnings if I can kind of put it that way. So,
whether we're talking about the Small Business Administration, the United
States Department of Agriculture - obviously there for the farming industry,
USA.gov itself - the main portal into the federal government, the Department of
Commerce. Many, many other actual government websites across the US at
the moment basically are maintaining warnings. So as an example the Small
Business, the US Small Business Administration, which is I
suppose the primary conduit the main government portal for small businesses
within the United States has a special announcement saying that, "Due to the lapse
in federal funding this website will not be actively managed. But disaster
assistance however is still available." It's good that actually that some
of those more urgent elements can still continue to be delivered and assist
businesses that might be actually going through a bit of a hard time. That said
this website up and running. You can continue to navigate and go through to
www.sba.gov, you can find out all the information that was being published and
provided by the Small Business Administration up to and prior obviously
to the actual US government shutdown and that all works that works fine. Obviously
if you're trying to send a message to the SBA, trying to contact them about
something, you're not going to be hearing anything back because those services are
currently not being provided. And the main reason for that is if there's no money
there to keep the actual Department up and running that means that the
actual department employees are not being paid depending on what's going on
there. They either turn up to work and don't get paid or alternatively are just
not turning up to work at all. In this circumstance it does mean that
a lot of these government sites across the United States that are being
delivering services to business - and the same thing actually applies to citizens
as well but obviously I'm focusing on businesses - it means that all of them are
actually able to access those services but there's actually no new content
that's being added to those sites. There's no changes being made to those
sites. There's no maintenance being made to those sites.
Now obviously maintaining and making sure that your information on your
website is up-to-date and accurate is essentially critical in modern society
and that being said you can probably let it go for a little bit, so for
example we're entering into the third week. Unless of course there's mission
critical information there that needs to be updated and maintained it's probably
not going to have a big impact on businesses. That being said there's a lot
of other different things that are going around across government at the moment.
A great one about that I guess would be if you're looking at both the
Export.gov website and the SelectUSA.gov which is aimed obviously at
attracting investment into United States. When you go into either Export.gov
or SelectUSA.gov the home page there and everything at the moment is
defaulting to a, you know, Export.gov/shutdown and gives this massive
all capitals, like shouting if I can put it that way,
message smack bang in the middle of the screen saying "DUE TO A LAPSE IN
APPROPRIATIONS EXPORT.GOV, SELECTUSA.GOV AND STOPFAKES.GOV - which is an interesting
website - AND ALL ASSOCIATED ONLINE ACTIVITIES WILL BE UNAVAILABLE UNTIL
FURTHER NOTICE." And then there's a learn more link telling you about the
shutdown. The thing about this message is it's glaringly obvious you can't miss it.
It's not at all subtle.
It actually gives you very much the impression when you kind of
go to that page that as it said, all associated online activities will be
unavailable until further notice. That's a pretty strong message to be
providing to businesses. The interesting part about that though is you can
actually kind of use Export.gov and SelectUSA.gov. You can actually still
use the navigation bar to navigate around and find everything that you
wanted to before. You can still use the search engine and find everything you
wanted to before. So that's very much like the SBA and USDA and other websites
where the information is still available. It's still accessible. It can still
help businesses. But you probably wouldn't really know that if you saw
this big massive message and obviously I'll include links within the show notes
so you can go and have a look at what it looks like after the event when hopefully all
this gets sorted out. The other thing though that's really interesting is one
particular US government website that's aimed at business taking a very, very
different tact. And that is the actual website Trade.gov. Now Trade.gov also has
a message smack bang in the middle of the screen. It's not shouting in all
capitals, but then again it looks like actually it's gone super old-school with
actually no cascading stylesheets, there's no images, it's just Times New
Roman in heading one, black on white saying, "Due to the lapse in government
funding Trade.gov and Export.gov and all the associated online activities will be
unavailable until further notice." So the same message as what we saw before with
Export.gov but the difference here is quite literally all associated online
activities for Trade.gov are unavailable. There is no navigation on that site.
There is no, there's no search available on that site. There's nothing.
There's just that initial message and that's it. So obviously you want to
continue to have a presence online even if there's no changes being made to the
site. And that's not just about actually maintaining continuity of service to
business it's actually about maintaining continuity of service to Google. And the
reason I bring that up is the fact that if you have a website like Trade.gov
which is quite literally off the air with just a single home page there and
nothing else available, when the Googlebot goes out and starts crawling
your website, and obviously it does that for government sites all the time,
because they are considered to be generally very, very trustworthy. When it
goes out and finds this message and this message alone Google's not going to take
that very, very well. It basically says to the Googlebot that look this web site
just doesn't exist anymore apart from this one single page and there's no
content here. It basically loses all that authority that's been built up
for that website over many, many years. Essentially what it does is that,
it means that after this event when actual funding starts coming through,
anyone within the US from a business perspective when they're trying to find
information about, that would normally be available from Trade.gov
when it's up and running, if they go to Google chances are they're not going to
find it anywhere near as easily as they used to be able to in the past. That's
not a really good message for business because it means that there's an ongoing
impact of the shutdown well and truly after the event. I guess the only one
thing that's really, really good around the current 2018-2019 shutdown is
that at the moment this is the only website that I found aimed at business
which is basically just slamming the door in Google's face and slamming the
door in business owners faces. In the past there's obviously been other
instances where, and I've actually wrote an article last year, back in
January last year, when there was just a three day shutdown within the US
federal government and how some particular government websites at the
time were taking a similar tactic. Back in 2013 which is probably the
longest shutdown that happened at the time I think was around about 18 or 19
days, so we're fast approaching that at the moment, and during that period of
time from my experience and you know, maintaining relationships with various
government websites within Australia who maintain and deliver services to
business, there was a very, very marketable impact when it came to the
traffic that was coming through from the United States actually into government
websites in Australia delivering services to business. You might think
that sounds a bit weird but at the end of the day when a business is looking for
information it's looking for authority, it's going to find out whatever actual
Google is putting up there and what Google's going to be putting up there
are those pages that actually are continue to be maintained, continue to be
made available and actually deliver quality content and quality services
through to business. That's one thing to really kind of think
about. That there is a an impact when you kind of switch off the lights so to
speak within an actual government website, that your customers essentially
go somewhere else. The thing that was very interesting was
say for example in the 2013 shutdown, that long period there was an
increase there in the amount of traffic coming through from the United States to
some of these government sites in Australia. You know it went up around
about a third or so, and what was particularly surprising was the fact
that kind of wasn't just during the period of the shutdown. That maintained a
an actual impact past that point of time, going a month or two further where it
took a long time again for those sites obviously in the US to be rediscovered
by Google, to be considered to be authoritative again and for Google then
to change the search engine ranking so that US businesses when they're looking
for government information were instead of getting temporarily those Australian
sites they were then getting back to the US websites. That's something to consider
when it comes to the shutdown and hopefully many, many of these government
departments have actually gone through this unfortunately too often and have
actually developed plans and I'm very surprised that the Trade.gov site is
actually doing the current plan of just shutting the door because it's not
very smart. It's not very forward-thinking. I'm sure they obviously
needs to switch off the lights figuratively speaking but at least
maintained the service. It's not like, you know, the actual hosting arrangements
can't continue. Government obviously enters into long-term contracts, they continue to
maintain and pay those services in advance or on a longer-term. Yeah, very, very
surprising. There's a couple of other things though I just wanted to touch on
when it comes to this particular government shutdown and its impact on
business. It's not just about the fact that any of those websites at the moment
that I mentioned who are still available and businesses can still find the
information although it's not being maintained the overall impact generally
across the economy is not a good one when it comes to conflict obviously
within the government system between the different levels of government, between
the executive and the legislature. And that basically is because of all the
extra uncertainty that creates within a economic perspective. That's not a very,
very good thing as far as businesses are concerned. But the one element I think
nobody is really, really thinking about here at the moment is the
impact on the employees within these government departments in the
United States. I say that in the sense of, as I said we're entering the third week
now that these government departments and their websites have been shut down.
That means that for those employees who look after and maintain those government
sites within the US for business. They're not getting paid. When they're not getting
paid that puts a whole heap of financial pressure obviously on their lives and on
the lives of their families. They still need to put food on the table,
they still need to pay mortgages or pay rent, they still have student loans or
other loans that they need to pay. And if the cash isn't coming in from their
employer, the federal government, their loyalty to that federal government and
to their department even if they might be, you know, great people to work with,
even though they might be in a very, very challenging, rewarding environment of
delivering public service, they're delivering public service. They're not
delivering a public charity. Their time is valuable. They still need to pay those
bills. And chances are the long-term impacts of
this particular shutdown is actually going to flow its way through to the
quality of the employees within the US federal government who are delivering
those services to businesses. I can imagine of the hundreds, if not thousands
of different US federal government employees who are actually supporting and
delivering services to small business many of those will have doubts in their
mind. They'll be looking at their bank accounts. They'll be going down to the
grocery store and going, "What can I afford to put on the table this week?"" And
in their minds they'll be going, "What other opportunities are there available
within the private sector for my skills?" So I do fear that there's a real risk of
a brain drain in the US federal government, particularly within this
aspect of digital service delivery to business and that's going to have a big
impact I think longer-term on businesses as a whole. Because if you're not
making sure that you've got the best people on board who are servicing
businesses across the US federal government, they're going to be
delivering unfortunately less of an actual quality service, they're not going
to be actually listening to their customers and delivering to
businesses what they need to know and that in itself is then
going to have a detrimental impact more broadly to the US federal government.
Hopefully this situation gets resolved sooner and I'm not coming back in another
couple of months saying "Geez this is getting even worse," and providing an update as
literally hosting environments are no longer being paid. But these are
pressing times and these are concerning times when it comes to the
actual digital service delivery to business from government within the US.
And I do hope that it gets resolved sooner rather than later. Of course if
you're not in the United States all of this has been pretty pointless but there
actually is some significant learnings for you regardless. It's about
maintaining that continuity of service even if you're going through an actual
website redevelopment, maintaining that authority with Google, that consistency
with Google. That's always going to be critical as well if you're ever going
through a plan to migrate or move your websites onto a different content
management system or redesign the website. Ensuring that you've got
continuity of your 'Google juice' if I can call it that way, it's basically your
pages they continue to be known or if you've moved them to another location
that you've done a 301 redirect, so permanently redirected the Google
juice, that's critical as well. So those are the type of things that at the
moment are going to have an impact on people like Trade.gov
and potentially other web sites in the future if the shutdown continues.
Thanks very much again for listening and I look forward to speaking to you again
soon. Goodbye.
Thanks for listening to Government to Business. For show notes
and how Gavin can help your department or agency visit GovernmentToBusiness.com
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