Information System in Public Sector Organizations - Essay Example

INFORMATION SYSTEM IN PUBLIC SECTOR ORGANISATIONS Challenges from the implementation of information system in public sector organizations Introduction With the increased government services locally and nationally, there is need to ensure effective coordination of government services and communication. Since 1950s, technology has been important theme in the study of organization functions. Over the last 30 years, information technologies have become a major factor that has led to remarkable performance of organizations locally and globally. With the emergence of modern information technology, firms and government agencies no longer need to take place around hierarchy. Contrary to the bureaucracies in the past that adopted command and control as well as inadequate distribution of information, innovation in information technology has made firms and governments to effectively organize what can be done during their day to day operations. Within the public sector organizations, information technology was primarily adopted to automate existing operations and to increase the speed of communication. E-government has therefore positively impacted on the performance of the organizations. This meant that the paper work and people were replaced by electrons. Before the introduction of internet and extensive use of personal computers, the major objective of technology use in government was enhancing the management effectiveness of the administrators while at the same time increasing the government productivity (Brown and Duguid, 2000). With the diffusion of personal computers in 1980s, public administrators were provided with personal information technology system, leading to a new period of IT use in government systems. On the other hand, learning as a process has positively impacted on the knowledge management. Through learning within the public organizations, knowledge has gained sufficient momentum. Despite the positive implications of e-government and learning, public sector organizations are faced with quite a number of challenges. This paper seeks to discuss the challenges from the implementation of information system in public sector organizations, using the concepts of e-government and learning in theory and in practice. E-government Information and communication technologies (ICTs) were noted to have strong impact on the way the public administrators performed their duties. For instance, ICT assisted in service and information delivery, creation of a networked structure for interconnectivity, effectiveness and efficiency interactivity, decentralization, and accountability among other aspects. E-government entails utilization of internet and the World-Wide-Web to deliver government information and services to citizens. According to Means and Schneider (2000), e-government is the relationships that exist between government, their customers, and suppliers among other stakeholders by the use of electronics means. E-government can also be taken as the use of technology especially Web-based applications to improve and effectively deliver government information and services. There are various sub-categories of e-government. These include government to government, government to citizen, government to business, government to civil society, citizen to citizen. Notable organizations that have played a major role in the development of e-government are the United Nations (UN) and the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA). The e-model by UN & ASPA proposed five stages of development. These include emerging stage, enhanced stage, interactive stage, transactional stage and lastly seamless stage. During the implementation of the e-government in public sector organizations, there arise some challenges as discussed in the section below. E-government challenges from the implementation of information system One of the first challenges that face public sector organizations as far as e-government is concerned is that there is no standard definition of the concept. This limitation arises due to various reasons. For example, e-government is a concept that is defined by an activity’s goal rather than by the actual technology used. This implies that e-government can have different implications depending on priorities in government strategies, and regulatory environment. By just focusing on the technology or technological artifacts, the public and government organizations will not get a chance to appreciate the emerging nature of the e-government concept (Taylor, 1911). Additionally, the stakeholders in the public sector organizations will not be able to understand that regardless of the technology employed to provide e-government services, the key issue is to make government departments works in a faster, better, and convenient manner (Boddy et al, 2009). The second challenge is that e-government is one of the major concepts that mean a lot of different things to different groups. For example, Perri (2001) indicates that different parts of e-government include e-service delivery, e-democracy, and e-governance. One of the major aspects that make it difficult to have a strong grasp of e-government concept is the rapid technological changes in the society. Alternative definitions emphasizes on particular subsection of these relationships touching on issues such as transparency, participation, interactivity, and cost-effectiveness among others. For instance, according to Whitson and David (2001), e-government in relation to US Department of Energy, implies the implementing cost effective models for citizens, industry, federal employees among other stakeholders. Another challenge that e-government has generated just like knowledge management and management by objectives is that it contains a lot of hype and promotional efforts. Hype entails raising expectations above realistic positions. In this way, it prevents people from seeing what is going wrong in a particular area resulting to a delay in the corrective action plan. The distortion aspect of e-government prevents administrators from addressing an issue that is under their management. An additional challenge that faces public sector organizations is that it is not clear how a substantial change is required to meet the criteria for a government technology project to be referred to as e-government project (Laudon and Laudon, 2013). For instance, public managers might ask themselves are their emails addresses or static Web sites enough, or is there need for some interactions. Resistance to change is another notable aspect that public sector organizations experience. It is worth to note that most of these organizations especially in the developing countries are managed by old people who had experience in paper work. Similarly, majority of the employees in the organization are old even though they have the needed skills and experience. By introducing a new technology in the form of e-government, such employees may be hesitant to adopt the new changes. Most of them may offer resistance to the change due to the fear of losing jobs or being demoted due to lack of IT skills. Based on the above challenges, organization and government agencies have come up with four suggestions to deal with the issues. These includes examining and better explanation of the process of, and participation patterns within patterns in e-government projects, addressing the problem of under specification in the e-government literature, explaining the policy-making processes, and lastly tying the subject of e-government strongly as a way of mainstreaming public administration research. Practical implications of e-government analysis As noted earlier, e-government has a lot of hypes. This implies that the governments have viewed it as multi-layer projects that only provide foreseen outcome. However, in some countries, e-government has been noted to generate more costs that its benefits. For example, in UK a recent study indicated that e-government costs are not only sour but their costs outweigh the benefits they generate for government. According to CIO of the UK Department for Work and Pensions, despite spending of over 14 billion pounds on IT within the public sector, only 30% of the projects are successful. By facing off the challenges as discussed earlier, many countries have now adopted extensive IT structure to undertake their operations. For instance, in its effort to increase tax collected, Singapore has established e-government systems that allows for proactive engagement of citizens (Zammuto et al. 2007). Through the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (IRAS), the government of Singapore came up with E-filing system. The E-filing brought to end agitations both for taxpaying citizens and organizational staff due to administrative lags that were as a result of unprocessed tax returns that stockpiled in the Singapore Income Tax Department. Learning –in Theory and in Practice By checking the language of knowledge management at the door, there are notable distinctions between information and knowledge. Learners are in most cases faced with challenges in identifying the distinctions. Knowledge entails a knower. This implies that individuals treat information as independent as well as self sufficient. According to an individual’s attachment, knowledge appears to be difficult to detach as compared to information. While information can be put in a database, written down, accumulated, found, or lost among other aspects, knowledge does not take seriously the ideas of receiving, shipping or quantification. Another issue that learners can face in differentiating knowledge from information is that knowledge requires more assimilation thus making it hard to receive or give. Additionally, knowledge is a thing that individuals digest rather than just holding. Based on the importance of people as carriers and creators of knowledge, organizations are now forced to realize that knowledge is found in little quantity in their databases than in its people. For example, in case NASA wanted to return to the moon, it is argued that it has to start from the scratch due to the fact that it has lost the human expertise that controlled it and not due to the loss of data. A similar argument by Larry Prusak and Tom Davenport indicate that if Ford aims at creating a successful Taurus, it will find that it the possibility of that success has been lost due to the loss of the professional who created it. Another notable challenge of learning is the high costs incurred by mistaking knowledge and its sources for information and its sources. According to Dorothy Leonard, a company referred as ELP decided to take over Grimes, its major competitor by capturing its intellectual capital. After the deal that was characterized by large amount funds and machine tools ELP noticed that the competitive advantage of Grimes was based on employees who were already gone and not the asset. Detaching knowledge from some people and taking it to others is another key challenge (Fountain, 2001). This is based on the fact that it offers protection of some knowledge assets thus making the management of the knowledge more difficult. One of the renowned scholars who have researched on the difficulty of managing knowledge is Robert Cole. For example, Cole indicated that Hewlett-Packard adopted best practices within the firm in the company’s attempt to improve the quality of its plants globally. The same strategy was adopted by HP, but it also failed. However, Cole argues that failure to transfer practice is not just a matter of linguistic boundaries or national position. It has more trouble transferring it more that we perceive. Another notable issue that is common to learners is that if the same stream of information is directed to different individuals; it does not produce the same knowledge in each. This indicates that if individuals are engaged in different learning process, they are likely to respond to information in a diversified manner. This shows that assimilation is shaped by practice. Practical implications of learning According to Sir Gerald Louis Charles Dickens, a Senior Loyal Navy Officer, people should only be taught nothing but facts since only the facts are wanted in life. Learning process has several implications. For example, it takes us ahead of information. The stand that learning is the steady supply of facts that was adopted by Dickens 150 years ago still exist today. It is worth to note that learning is more of demand driven that a supply side matter the way it is treated. This implies that people learn in response to the need. For example, in public sector organizations, the need to collect hire taxes calls for the implementation of E-filling. In turn, staff in revenue collecting agents must undertake IT courses to enhance their knowledge on how to operate the computer systems (Bouwman et al, 2008). Conclusion Based on the above discussion, it is clear that for public sector organization and government agencies to attain a competitive edge just like most of their counterpart in the private sector, the issue of e-government cannot be overlooked. This entails expanding their investment to acquire computer systems and installing the needed software. On its part, learning process allows the organizations to benefit. Notable aspect that makes firms not to have similar competitive advantage like their rivals even if they acquire them is that it is difficult to transfer knowledge. References Boddy, D. et al. 2009. Managing information systems: Strategy and Organization, Financial Times/ Prentice Hall. Bouwman H. et al 2008. Information & Communication Technology in Organizations. London: Sage. Brown, J and Duguid, P. 2000. The Social Life of Information. Harvard Business. Fountain, J.2001. Paradoxes of Public Sector Customer Service, Governance: an International Journal of Policy and Administration, vol.14, no.1, pp.55-73. Laudon, L and Laudon, J. 2013. Management Information Systems: Managing the Digital Firm, 13th edition, Pearson. Chapter 1. Means, B and Schneider, D. 2000. Meta-capitalism: The e-business revolution and the design of 21st century companies and markets. New York: John Wiley & Sons Inc. Perri .2001. E-governance: Do digital aids make a difference in policy making. In J. E. J. Prins (Ed.), Designing e-government: On the crossroads of technological innovation and institutional change (pp. 7−27). The Hague:Kluwer Law International. Taylor, W. 1911. The Principles of Scientific Management. US: Harper & Brothers. Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6435/pg6435.html Whitson and David .2001. Best practices in electronic government: Comprehensive electronic information dissemination for science and technology. Government Information Quarterly, 18, 7−21. Zammuto, R. et al. 2007. Information Technology and the changing fabric of organization, Organization Science, vol.18, no.5, pp. 749-762. Read More