Why, though often neglected, IT is key to Government success
Information technologies and their procurement shape Governments’ ability to generate public value, and yet this relationship is still not well understood
The centrality of data might be the latest stage in a longer transformation from an industrial to an informational society. In 1996, and building on other thinkers before him, Manuel Castells published his monumental Network Society, part of his trilogy, the Information Age. In that work, Castells explained how information had become central to production, distribution, and consumption processes, transforming the shape and functioning of the economy, companies, work practices, and cities. An important omission in his analysis, however, were governments and organizations. Castells explored the role of the State in the new information era, but he did not analyze how information and the technologies to collect, process and make sense of it have transformed public organizations.
That analysis had to wait 10 more years, until Patrick Dunleavy, Helen Margetts, Simon Bastow and Jane Tinkler published their book Digital Era Governance. IT Corporations, The Sate and e-Government, where they explored the role of IT in public administration, tracking the history of that relationship. The book also studied the impact of IT systems and IT contracting on public organizations, and described four ways in which IT affects public management:
1. The documentation of decisions, tracking of versions, and systematic organization of files to function impersonally and build an institutional memory enabled by electronic systems was fundamental for the building and operation of modern bureaucracies.
2. IT support systems and its technostructure has played a key role in the organigram of bureaucracies throughout their history.
3. The importance of controlling information has increased with the growing complexity of government functioning, including the expansion of governments into knowledge intensive areas such as health, environmental management or education.
4. Many policy initiatives depend for their implementation on complex IT systems. The experience of Healthcare.gov in the US showed how the success or failure of a political priority may hinge on the ability to implement it through operating IT systems. Others like Rosie Collingon (2021) have documented how these systems often determine “the ability of the elected government to govern in the interests of citizens.”
The arrival of the internet brought the importance of IT systems to a whole new level. Citizens began to interact with governments through digital means, while their expectations have been shaped - and raised - due to their experience with e-commerce and social media. And yet, despite the centrality of IT systems in government performance, often these critical functions have been highly formalized and routinized, losing salience and importance for top officials, who do not dedicate sufficient time to understand, transform and leverage them.
This is often complicated by the “legacy” effects that major investments in technology have in orientating and constraining organizational strategies for long periods. As put by Dunleavy and colleagues Government’s capacity in any of our case study countries to enjoy the benefits of these technology-driven trends will be heavily reliant on IT corporations. That is why procurement is such a crucial element to understand how IT is adopted in government and how it affects government performance. After studying the IT contracting practices of seven countries (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and the Netherlands), they concluded that: the greater the power of the IT industry, the less effective performance of government IT has been.
The three key variables that they found connected with improved government performance were: the existence of competitive procurement practices, lower concentration of IT suppliers in the market and greater development of in-house IT capacities within public organizations. This last element is particularly notable in those countries that underwent heavy New Public Management inspired reforms that resulted in greater out-sourcing of IT functions and the weakening of internal capacities.
The lessons from Digital Era Governance are critical for anyone interested in studying how data and its infrastructure affects governments. First, infrastructures to collect, process and use data will influence and be influenced by the organizational shape of the public organizations in which they are deployed. The ability of governments to leverage data to generate public value will highly depend on a good match between these two elements. Second, this ability will also be largely determined by the procurement practices, the vendor ecosystem and in-house capacities retained by governments.