E-government and Public Sector Process Rebuilding: Dilettantes, Wheel Barrows, and Diamonds

224 Pages·2005·2.492 MB·English

by  Kim Viborg Andersen (auth.)

E-GOVERNMENT AND PUBLIC SECTOR PROCESS
REBUILDING
E-government and Public
Sector Process Rebuilding
Dilettantes, Wheel Barrows, and Diamonds
by
Kim Viborg Andersen
Copenhagen Business School,
Denmark
KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS
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eBookISBN: 1-4020-7995-8
Print ISBN: 1-4020-7994-X
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Contents
Preface vii
Presentation of the PPR-Model 1
The Activity and Customer Centric Approach 19
The domains and directions of IT impacts 37
Digital wheel barrows in local government 57
E-government Objectives, Means, and Reach 71
The Organizational Membrane Penetrated by Mobile Technologies 93
E-Procurement: The Improvement of Supporting and Strategic Operations
107
Instrumental Digital Customer Involvement 133
Evaluation of IT applications 153
Development of e-government applications 177
Conclusion 195
Preface
Writing a book on information systems (IS) in government turned out to
be targeting the market at a time when the topic of e-government is
sprouting. Clearly, I am happy to have launched a book that hopefully can
help drive the e-government race in the right direction. Most e-government
plans are at the surface stylish and confident in their capacity to transform
their country, county, municipality, and city. Under the first layer of
confidence, there is little information on where the right direction lead to,
what resources it will take to get there, who is getting there, and what will be
the impacts.
We present a series of studies and observations that governments at
present are taking the wrong track if the benefits of e-government is to be
any different from the benefits achieved from information technology (IT) so
far. The PPR-approach we launch in this book is not a guarantee for reaching
the right goals. The goals and aims of the IT applications need to be
identified in the organization of the activities that starts and ends with the
customers. This book provides guidelines and inspiration for how these can
be approached.
“E-government and Public Sector Process Rebuilding: Dilettantes,
Wheelbarrows, and Diamonds” is chosen as the title of this book to reflect
three overall goals.
First, the aim is to give a constructive input to rebuild and improve the
processes in which the public sector perform activities and interact with the
citizens, companies, and the formal elected decision-makers. The ambition is
not to attack the public sector per se or to argue that no public sector should
exist. That would a wrong motivation to adopt this book and would
contradict the objectives of the PPR-approach launched in this book.
viii E-government and Public sector process rebuilding (PPR):
Dilettantes, wheelbarrows, and diamonds
Second, we want to emphasize information systems as the vehicle for
change. The book covers a range of applications and technologies other
than internet technologies to demonstrate the plethora of technologies that
are part of PPR.
Third, the subtitle of the book reflects that there are serious capability
challenges in the public sector inhibiting the transformation towards activity
and customer centric applications. The dilettantes in the public sector are in
need of upgrading, rethinking, and refocusing their use of IS. Part of this
involves a revisit of the extensive use of digital wheel barrows to transmit
data, and complement the transaction focus with IT-enabled analysis of the
activities. Also, there is a need to recognize that IS are not only flashy and
shining diamonds to be shown off on special occasions. IS are, as are most
diamonds, produced to be part of a set of activities and are intended for
replacement whenever the diamonds are no longer serving their intended
purpose.
The book should as such be seen as an input to researchers and graduate
and Ph.D. students. Equally important readership for this book is the
practitioner group comprised of public servants, managers, policy makers,
consultant, and IT-suppliers. Consequently the book is written in a style and
format that should appeal to both groups. The book downplays the more
rigorous part of the arguments, tables, and figures although there are still be
a few places with rather complex data and tables.
This book has had a long birth and the publisher has been very patient
waiting for the final manuscript. The research and writing up of the pieces
has been going through a series of drafting, comments from colleagues,
students, and governmental workers. Without their comments, I would not
have been able to complete the book.
Chapter 3 of this book was developed from a joint research project with
Professor James N. Danziger from University of California at Irvine.
Although the chapter has been conceptualized, reiterated, and rephrased, the
bulk of that chapter and the research conducted is a result of joint forces
rather than the results of my work only.
I am in debt to Department of Informatics at the Copenhagen Business
School who granted me the opportunity to complete this book and provided
the physical facilities to enable me to do so. During 2003, whilst the final
outline and research for this book was completed, I was happy to benefit
from the friendly atmosphere at the Department of Economics, Statistics,
and Information Systems (ESI), Örebro University in Sweden. I am also
appreciative of the School of Information Systems at Deakin University in
Australia who hosted me during January 2004 where the last elements of this
book emerged.
E-government and Public sector process rebuilding (PPR): ix
Dilettantes, wheelbarrows, and diamonds
The text has been carefully proofread by Angela Wyatt from New
Zealand and Birgitte Bush from the Department of Informatics at the
Copenhagen Business School. Last, but certainly not least, Vicki Antosz has
done an outstanding job in formatting, entering, and keeping track of the
versions and iterations of this book.
Any errors that remain are clearly on my behalf only.
March 2004
Kim Viborg Andersen
Chapter 1
PRESENTATION OF THE PPR-MODEL
1. INTRODUCTION
Reorganizing work processes using information systems (IS) has been a
focal point for consultancy work in the private and the public sectors.
Ongoing modernization of management in the public sector, gray-zone/
semi-public organizations, and virtual/ teleworking/ Internet use are some of
the organizational features that form a dynamic triangle of technical,
organizational and institutional changes. These have altered the face of the
public sector and paved the road for what we in this book label “Public
Sector Process Rebuilding Using Information Systems” and use the
abbreviation PPR.
With governmental expenditures on IS still escalating annually, rather
than diminishing, it is evident that government has been seeking a return on
their efforts to implement new IS in their organizations. For government, the
motives to invest in IS may include issues such as; does R&D expenditures
lead to higher economic growth? Does computerization of the public offices
lead to savings in manpower, better service, and more services? Does
interaction with citizens and companies improve? It is apparent that the use
of IS does not live up to expectations and is a continual source of vexation
for the government.
One way to solve the puzzle of missing benefits from IS-investments is
to increase the number of variables and approaches to find valid
explanations for why IS does not always match the intentions, expectations,
and needs. The interest in factors leading to a successful implementation has
spanned from technical issues, environmental concerns, organizational
2 Presentation of the PPR-Model
factors, and political issues. Parallel with the increase in number of
variables, a growing variety of research disciplines have been brought
together to solve the puzzle of the missing impacts of IS.
Another approach to solve the missing value riddle is to refine the
measurements of what constitutes successful implementation arguing for a
change in focus from assumed impacts to the exploitation rather than just the
use of IS (Willcocks et al. 1997). Following this line of argument, IS-
management rather than the magnitude and altitude of IS application is the
key to understand how internal and external work processes at micro, meso
and macro level of government can be improved.
The third track we want to highlight is the issue of the use of IS in
government. From one perspective, government represents an institutional
user that can implement new IS in a top-down command style. A competing
view is to either follow actor-network approaches (Akrich 1994; Bijker
1994) and/ or user centric-approaches thus shifting the focus to the
affiliations, environments, interactions, and identities of the social actors in
government (Lamb and Kling 2003). In a governmental setting, it is
important to consider this approach since the borderline between
government, business and civil society often is blurred.
The final route that we highlight is the government versus governance
approach. By governance, we refer to the “interaction between the formal
institutions and those in civil society…a process whereby elements in
society wield power, authority and influence and enact policies and
decisions concerning public life and social upliftment” (Council-for-
Excellence-in-Government 2001). By government, we imply the
organization in charge of governing a political unit. We can distinguish
between the two modes by asking the questions “who is using the IS?”
versus “how is government using IS?” Often, the intention is to improve
government rather than governance by using IS.
The four avenues that government and researchers have followed in their
(studies of) implementing IS (segmented versus multi- and interdisciplinary
studies, adoption versus exploitation, institutional versus user centric
approaches, government versus governance) form the foundation of our
PPR-concept in the sense that each dimension includes issues of which an
understanding is imperative in order to rebuild the processes. There are
indeed various obstacles for reorganizing government, such as the extreme
openness of the public sector organizations. For example, every piece of
information has to be filed. All applications have to be treated equally. Also,
public organizations rarely change in any rapid nor top-down manner.
Rather, they change in an incremental manner and only partly top-down.
Whilst this applies to a large part of the public sector, the increased use of
teleworking, virtual organizations, and quangos/ semi-governmental
Presentation of the PPR-Model 3
organizations, make us more optimistic about the prospects of reorganizing
the “business processes” in the public sector.
1.1 Why IS in Government?
Despite IS in government being a research issues for many years - with
highlights such as the Reinforcement Hypothesis (Danziger et al. 1982), the
Dutton & Kraemer study on Fiscal Impact Budgeting Systems (Dutton and
Kraemer 1985), the Osborne and Gaebler book on reinventing government
(Osborne and Gaebler 1992) and the book on Public Administration in the
Information Age (Snellen and Donk 1998) – the field still lacks a coherent
approach to theory and theory building. In fact it is very difficult to point to
any major area or field of government utilizing IS theories or theory building
(Weick 1989; Whetten 1989).
The PPR method presented in this book calls for more action research
(Argyris et al. 1985) and equally welcome studies that discuss the
ontological, epistemological, methodological, and axiological dimensions of
the PPR-approach (Fitzgerald and Howcroft 1998).
Beyond the need to build a more coherent research community, there are
three overall arguments for doing research on IS in government. First of all,
there is a high level of policy saliency and funding of development. There is
also a potential to successfully implement application in areas such as health
care and develop new generations of vertical and horizontal infrastructure.
Second, there are solid scale arguments for doing research on IS in
government. Government might be decentralized and segmented in silos, but
at the application level most applications are identical or even shared across
departments. With the diversified user environment, this provides unique
opportunities to study variance in the implementation of applications.
The third argument for researching IS in government is that researchers
might have easier access to quantitative and qualitative data sources as
compared to those researchers who investigate the private sector. Although
issues on privacy, confidentiality, etc. are research components in both the
private and public sector, the public sector might be keener to open the gates
for researchers.
2. REORGANIZING THE PROCESSES
The concept of reorganizing processes originates in the basic questions;
Are we doing our business in the most optimal way? Are we doing our job
well enough? Are we giving all we’ve got? (Osborne and Gaebler 1992).
The last question is just as crucial for the public sector as for any other large