Prescriptions for IT in Government

Information systems have become an important concern of generalist managers ingovernmental organizations and public managers need to learn how to manage IT. Forgeneralist and IT managers, the current situation creates both difficulties and possibili-ties. It is the best of times because IT has become recognized as the major vehicle forachieving innovation in public organizations. At the same time, the number and speedof new technologies in the IT area can make it difficult for even the most highly-skilledIT professional staff to keep up with innovations in the field. What is a generalist managerto do who needs to attempt to not only comprehend, but manage these IT innovations?The situation facing these administrators (and IT staff themselves) is the sense of beingon a “moving staircase” (Farbey, Land & Targett, 1999). The problem is that thesemanagers must find a method for making rational choices in a field that changes soquickly.

Politics, Leadership, and Information Technology

The underlying premise of this chapter is that information is power and consequentlyinformation management is inherently political. Information asymmetries give an advan-tage of one actor over others (Bellamy, 2000). Maintaining control over information canallow an individuals, departments, or organizations to control how successful theyappear to others and thus may protect autonomy, job security, and funding. Therefore,in order to provide effective leadership for IT, the generalist and head IT manager willneed to actively engage themselves in both internal and external politics.An excellent case illustrating the importance of political issues in managing IT occurredin California. The California Department of Information Technology (DOIT) was elimi-nated in June of 2002 (Peterson, 2002). The Department had been created in 1995 in orderto solve the problem of several disastrous contracts in the IT area including a DMVproject that cost over $50 million but never functioned as planned (Peterson, 2002).Peterson (2002) cites accounts from observers to support the argument that a majorreason for the failure was due to the other major agencies that viewed the new departmentas a threat to their power and lobbied to reduce the authority of the agency in thelegislation creating it. In particular, the opponents lobbied to deny the new DOIT controlover operations in the legislation creating DOIT. Those with interests that were opposedto the new DOIT included existing departments that had major authority in the IT fieldand/or those with large data centers. The opposition was successful so that thelegislation limited DOIT’s role mainly to authority over the budget.

Public and Private Information Systems

Information managers need to be aware of the fact that managing IT in the public sectorpresents different challenges than those faced in the private sector. However, there hasbeen little systematic attention given to these differences by IT researchers. The purposeof this chapter is to review these differences and to present some empirical informationconcerning the differences between IT management between the two sectors. I concludeby discussing the implications of these differences for managers involved in publicsector IT.

Information Technology, Accountability, and Information Stewardship

Over the past two decades, there has been an unabated demand for more accountabilityfrom public organizations. The term “accountability” is employed with a variety ofdifferent meanings. I view the purpose of these assessments as responsiveness to publicor external values. As Meijer (2001, p. 234) points out, accountability is a practice ratherthan an outcome. The essence of accountability is the idea that an individual ororganization “is held to answer for performance” and public organizations should beresponsive to the values of their customers (Meijer, 2001, p. 259). For example, we do notwant to allow professors to over-concentrate on research and ignore teaching, so nowmany states require that institutions prove that students are achieving their goals, suchas obtaining jobs and passing professional examinations. In other words, the purposeof accountability mechanisms is to achieve responsiveness to external values held bythe public and the constituencies served by public agencies. Although most account-ability reports tend to emphasize quantitative performance measures, qualitative assess-ments of the adequacy of performance may also be used to achieve responsiveness

Information Technology, Training, and Organizational Learning

The development of information technology creates many new opportunities for orga-nizations to acquire and disseminate knowledge and skills among its employees. Due tothe crucial importance of knowledge and skills related to IT, human resource issues havearisen that need to be dealt with. A recent in-depth study (Nelson & Todd, 2004) of severalorganizations identified the following issues as being important to the management ofIT personnel (Adapted from Nelson & Todd, 2004, p. 4):1.How can the organization recruit employees with the needed skills?2.How can IT staff work together with the human resources department?3.How can the organization develop the right mix of skills?4.How can the organization support career development programs that meet theneeds of the organization and the staff?5.How can the organization keep up with new technologies?6.How can employees be compensated fairly?7.How can an effective work environment be developed and maintained?8.How can personnel balance work and personal life?9.How can key personnel be retained?

Planning for Information Technology in the Public Sector

Experts agree that formal strategic IT plans should not only be done, but they should alsobe revised regularly at least on a yearly basis (Barrett & Greene, 2001). Reed (2003) citesdata from the Government Performance Project that high-performing governments tendto update their plans one or more times during a year. Raumer (2001) points out that withthe cutbacks in governmental budgets, IT projects are no longer rubber stamped but mustmake their business case and argues that the strategic planning process is needed to setsound priorities. The term business case refers to a case based on solid business reasonssuch as increased revenues and/or decreased costs that are expected to improve theeffectiveness and efficiency of the organization and may be contrasted with changes fornon-business reasons such as for prestige and “keeping up with technology.” Failureto plan adequately has led to serious problems. For example, Ward (2003) has argued thatorganizations must plan their intranets or the intranets will die. He cites examples ofintranets that have failed and have to be restructured frequently because they were done“on a whim” of management with no clear direction and became political “footballs.”In this chapter, I discuss the key issues and problems encountered in planning forinformation technology. In particular, I will focus on the logic behind prescriptions to doplanning and the challenges and complexities that occur in planning for IT. I also seekto explain why planning is often not done at all or not done according to the recommen-dations laid out by experts.

Governments and IT Sharing

There are many reasons why today’s computerized information systems can achievemore sharing in government than ever before. Over the last decade, an increasingemphasis has been placed on taking an enterprise-wide view of governments in order toreplace “stovepipe” systems that focus on one department’s needs with integratedsystems that would allow users from any department to access to information they needto achieve their jobs. This ability to share information across departmental boundarieshas become accepted as one of the basic goals of modern information management ingovernment. One of its key precepts is that data should only be input once into a systemand any user (with a valid need) can use that information from anywhere at any time ina variety of forms.

Electric Government

Electronic government (e-government) has become a primary focus of informationmanagement for governmental officials as well as IT staff. In this chapter, I review thebasic concepts of e-government and present information on its successes and limita-tions. I also outline key issues that need to be addressed in planning and implementingIT. Because governments are so active in the e-government area, the situation ischanging rapidly so assessments that I make now will undoubtedly need to be revisitedregularly.

Information Management and Ethical Issues in Government

There are many ethical and legal issues raised by the growing of electronic informationmanagement and there is a growing literature on the development of “cyber-ethics.”There is consensus among experts that organizations need to be proactive in addressingcyber-ethics. A U.S. Treasury Department study showed that 60% of computer securityfailures come from within the organization (Stone & Henry, 2003). That fact suggests afailure of organizations to instill a sense of ethics in its employees. The turnover rate ofIT professionals has been relatively high compared to other professions and this maymake them more problematic when it comes to ethical issues (Oz, 2001). Oz’s comparativestudy of IT and other professionals found them somewhat less ethical with respect tosoftware piracy and hacking but comparable to other professionals in their attitudestoward privacy. One of the problems is that ethics is not a part of the standard ITcurriculum (Wilder & Soat, 2001), which is one reason that organizations may need toconduct active training about ethics. IT professional societies have codes of ethics suchas that of the Association for Computing Machinery that is available online. However,Linderman and Schiano (2001) argue that IT “is not a profession” because it lacksimportant characteristics of a professional, such as certification standards and “sanc-tions for unprofessional behavior.” They also point out that only 8% of IT professionalsbelong to the ACM.

Evaluation and Information Technology

It is important to evaluate information technology because if you don’t assess resultsfrom IT, research (e.g., Markus et al., 2000, p. 255) shows that you will not achieve thegoals you are pursuing. Moreover, investments in information technology hardware,software, and personnel have become a larger portion of the budgets of governments atevery level so it makes sense to determine whether these expenditures are paying off.More importantly, a well-designed evaluation program can provide feedback on how toimprove IT services. In this chapter, I review basic concepts of evaluation and apply themto the evaluation of information technology. I draw from research literature to identifymodels and approaches that have been employed in assessing the value and performanceof information technology. Finally I look at some actual evaluation measures used byvarious governments to assess their information technology function.