1.  Introduction

1.1       A Question of Scale and Perspective

By any measurement, government is big business.  In many first world countries the state absorbs approximately 40% of Gross National Product. Government IT spend is correspondingly large. As Muid (1994) puts it, government is at the apogee of an information industry, a phenomenon also noted by Hood (1983) in his concept of the nodality of government and by many others (Snellen 1992).  Given the size of this outlay, research into the IT value in the public sector has a relatively low profile.  This is all the more surprising given the general unease that IT in the public sector has not delivered the value expected (Lenk 1990, Frokjaer & Korsbaek 1992, Pye 1992, Margetts and Willcocks 1993, Bellamy and Taylor 1994, Willcocks 1994, Margetts 1999). 

This perception of poor value has not been helped by a number of high profile IT failures[1] and overruns.  Margetts and Willcocks (1993) suggest that there are several factors that make IT projects in the public sector inherently more risky and thus more prone to failure and high cost.  However the question of whether public administration is receiving good value from its IT investment is much more complex and difficult to assess.  One reason for this is that there is no agreed model of IT value in public administration.  In this paper it will be argued that an agreed model is needed if IT development in a given public administration is to be coherent. Such a model must be consistent with current thinking in public administration whilst taking into account civil service culture, legacy infrastructure and technology developments.  A model of IT value in public administration based on the concept of citizen centricity, i.e. the precept that the ultimate beneficiary of civil service IT system must be the citizen in all his or her roles as customer, recipient, participant, taxpayer and so on, will be proposed.

1.2       IT in Public Administration

Developing a coherent theory of IT in public administration is difficult given the current state of incoherence in public administration theory in general (Mainzer 1994).  Van de Donk and Snellen assert that not only has no such theory been developed, but that it is virtually impossible to develop anything other than a ‘more or less mature’ theory (Van de Donk and Snellen 1998).  A widely discussed conceptual framework is informatization (Frissen et al 1992).  Another useful concept is the Information Polity. (Taylor and Williams 1992, Bellamy and Taylor 1992, Bellamy and Taylor 1998).  More recently Heeks and Bhatnagar (1999) have proposed the concept-reality gap as a frame for considering how IT can contribute to the ‘reinvention of government’. 

The concept of informatization can be summarised as:

·                    Introduction of IT to shape or take care of the information retrieval process; 

·                    The arrangement of information flows and information relationships to facilitate administrative or management information process; 

·                    Changes in the organisational structure into which IT is introduced; 

·                    The development of information policies as a differentiated area of decision making in an organisation; 

·                    The use of specific expertise in the field of IT through functionaries or consultants with specific tasks in this field.

Informatization may be considered broadly equivalent to the term information management in the sense of managing the information needs of an organisation.  Looking at informatization policies across a range of European countries, Snellen (1992) found that IT projects in the public sector during the period from 1970 to 1990 were dominated by the values of efficiency and effectiveness, controlled by the Ministry of Finance or its equivalent and that:

 “the interest of representation with informatization policies reinforces the internal orientation of those policies”

(Snellen 1992, p21).  Inasmuch as customer service was a consideration, it was viewed in terms of speed of delivery and absence of errors.  Sometimes appearances were deceptive. Even where projects were deemed to be successful, ex-post research has shown that in many cases the ‘savings’ realised to have been illusory (Henman 1996). 

Informatization is positioned by Taylor (1998) as an alternative way of analysing what Heeks terms “…the murky, messy world of information systems and public sector reform.” (Heeks 1999b, p76).  In the literature on informatization and IT in public administration a major focus is on public sector reform and re-engineering (Taylor and Williams 1992, Andersen 1999).  Informatization should shift the emphasis from efficiency and effectiveness to reform, i.e. from automation to information and thence to transformation.  The question is how does all of this relate to the value of IT in public administration?  There is a need to respond to the challenge posed by Wyatt:

“Rarely has anyone explicitly addressed the question of why the public sector invests in IT, and of what it is hoping to achieve if not increased competitive advantage.”

 (Wyatt 1991, p 25).  Indeed, if one ignores self-funding and mandatory investments, why does a civil service invest in IT at all? 

In order to answer this question, a model of IT value in public administration is necessary.  In the remainder of this paper, such a model will be developed in four steps. 

1.      First a conceptual model of value will be developed.  This will provide a framework for what follows. 

2.      Secondly the differences between public service and private commercial perceptions of IT value will be explored. 

3.      Using a number of existing taxonomies of IT value, a taxonomy of IT value in public administration will be distilled. 

4.      Finally, consolidating all of these, a model of IT value in public administration will be put forward and discussed.

2.  Defining IT Value - A Grounded Approach

2.1  Values and value

The concept of value in economics goes back to Adam Smith’s concepts of value in exchange and value in use (Samuelson 1976).  Economics posits the rationale man and proceeds to build various predictive models of behaviour on this assumption.  In this model, the return on investment in IT is directly comparable with the return on investment in a new piece of machinery or in research and development (Engelbert 1991).  Psychologists and decision theorists discuss value and decision making in quite different terms (e.g. Tversky and Kahnehmen 1982, Plous 1993, March 1994).  In practice human and organisational decision making is often seemingly irrational when viewed from a strictly logical or economic perspective - a phenomenon Simon (1953) termed ‘bounded rationality’. 

To understand the nature of IT value as perceived by a civil service we need a definition of value which will encompass the economic, psychological, cultural and political aspects of value.  The multidimensional nature of IT value has been discussed by, inter alia, by Symons (1994) who describes the need for multiple perspectives and Cronk and Fitzgerald who discuss the value perspectives of functional groups and the dimensions of IS business value (Cronk & Fitzgerald 1999).  To develop such a definition, we start by distinguishing the concepts of ‘value’ and ‘Values’ (for clarity spelled with a capital ‘V’).  Values may be described as normative characteristics or modes of behaviour that individuals, groups or organisations hold to be right or at least better than other characteristics or modes of behaviour.  Values have their visible manifestation in the ways that individuals or groups behave and interact with other individuals or groups.  For example beliefs in honesty, humility, self gratification, efficiency, social equality, duty, thrift, service to others and so on are all Values which, assuming they are applied, result in distinct forms of behaviour and distinct choices.  Values present as attitudes and beliefs which directly affect the way in which government departments apply IT. 

Given this definition, ‘value’ is defined to be a quality applied to a good, service or outcome which supports, meets or conforms with one or more of an individual or group’s Values.  Thus a person who holds strongly the Value that all humans should be treated with respect, is likely to place value on improved work practice and ergonomic aspects of an IT system.  An organisation whose primary corporate Value is economy in the form of keeping taxation levels or costs to a minimum will value an IT system which, say, reduces headcount[2]. 

The second distinction is between value and benefits.  In assessing any information system, a government department will judge the value it receives on its ability of the system to meet a number of stated and unstated needs.  These may include explicit external needs (e.g. implementing government policy) and/or stated or unstated internal corporate or even individual Values.  Benefits can be thought of as an operationalisation of the value construct.  Value is what we perceive; benefit is what we receive.  The relationship is illustrated in diagram 1.

Diagram 1 - Relationship between Values, value and Benefits.

The impact of the objective needs, i.e. those values which are formally stated or specified combines with Values which are implicit and may or may not be recognised by the members of the organisation.  Together these substantially determine decisions about IT investment and use.  Value perception is also affected by the information available to the actor.  Civil servants will be aware of the general economic and political climate and will be working within a broad framework set down by government, the Ministry of Finance/Treasury or other bodies.  In times of economic cutbacks, there will be greater sensitivity to value for money than there might be in times of budget surplus. 

In summary, all members of any organisation have Values, whether they acknowledge them or not.  Values may be individual, group or organisational/corporate Values may be fundamental or transient and may be affected by current events.  These Values lead individuals and organisations to seek goods or outcomes which deliver value - i.e. things which meet or comply with these Values.  For IT investments and outcomes, we term this the value set.  Benefits are the operationalisation of value.  In order to provide an appropriate basis for IT investment decisions in public administration, it is necessary to define the value set for public administration.

3.  Public and Private Perceptions of IT Value

3.1  A Question of Perception

An important issue is the difference between commercial and public administration perception of value and benefits.  The perception of the role of IT in, and the value of IT to, a commercial organisation is inherently different from that of the civil service for a number of reasons of which two are fundamental: motivation and complexity. 

3.2  Motivation

Private sector commercial bodies are driven by some combination of a need to:

·        survive,

·        grow,

·        make profits and/or

·        create wealth

The combination of growth and wealth creation is the yardstick by which business performance is measured.  League tables of added shareholder value are published indicating which companies are the most successful at achieving these ends (e.g. by the Sunday Times).  Reflecting this, the language of business management, particularly since the early 1980s, has been infused with the idea of competitive advantage (Porter and Miller 1985). While more sophisticated tools to measure company performance such as the Balanced Scorecard (Kaplan and Norton 1992, 1993) have been developed, the fundamentals do not change.  Investments of any sort are (or should be) primarily measured against how well they serve, directly or indirectly, the four criteria listed above.  A variety of other rationales for IT investment may be invoked and filters used (e.g. Boynton et al 1994), but ultimately they must serve these commercial imperatives. 

The above four criteria either have quite different meanings or no meaning at all in public administration. 

Survival

Civil services, like most organisations, seek to survive, indeed they are highly effective at so doing, but the threats to their survival are primarily political and social rather than economic. A civil service department does not normally have competitors.  In Ireland, for example, civil service departments constantly mutate, but the overall structure and staffing levels have remained broadly stable over the past 30 years (Dooney and O’Toole 1992).  With constitutionally protected job security, most civil service managers do not concern themselves unduly with Grove’s blunt assertion that one has to be paranoid to survive (Grove 1996).

Growth

A civil service may seek to expand, but the motivations for such growth are different from those of a private company.  There are no shareholders or investment managers demanding year on year increases in earnings.  Internally generated growth driven by civil servants (as opposed to growth driven by customer demand or government action) may be driven by a desire to provide better or additional services or for less altruistic reasons such as power, promotion or control, but not by external pressures to add shareholder value.  Furthermore, unlike private companies, any civil service has, in the central government Finance function, an internal control mechanism which deliberately tries to restrain growth. 

Profitability

Civil service departments are not profit driven.  Department management may be motivated by cost savings or cost avoidance, but this is a much more limited sphere than profit growth in part because costs are only one side of profitability, but also because cost savings are bounded to a much greater extent than profits.  The motivation in many civil service departments is still to  break-even each year. 

Wealth Creation

Fourthly, while civil service departments seek to create wealth (a more healthy population, better roads, better educated workforce), such wealth creation is a vastly broader conception than that of financially enriching shareholders, management or the workforce.  The value of such wealth is often difficult to measure by comparison with such business metrics as increases in shareholders funds or earnings per share (Wholly 1979, 1983, Boyle 1993, 1996).  The issue of such non material wealth creation is, however, central to the mission of the civil service (Lalor 2000) and has a fundamental impact on the role and value placed on IT. 

3.3  Complexity

Business decisions can sometimes be very complex (Clemen 1996), but in general public decisions are much more so.  There are several reasons why this is so including:

·        Public sector decisions tend to have many more stakeholders;

·        The scale of expenditure by public bodies is, in general, far greater than that of private sector organisations;

·        Many public sector decisions have the force of law and are not optional.  They deal with citizens, not voluntary customers;

·        Democratic and political considerations often add to the level of consultation required and consequently to the timescale.

This difference is often demonstrated when private sector decisions enter the public arena.  For example, a decision as to whether a company should invest in a waste incinerator can be evaluated in a few weeks or at most months.  Obtaining planning permission to build such an incinerator may take several years. 

3.4  Interpretation

Given the differences between private commercial and public administrative motivations, it follows that the rationale for investing in general and in IT in particular is frequently different.  However, even where value perceptions are shared, they can take on a different connotation in public administration.  For example, many commercial IT investment decisions would include several customer related benefits or values including: 

·        Better customer service;

·        Enhancing customer value;

·        Customer retention;

·        Enhanced customer profitability.

But there is a fundamental difference between the customer/supplier relationship and the citizen (customer of the state)/state relationship.  The commercial customer generally has the option to reject a supplier’s product or service and buy elsewhere or, in many cases, not buy at all.  The state is not only a monopoly supplier or provider of many services, it often has the authority to compel the citizen to deal with it.  For many of its services, there is no market imperative for the state to treat its customers well[3].  Thus, in public administration, the above values translate as follows:

·        Better customer service can, up to a point, be equated with better service to the citizen.  However, whereas a company may quickly suffer the costs of poor customer service, the same is not necessarily true of public services;

·        Enhancing customer value may or may not be meaningful.  In many instances the ‘customers’ are at most paying for the services they receive indirectly or, for example in the case of social welfare benefits, may not be paying for them at all;

·        Customer retention is largely irrelevant.  Customers can, of course, choose not to use state services, but if they want to travel abroad, drive a car or even eat, they may have no choice;

·        Enhanced customer profitability has no direct equivalent meaning in the civil service.  Lower cost per citizen served does have meaning, but this covers only half of the full scope of this value metric.

Finally, there are also values and benefits which are either only found in a civil service context or which have a particular emphasis in the civil service which differentiates them.  Examples of such values include

·        Assuring equality of treatment;

·        Social inclusion;

·        Facilitating the democratic will.

None of these are commercial values.  Many modern businesses deliberately set out not to treat their customers equally (for example frequent flier schemes, private banking and so on).  Social inclusion is not on the agenda of most businesses (witness the current closure of unprofitable bank branches in small rural communities) and facilitating the democratic will is not a Value that many businesses espouse in practice, even with their own shareholders.

In building the value set therefore, it is first necessary to differentiate those values which are purely commercial, those which are shared by all and those which have a different slant in public administration and then to add values which are distinct to public administration.

4.  A Taxonomy of IT Value in Public Administration

4.1  Values

The first step in developing a model is to define a core set of Values for Public Administration.  The following list is proposed:

·                    Duty Orientated            Responsibility to citizen

Responsibility to the government;

Proper use of public funds;

Efficient and effective use of public funds;

Facilitating the democratic will.

·                    Service Oriented           Service to the citizen;

Respect for the individual.

·                    Socially Oriented          Respect for the citizen;

Social inclusion;

Justice;

Fairness;

Equality of treatment.

We term these core values.  The traditional themes in the study of Public Administration, i.e. accountability, responsibility, responsiveness, control, equity, justice and democracy are implicit in the core values.

The citizen appears under each of the different headings reflecting the fact that (s)he has several possible roles.  At any given time, the citizen may be some of all of:

Taxpayer:         The person who ultimately funds public administration and IT investment;

Customer:         Someone who buys a service from the state;

Client:               Someone on whose behalf the state acts;

Claimant:          Someone who has entitlements from the state;

Recipient:         A person who receives either money or authority from the government;

Participant:       A member of the public participating in democratic decision making or policy formulation

Agent               Someone working for or on behalf of the state;

Individual          As a person in their own right.

The citizen qua citizen, as a member of the polity is here term ‘participant’ to avoid confusion.  The above list is not exhaustive (a citizen could, for example, be a prisoner or a ward of the state), but it covers the common roles a citizen can take. 

These two constructs will provide the basic structure underlying the model. 

4.2  Value Categorisation

A six way framework categorisation of IT value is now proposed.  IT value in public administration may be classified as:

Foundational.                relating to the legacy of cost efficiency justified IT systems used in public administration.  These values are close to the traditional three Es of Value for Money, Efficiency, Effectiveness and Economy (National Audit Office (UK) 1996);

Policy formulation.        relating to the administration’s role in developing policy.  This includes responsibility to government.

Democratic                   relating to the support for and enhancing of democracy and citizen involvement in the affairs of the state.  This includes informing the citizen, justice, fairness and equity;

Service                         relating to the provision of service to the citizen as customer, client, claimant or recipient.  This includes timeliness, accuracy and convenience to the citizen;

Internal                         relating to values which are directed towards employees and internal operations of public administration.  This includes staff motivation and working conditions;

External                        relating to the state’s interactions with external organisations including organisations outside of its jurisdiction. This may include many mandatory elements.

4.3  Towards a Taxonomy of Values in Public Administration

Several researchers have presented or suggested lists or taxonomies of ‘IT benefits’ (Parker and Benson, 1988, Clince et al, 1992, Farbey et al 1993, Coleman and Jamieson 1994, Bannister 1995, Remenyi et al 1995, Remenyi and Sherwood Smith 1997).  Most of these lists are not sector specific, although some of them are grouped in different ways.  In converting these taxonomies/lists to a taxonomy of IT value in public administration, four issues must be addressed. 

·        First, it is necessary to distinguish between benefits and values. Benefits and values, though closely related, are not the same thing. This difference/relationship must first be made explicit. 

·        Secondly, most of the lists are generic and/or business oriented.  As has been shown, there are IT benefits and values which may be important in the commercial sector, but which have no relevance in public administration. 

·        Thirdly, there will be benefits and values in public administration which may have little or no importance in business.  A superset of such lists will not yield a comprehensive list of IT public sector value metrics and will contain many irrelevant metrics. 

·        Finally where benefits and values do overlap, they may have different meanings or interpretations in each sector. 

The following steps were then taken:

·        Following an extensive literature search, an extensive list of benefits and values was compiled;

·        This set was filtered to remove those benefits and values which are not relevant or not applicable in public administration;

·        Where appropriate, benefits were restructured or re-formulated as values;

·        The resulting set was reviewed and, where necessary, values were restructured and/or re-formulated in public administration terms;

·        The list was then augmented with a number of values which emerged from the background research in the Irish civil service and from the broader public administration literature;

·        The values identified were categorised using the headings above.

The resulting taxonomy is shown in the following table:

Table 1 - Taxonomy of IT Values in Public Administration

5.  A Citizen Centric Model

5.1  A Citizen Centric Model

Combining this taxonomy of IT values with the constructs previously discussed, a model can be developed.  The model posits an IT value core which is made up of six major components delivering services directly and indirectly to the citizen.  This model is shown in diagram 2.

Diagram 2 - Relationship between Values, value and Benefits.

The foundation on which this rests are the core values of public administration.  The model is both supported by infrastructure and supporting constructs.

5.2  Supporting Constructs

The core values and the operationalisation of value are supported by a number of supporting concepts including:

The Whole Person Concept:  The essence of this concept is that civil service should view citizens as an entity rather than a ‘social slices’ (Nora & Minc, 1978).  Traditionally, most civil service systems (and by implication departments and sub units of departments) deal with only one aspect of a citizen’s life.  The whole person concept emerged during the development of systems for the UK DSS Operational Strategy (Fallon 1993), but as envisaged here is wider than the DSS’s interpretation which Adler and Sainsbury (1990) found be more akin to a ‘whole claimant’ concept. 

The Lifetime Events Concept  The life event concept envisages the civil service being able to track citizens through those events in their life that bring them into contact with the state.  This includes major events such as:

·        birth;

·        marriage;

·        separation/divorce;

·        death;

as well as many other milestones:

·        reaching voting age;

·        entry to the workforce;

·        retirement;

·        becoming a parent;

·        buying a house.

and other events which may only affect a subset of the population as well as various licenses and authorisations issued by the state. 

The One Stop Shop.  The one stop shop is simple in concept, but its implications are profound.  In essence this says that a citizen should, if he or she requires, be able to avail of or make contact with all the state services that are relevant to him or her at a single location.  This might be an office, a counter in an office or a web site. 

Multiple Modes of Access.  This principle states that there should be a variety of means whereby the citizen can transact his business with the state.  With technological advance, the range of ways in which citizens can potentially undertake transactions with the state has increased.  These methods now include:

·        Direct face to face contact (in an office or in the home);

·        Post;

·        E-mail;

·        Telephone (fixed and mobile);

·        Fax;

·        Web (computer, television or WAP based);

·        Teletext;

·        Interactive television;

·        Courier;

·        Pager;

·        Automatic Teller Machine;

·        Kiosk.

 the development of the e-delivery of public services, there will remain a need for a variety of other methods of delivery.  Not all modes of delivery will be IT enabled.

5.3  Infrastructure

Finally there is a need for a technical and organisational infrastructure to support the delivery of benefits.  Briefly this encompasses integration of systems, communications and privacy issues.  This means on the one hand the ability to both access and combine information where necessary, but on the other the ability to separate and isolate information where the privacy or rights of the individual would otherwise be compromised.  The design of such an infrastructure will be influenced by the Values held by departments and individual civil servants.  There is much work in hand on this, but a discussion of it is outside of the scope of this paper.

6.  Conclusion

It is important to stress that the model proposed in this paper is not a model of IT value in government, but a model of IT value in public administration.  This paper has deliberately avoided what might be loosely termed wider political agendas such as the re-invention of government through technology, e-government and the information society as well as many of the wider and more complex issues surrounding IT in public administration.  The objective has been to develop a model of core values, i.e. values which are independent of current government policies, dominant ideologies or political fashions.  It is in this sense a politically, but not a value, neutral model.  The responsibility of the public administration is to both government and citizen.  If government policy is to decentralise, privatise state companies or put a PC in every classroom, it is the function of civil servants to execute these policies and where appropriate to use IT as effectively as possible to achieve government aims. 

IT value in public administration is measured by its contribution to the good of the citizen.  It is argued here that the primary aim of IT in public administration is to serve the citizen and the society in which (s)he lives.  In many countries, the civil service has a long and honourable tradition of providing a politically neutral service - a service which can protect, and in the past has protected, the citizen from the government.  These values will inform IT values and decisions made about IT acquisitions.  An agreed model would provide a valuable reference for IT decision making in the civil service.

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