Reinventing Government in the Information Age

International Practice in IT-Enabled Public Sector Reform

Richard Heeks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134656288
• Subtopic: Project Management
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Will information technology help reinvent government? It might, but only if it is correctly managed. This book provides a new model for management of information age reform, based on international case-studies drawn from the US, UK, mainland Europe, and developing countries. It offers practical guidance and analytical insights and will be of value to practitioners, students, educators and researchers in both public administration and information systems.

Part 1
Information age reform

1 Reinventing government in the information age

Richard Heeks

Abstract: ‘Government reinvention’ is largely a new terminology and repackaging of longer-term processes of public sector reform. Such processes have been particularly prevalent since the 1970s when three factors described in this chapter began to combine: a sense of crisis in the public sector, a renewed ideology that provided a response to crisis and, at times, political will and power to enact those responses. Typically those responses did and do consist of five main components: increased efficiency, decentralisation, increased accountability, improved resource management, and marketisation. After reviewing development of ideas about the information age, the chapter concludes that ‘reinventing government in the information age’ means delivering these ongoing reform components with a more overt role for information and with greater use of information technology. The role of information systems and information technology in reform is then analysed, with real-world examples provided around each of the main components of reform.

REINVENTING GOVERNMENT

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a new terminology emerged in the public sector. Commentators spoke of revitalising or reengineering the public sector or—most notably—of ‘reinventing government’ (Osborne and Gaebler 1992). However, whilst the terminology and the examples were new, most of the concepts and processes were not since they drew on the longer tradition of public sector reform: ‘Reinvention is only the latest initiative in the enduring cycle of reform’ (Ingraham 1996:454). To understand what is meant by ‘reinventing government’ we must therefore first understand what is meant by public sector reform.

Public sector reform is, if generally defined, change within public sector organisations that seeks to improve their performance. As such, public sector reform can be seen as an ongoing process since the inception of institutions that we now label ‘public sector’. American presidents, for example, have been launching comprehensive programmes to reform government since at least the start of the twentieth century (Arnold 1995).

However, public sector reform is typically defined more narrowly. It is often associated with the ideology of the ‘New Right’ towards the public sector; an ideology that grew up especially from the 1970s and which sought particular types of change in the way the public sector was run.

The roots of government reinvention can therefore be traced back to a number of historical causes, three of which are overarching (and interlinked).

Crisis in the public sector

If all had been well in the public sector, no consistent trend, let alone ideology, of change in the public sector might have emerged. However, a perception of problems with the public sector, even of crisis in some countries, emerged during the 1970s. The perceived problems were focused on:

• Inputs In a number of countries, the public sector was seen to require unsustainably large and/or unsustainably increasing public expenditure.
• Processes There was concern about examples of waste, delay, mismanagement and corruption within the public sector, all of which contributed to inefficiency in the conversion of public expenditure into public services. In particular, public servants were seen as sometimes making decisions divorced from the interests of the public they supposedly served. That they were able to do so was seen as a twin failure: first, of centralisation, which made decision makers too remote from the locus of decision information and action; second, of unaccountability, which made decision makers too remote from those outside the organisation who were affected by their decisions.
• Outputs Finally, there was a perceived problem with outputs. Concerns were widespread in a number of countries that the public sector was not delivering what it should, from adequate defence and policing through support for agriculture and industry to education, housing, health, social welfare and a hundred other responsibilities. This, in turn, undermined the wider social outcomes of public sector activity.

The sense of difficulties came to cover both what the public sector was doing (the public sector’s role) and also how it was doing it (public sector organisation and management).

A renewed ideology

If there had been no ideological peg on which to hang many of these concerns about the public sector, reform measures would have been less clearly identified and probably less strongly promoted. Such a peg emerged slowly after the Second World War and with gathering pace from the 1970s in the form of ‘neo-liberalism’; otherwise known as the ‘New Right’. This represented a resurgence of the ideas of liberalism that can be traced back to John Locke and Adam Smith in, respectively, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It provides a substantial theoretical framework that can be used to justify a set of public sector reforms.

In its crudest form— ‘market good, government bad’ —neo-liberal thinking emphasises what it sees as the economic efficiency of markets, of the forces of competition and of individual decisions. It also emphasises what it sees as the inefficiency of governments and of the forces of collective, planned intervention. Three particulars flow from this viewpoint:

• that, wherever possible, there should be a ‘rolling back of the state’; in other words, the replacement of the state with privately owned institutions;
• that the main justification for the continued existence of the state is its role in helping markets to function more efficiently;
• that, where state institutions remain, they should wherever possible be opened up to true (or, at worst, quasi-) market forces of competition, making the (bad) public sector as similar as possible to the (good) private sector.

The New Right therefore had something to say not just about the role of the public sector, but also about the way in which it might be organised and managed. It proposed comprehensive reform that can be read not merely as reform ‘of government’ but as reform ‘against government’ (Arnold 1995: 412).

Political will and power

A sense of crisis and an ideology of reform are necessary, but not sufficient conditions for reform. There must also be a third element: that of the political will and power to enact reform. A number of components of any nation’s political economy can be identified that influence this:

• the populace at large, which has often borne the brunt of public sector crisis, has typically longed for reform, has sometimes pressurised government into a rhetoric of reform (e.g. ‘reinventing government’), but has had only limited political capacity to have those reforms enacted;
• politicians and public servants, who may be powerful but have often been divided, with conflict between those supporting and those resisting reform;
• local and global capital, which has sometimes been divided but has more generally sought reform in the belief that this will reduce business costs and increase transaction speed;
• international organisations, which have been a powerful driving force behind reform for the majority of the world’s nations. These agencies have had the political and economic muscle to drive reform because countries, struggling with both international trade and domestic spending deficits, have had to request external sources of financial assistance. In return for that assistance, the domestic governments must commit to a reform programme. The late 1990s financial crisis is but the latest round in this continuing process.

The political economy of every country is different. However, one stereotypical outcome of these various forces has been a process of reform that is driven largely from outside the public sector, whilst being overtly or covertly resisted by at least some portion of public servants.

Components of reform/reinvention

The political roots of reform

Where public sector crisis prompted the call ‘Something should be done’, neo-liberal ideology provided the response ‘Something can be done’ and, in some situations, political driving forces demanded that ‘Something will be done’.

This is not, of course, to argue that concerns about changing the public sector are the sole preserve of the New Right. Commentators and politicians from all shades of the political spectrum have constantly sought change of one kind or another, and have increasingly coopted reform or reinvention on to their own agendas. For example, there are now many examples in which the political left has welcomed and even driven aspects of change such as decentralisation or increased accountability.

There is equally a current approach that sees reform as a ‘third’ or ‘middle way’. When the ideology of the New Right met the traditions of public administration, the result was the development of ‘new public management’, of which ‘reinventing government’ is but a recent fraction (Blundell and Murdock 1997). New public management has been portrayed as a kind of merger or compromise between public administration and neo-liberal ideology. Similarly, reinventing government is represented by Osborne and Gaebler (1992) as a non-partisan issue. From this perspective, there is a new, objective, optimal blueprint for government that transcends political debate.

In reality, these new reform initiatives are not so clearly balanced. They are fundamentally a set of changes that sings more from the New Right hymn sheet than from that of the left, as a look at Osborne and Gaebler’s ten-point mantra of principles for reinvention of government indicates:

• steering rather than rowing;
• empowering rather than serving;
• injecting competition into service delivery;
• transforming rule-driven organisations;
• funding outcomes, not inputs;
• meeting the needs of the customer, not the bureaucracy; earning rather than spending;
• prevention rather than cure;
• from hierarchy to participation and teamwork;
• leveraging change through the market.

It is important to recognise that the roots of current reform/reinvention agendas lie in neo-liberalism, and that this remains a powerful driver of reform, even when those reforms are remodelled and delivered by parties traditionally seen to be of the centre or left.

Reform/reinvention agendas

What constitutes the reform/reinvention agenda? There is no agreed menu of elements but typical components include those listed below. As can be seen, these components overlap and real reform initiatives may contain more than one component:

• Increased efficiency: improving the input: output ratio within the public sector. The rationale of such reforms is to address the large size of public sector expenditure and/or the inefficiency of many of its processes.
• Decentralisation: the transfer of decision making to lower, more localised levels of the public sector. The rationale of such reforms is to reduce the costs of centralised decision making, and to create more flexible and responsive decision making.
• Increased accountability: making public sector staff more accountable for their decisions and actions. The rationale of such reforms is to increase the pressure on staff to perform well, to make them more responsive to recipient groups, and to reduce inefficient or corrupt practices. One particular form of this is democratisation, meaning the increased involvement of citizens in public sector decisions and actions; this often includes components of decentralisation and marketisation.
• Improved resource management: increasing the effective use of human, financial and other resources. The rationale of such reforms is clear from their definition. It often includes a refocusing of the way the performance of these resources is planned, measured and managed.
• Marketisation: increasing the use of market forces to cover relationships within the public sector, relationships between citizens (‘consumers’) and the public sector, and relationships and boundaries between public and private sector. The ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES
• TABLES AND BOXES
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION: THE FOCUS AND CONTENT OF THIS BOOK
• PART 1: INFORMATION AGE REFORM
• PART 2: MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS
• PART 3: EXTRA-ORGANISATIONAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS
• PART 4: NATIONAL PLANNING FOR INFORMATION AGE REFORM
• PART 5: ORGANISATIONAL PLANNING FOR INFORMATION AGE REFORM
• APPENDIX: EDUCATORS’ GUIDE