Understanding E-Government

Information Systems in Public Administration

Vincent Homburg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134085019
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Governments these days often boast about the efficiency of their electronic systems. Information communication technologies (ICTs) apparently allow public service to become cheaper, faster and more democratic. E-government has become another buzzword, the shining future of the public realm. Critics claim, however, that ICTs' potential for democratic renewal is hampered by ancient assumptions of how governments should function. But which viewpoint is nearer the truth?

In this original and insightful volume, Vincent Homburg demonstrates how the use, form and impact of ICTs are, in fact, entwined within the socio-political, economic and institutional aspects already established by government and public administration. Evangelical or fatalistic perspectives are discredited to show the different realities in which ICTs play a role in our daily lives. Using case studies and vignettes from throughout Europe and the US, the book analyzes what these new technologies actually do, and how they are screened through varying layers of bureaucracy and convention.

This is a timely addition to our understanding of what is meant by e-government. It gets behind the political rhetoric. Understanding E-Government: Information Systems in Public Administration will be key reading for all students of public administration, political science, organization theory and information systems.

1 Introduction

Key points

After reading this chapter, you will be able to

• describe technological determinism as a perspective on the relation between technology and society
• explain how ICT applications result in dilemmas when applied in the real world of public administration
• describe a social shaping of technology perspective as a view on the relation between technology and society
• explain the differences in perspective of the academic disciplines of public administration, information systems and organization theory with respect to ICT applications in public administration.

A puzzling but faulty question … how do ‘ICTs’ affect public administration?

Many articles, books and policy documents on information and communication technologies (ICTs) begin with mantra-like sketches of ubiquitous, revolutionary effects of microelectronics-based, digital ‘smart machines’ (Zuboff, 1988). Apparently, they offer unlimited benefits to individuals, functional units, organizations, governments or even the fabric of our society. For example, Burstein and Klein (1995: 254) enthusiastically claim that ‘[t]here is no disagreement on the essentially revolutionary nature of the forces unleashed by the new technology’. Similarly, Tapscott (1995) has heralded the information revolution in glowing terms:

Today, we are witnessing the early turbulent days of a revolution as significant as any other in human history. A new medium of human communication is emerging, one that may prove to surpass all previous revolutions – the printing press, the telephone, the television, the computer – in its impact on our economic and social life.

(Tapscott, 1995: xiii)

Academic commentators have also speculated about the advantages of ICT. They see the potential for increased levels of social interaction among ‘empowered’ individuals (Katz et al., 2001) or of new hourglass-shaped organizational structures enabling the elimination of middle management and drastically increasing levels of productivity (Leavitt and Whisler, 1958; Scott-Morton, 1991). Not to mention the emergence of virtual organizations (Groth, 1999) or interpretations of ICT representing even greater historical change for the fabric of society than the discrete, mechanical technologies of the industrial revolution (Castells, 2000). Even more than in previous eras, information and communication technologies, in the form of all kinds of smart machines, would appear to have infused our daily lives, organizations and societal structures (Bekkers and Homburg, 2005; Lips et al., 2004).

Above-mentioned claims are consistent with a line of reasoning known as ‘technological determinism’ (MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1985). Technological determinism depicts technology as a cause of social (or sometimes even historical) change. It views development of technology as a process that occurs independently and autonomously, separate from politics, economics and power. Technological progress is, in this view, inevitable, and is limited only by scarcity of material resources. Note that although many technological determinists stress progress, more efficient and effective operations, increased democratic value in the way governments function, and in general, more open, transparent societies, such ‘utopian’ visions are not necessarily a part of technological determinism. Beside these techno-optimists, there are also techno-pessimists who talk about the end of privacy and individual freedoms, increased potentials for surveillance and control by governments (and large corporations) and decreases in well-being (or inequalities in distribution of wealth among various groups in societies, the emergence of a digital divide that widens existing gaps in society).

For the public sphere, the above rhetorical sublime of technological progress (Mosco, 2004) has led to equivalent speculations about the nature and challenges of so-called electronic governments and electronic governance. For instance, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) quite energetically promotes the use of ICTs in order to enable governments to reorganize their internal structures, focus more on citizens’ demands and in general, increase their performance (OECD, 2003). Referring to ICTs’ potential role in community development, former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has stated that ICTs are powerful tools with diverse applications, and the challenge is to put that power at the service of all humankind.¹ In various countries, national policies have been drafted in which a ‘wired’ government takes shape (Minister for the Cabinet Office, 1999, 2000; National Audit Office, 2002; OECD, 2003). In Australian, Canadian and British policy documents, for example, information and communication technologies are portrayed as enablers of a less fragmented, more responsive, joined-up government. In Danish national e-government policy documents, the emphasis is on goals of free access to information, individual freedom for citizens to exercise influence, openness in the public sector and rationalization of service delivery. The picture that emerges from these policies is that smart technology is transforming, or is about to transform, the fabric of our society, including the machinery of public administration and governance. This picture is somewhat overstated and overly simplistic.

The claim that smart machines transform public administration is certainly an interesting one and – at first sight – it raises the question what the exact effects are and will be for public administration and government. As stated above, however, such a claim is unsatisfactory since it cannot be proven or disproven, and in general is not either plausible or questionable. There are at least two reasons why the claim is unsatisfactory.

First, it uses a very abstract notion of technology. It is not immediately clear what kind of technology is being reasoned about, what properties of technologies are important and how the technology is applied and implemented in specific contexts. Rhetorically, keeping technology abstract in the claim enables the focus to remain primarily upon desirable effects. In order to reason about the consequences of ICTs, it is necessary to open the ICT ‘black box’ implicit to many of the claims that try to envisage the future of smart machinery in public administration.

Second, the effects, impacts or consequences of ICTs are depicted in a rather exogenous way. Authors talk about increased efficiency (Gurbaxani and Wang, 1991), increased speed of operations and government transparency, without specifying how these eventual effects are accomplished, in what contexts the effects are likely to occur, and the kinds of effects that interfere with existing political, socio-organizational and institutional settings.

Case vignette 1.1: E-government pay-off in Europe

In a study on the pay-off of technology initiatives in government (TNO and CapGemini, 2004), it was concluded that ICTs do pay off in terms of improved quality of information provision, reduction of process time, reduction of administrative burdens, cost reduction, improved service level, increased efficiency and increased customer satisfaction. At least some of the changes not only occurred because of characteristics of the ICTs used in policy implementation (faster calculations, increased capacity to process huge amounts of information), but also could be attributed to organizational changes in back offices (for instance, redesign of workflows).

The focus of this book is upon the use of smart machines, or in general information and communication technologies, in and around public administration. In recent years, a lot has been said about ‘electronic government’ or ‘e-government’ (Bekkers and Homburg, 2005; Fountain, 2001; Grönlund, 2003; Snellen, 1998; Tat-Kei Ho, 2002) and in practice, there are enough existing implementations of ICTs to talk about an actual ‘wired government’ (Minister for the Cabinet Office, 1999, 2000; Ministerie van Economische Zaken, 1999; Ministry of Research and Information Technology, 1995; Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relationships, 1999; National Audit Office, 2002; National Performance Review, 2000; OECD, 2003). It is seductive to ask the question what the effects of smart machines are for public administration, but, for the reasons mentioned above, such a question will not be asked in this book. Rather, the focus is on the properties, potentials and paradoxes of ‘smart machines’ for governments (including an analysis of what would make machines ‘smart’ or ‘intelligent’). After reading the book, it will probably not be possible to give an answer to the question, what are the exact consequences of ICTs for public administration, but I hope that the question is more circumscribed, defined more exactly and, therefore, better answerable.

Examples of wired public administration: challenges, problems and dilemmas

Introduction

As has been argued above, this book pays attention to the use of ICTs in and around public administration in a specific and particular way. One could ask the question whether this is needed. Aren’t there enough fine textbooks out there completely devoted to applications of ICTs? Yes there are. Nevertheless, it can be argued that existing textbooks do not pay enough attention to either properties or characteristics of ICTs, to the various uses of technology, or to the socio-political and institutional contexts in which smart machines are implemented and yield effects. In order to illustrate the need for this book some examples of implementations of ICTs in and around public administrations are presented below. They include questions and dilemmas that, until now, have remained unsolved.

Levying of taxes: transparency versus law enforcement

Internationally, national and federal tax agencies have championed the race for the most successful ‘wired’ government services. For example, in 2004 the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was cited as most reliable government website,² and throughout the world tax agencies are seen as frontrunners of efficient, responsive and customer-oriented government agencies. Many agencies have not only reorganized their internal structures and information systems, but also redesigned the ways in which they communicate with the outside world. Contacts with citizens now take place using advanced, customer-friendly websites, while government agencies are cooperating more and more for the purpose of cross-checking citizens’ data and fighting fraud. For citizens, this implies that the processes of requesting rebates and submitting personal information has been simplified, and there is less need to submit information that has already been supplied to tax agencies. Furthermore, through websites, tax agencies are able to offer customized information about tax laws, regulations and so on. The Dutch Tax Agency, for example, claims that all the background dossiers and materials that a professional tax inspector needs are online and available to citizens. In short, one could conclude that tax agencies have, over the past years, embraced ICTs and that these ICTs have yielded organizational transparency, customer orientation and efficiency.

There is, however, a limit to the technologically enabled customer orientation of tax agencies. In the past some tax agencies (for example, the Dutch Belastingdienst) have experimented with personalized web services, with which individual taxpayers could monitor the progress and status of tax filings. Comparable ‘track and trace’ services exist on almost every e-commerce application (for instance, e-banking services) and at first sight they appear desirable for tax agencies since they would be conducive to transparency and personalized customer orientation. This ignores the ‘involuntary services’ and enforcement role that tax agencies also provide. They are public service organizations as well as law enforcement agencies and the balancing of these functions provides a compelling argument against the use of ‘track and trace’ services. In their role of law enforcement agency, tax agencies try to maximize the citizen’s perceived chance of being caught while trying to submit forged income figures or other kinds of information. A fully personalized service would reveal the actual checks and countermeasures available to tax agencies to fight fraud. Such a service could entice citizens to maximize calculative behaviour, which is of course not in the direct interest of tax agencies. This provides an example of the importance of how the specific context of ICT application shapes and interacts with the way that ICTs are implemented.

Focus on electronic service delivery may paradoxically widen gap between citizens and administration

Throughout the world, national and local governments are implementing web services to increase citizen orientation, reduce red tape, create one-stop shops, decrease the administrative burden on citizens and corporations, and increase citizens’ trust in government (for a more complete discussion, refer to Chapter 6 on e-government). By increasing the quality of public service delivery, it is hoped to bridge the often-felt gap that exists between corporations and citizens on the one hand, and government agencies and administrations on the other hand.

Although it seems reasonable that citizens’ trust increases as the level of quality of services increase, Fountain (2001) argues that the opposite might be the case. She notes that public organizations are not solely concerned with service delivery and points to the multifaceted (policy making and executive) character of many public sector organizations. Addressing citizens as consumers and defining government as a production company ignores the inherent political character of public service delivery. Public organizations delivering services are supposed to be not only responsive to the needs of customers, but also accountable to Good Citizens (Schudson, 1998) or citoyens, and to voters (Bekkers and Homburg, 2005). According to Fountain (2001), emphasizing service delivery and ignoring notions of citizenship, other than being a customer of public service, will eventually jeopardize legitimacy and citizens’ trust in government.

Automating discretion: consequences for control and accountability

Many public sector services – for example specific benefits, permits or rebates – require some sort of interaction between public servants and ci...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 On technology, intelligence and the social
• 3 The Information Society
• 4 Bureaucracy and virtual organizations
• 5 The political economy of information networks
• 6 E-Government: a wired government takes shape
• 7 ICT evaluation
• 8 Conclusions and reflection