Electronic

Government: A
Revolution in
Public
Administration?

HELEN MARGETTS
PRESENTATION OUTLINE

I. INTRODUCTION
II. APPROACHES TO ICTS AND PUBLIC
ADMINISTRATION
I. THE POLICY IMPACT OF ICT’s
II. SO WHO WAS RIGHT?
III. THE INTERNET AND E-GOVERNMENT
IV.THE FUTURE OF E-GOVERNMENT
INTRODUCTION
This chapter briefly reviews the various approaches to analysing
the impact of ICTs on Public Admnistration. Politicians’ enthusiasm
for Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) has its
source in a particular tradition of political thought:

MODERNISM
WHAT IS MODERNISM?
Modernism is both a philosophical movement and an art movement
that, along with cultural trends and changes, arose from wide-scale
and far-reaching transformations in Western society during the late
19th and early 20th centuries. Among the factors that shaped
modernism were the development of modern industrial societies and
the rapid growth of cities, followed then by reactions to the horrors
of World War I. Modernism also rejected the certainty of
Enlightenment thinking, although many modernists also rejected
religious belief.

(Pericles Lewis, Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel (Cambridge

University Press, 2000). pp. 38–39.
INTRODUCTION
By 1960s and 1970s, as computers started to appear in
1960’s Government Organizations, some public officials and
commentators predicted that information technology would
bring a revolution to Public Administration.

1980’s and 1990s As increasingly sophisticated information and communication

technologies (ICTs) spread across all organizations during
The 1980s and 1990s, politicians jostled to claim credit for
“Information Age Government”

By the beginning of twenty first century, as use of Internet

21st Century became increasingly widespread, claims for the
transformative power of ICT’s became correspondingly
enthusiastic.
 INTRODUCTION
Computers and communication have long been cited as the key to bringing
public administration up to date, just as domestic appliances modernize the
home. They were viewed as a force for rationalization, as was Weberian
bureaucracy in the first half of the twentieth century. The various approaches
can be grouped according to their degree and direction of enthusiasm for
the modernizing effects of ICT’s, as:

HYPERMODERNIST
ANTIMODERNIST
POSTMODERNIST
 Approaches to
ICT’S and Public
Administration
Approaches to ICTs and
Public Administration
According to Max Weber, the road to
modernity through rationality was
facilitated by the development of
Bureaucracy. Bureaucracy would allow
the control of the world through
calculation, the systematization of
meaning and value into an overall
consistent, ethical view (Kolb, 1986)
Approaches to ICTs and
Public Administration

Weber’s vision of administrative

modernization: ‘Informatization in public
administration is a process of continued
modernization (Frissen, 1995)
 Hypermodernists vs Antimodernists
Antimodernist seen computers as having an
equally transformative but malign effect on public
administration, bringing on “Control Revolution”
(Beniger, 1991) or the “Computer State (Burnham,
1983), where massive databanks would be used
as instruments of control. According to Beniger
(1991), “progressive convergence of information
processing and communications technologies in a
single infrastructure of control is sustaining the
“Control Revolution”.

Hypermodernists are technological utopians who

sees ICT’s as the central enabling element of a
utopian vision of public administration. According to
the book of Alvin Toffler titled “The Third Wave”
would bring a new civilization with the electronics
revolution at its technological base, peopled by
“information workers” in “intelligent buildings” full of
“electronic offices”, organized in networks rather than
formal hierarchies.
 Toffler claimed, government would begin to “bypass their hierarchies –
further subverting bureaucratic power. As use of the internet rose
steeply during the 1990’s, this group of writers expanded to form a
POSITIVE MULTITUDE, PREDICTING THE END OF
ORGANIZATIONS, BOTH PRIVATE AND PUBLIC, that did not adapt
radically to the internet age.

As use of the internet rose steeply during the 1900s, this group of writers
expanded to form a positive multitude, predicting the end of organizations.
Both private and public that did not adapt radically to the Internet age.

In the United States during the 1900s, when Al Gore was promising to replace ‘industrial era bureaucracy’
with ‘information age government’.
The Policy Impact
of ICTs
The belief that ICTs make no difference to public administration is challenged
by the extent to which they are now embedded within all types of organization.
In the period of 1950s to the 2000s ICTs pervaded every corner of public
administration across OECD countries, with real relevance to policy.

There are few government office without a computer, few administrative

operations that do not rely on the processing by a complex network of ICTs.
And ICTs now form a significant proportion of the budgets of government
agencies.

In the US expenditure on ICTs had reached around 6 percent of the

federal operating budget whereas in UK, ICTs amounted to 11 percent of
running costs by 1995 (Margetts, 1999)
 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
List of OECD members (2019):
AUSTRALIA ITALY
AUSTRIA JAPAN

BELGIUM KOREA

CANADA LATVIA

CHILE LITHUANIA

CZECH REPUBLIC LUXEMBOURG

DENMARK MEXICO

ESTONIA NETHERLANDS

FINLAND NEW ZEALAND

SLOVAC REPUBLIC SWEDEN UNITED
FRANCE NORWAY KINGDOM
SLOVENIA SWITZERLAND UNITED
GERMANY POLAND STATES
SPAIN TURKEY
GREECE PORTUGAL
ICTs can be shown to be policy critical. Margetts (1998, 1999) has shown all
the ‘tools’ of government policy identified by Hood (1983) – nodality, authority,
treasure and organizational capacity – are now heavily reliant to ICTs.
First, with respect to nodality – the extent to which government is at the
centre of information and social networks – ICTs play a clear role, facilitating
information channels both within government organizations and between
government organizations, private sector companies, voluntary
organizations and citizens.
In the US expenditure on ICTs had reached around 6 percent of the
federal operating budget whereas in UK, ICTs amounted to 11 percent of
running costs by 1995 (Margetts, 1999)
With respect to the legitimate authority that government has by virtue of being
government, research suggest (Margetts, 1999) that authority wielding organi
zations have been among the most innovatives.
 SOME OF THE INNOVATIONS OF ICT’S
• Police databases with massive search capacity have long facilitated a
move towards more pre-emptive policing.

• Widespread use of Closed Circuit Television (CCTV)

• DNA testing and the creation of searchable database of DNA samples

offer the potential to revolutionize policing strategies

• Electronic tagging of prisoners has made possible, such as the early

release of prisoners and curfew orders
 SOME OF THE INNOVATIONS OF ICT’S
• Government organizations at the beginning of the twenty first century can
process more transactions; more rapidly less staff than they could before
computers were introduced;

• Computer technologies of the 1970s mainframe computers designed for

heavy transaction loads were particularly well suited for taking over
bureaucratic operations within the largest of government organizations
processing large quantities of dealings with citizens, particularly those
processing tax and social security
 NEGATIVE IMPACT OF ICT’S
• The history of government computing in the UK is littered with high profile
projects that have gone wrong and seriously hampered policy implementation

• Large-scale projects that ran overbudget, took longer than anticipated to

implement and resulted in inadequate, inflexible and outdated systems

• In 1998, the UK Passport Agency reached virtual collapse when a new system
was introduced at the same time as a new policy requiring children under five
to have their own passports was introduced, the resultant backlog brought the
agency to virtual collapse
 NEGATIVE IMPACT OF ICT’S
• In 1989, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office was severely incapacitated
when its small accounting system crashed disastrously causing the Office to
produce the most serious qualification of a department’s accounts that the
Comptroller and Auditor General had ever made (Margetts, 1999:17)

• In 1970s, the US Social Security Administration experienced a major disaster

which ground the agency to a halt in implementing a new system for Social
Security Income and blackened the agency’s reputation for managing
technology over the next thirty years

• The long-running series of projects to modernize the computer systems of the

US Internal Revenue Service – Tax Sytems Modernization – has absorbed
 NEGATIVE IMPACT OF ICT’S
spiralling budgets over twenty years with few tangible benefits and resulted in
a tax system that is increasingly difficult to manage, with some parts of the
system still dating back to the 1960s.

• In the early days of computers, during the 1960s and 1970s, government
organizations gained expertise in ICT’s through employment of specialized staff
or IT contractors on an individual basis. The trend was for contracts for IT
expertise to become larger and larger. Some of these contracts represent major
chunks of public expenditure. UK’s Inland Revenue contract with Electronic
Data Systems was worth £1 billion over 10 years when it was first signed in
1996 and £4 billion for the next ten years.
The Internet and
E-Government
 50% 55%
US EUROPE
By 2001, 50 percent of By 2001, 55% percent
US Citizens are using of UK Citizens are
Internet using Internet

Rapidly rising usage of the internet across society, particularly in commerce –

And a consequently higher profile for information technology in general, with
ICTs being widely credited as a key driver of productivity and economic growth,
Particularly in the United States
 16%
US
Internet Banking was
used by 16 percent of
UK Citizens by 2001
20%
US
Nearly percent of US
Citizens ordered goods
or services over the
Internet during 2000

New organizations with no shopfront opened up, such as Amazon bookstore,

Which dashed to the frontier of their markets.
There is no doubt that the Internet has proved a major new channel of
commucation by which increasing numbers of citizens are making transactions
with a wide range of organizations
 Initiatives taken by the Governments in shaping the
conditions for realizing E-Government

01 The provisions of access to laws and

regulations

02 Streamlining of basic data

03 Securing of confidential transactions

04 The creation of ICT awareness and the

development of ICT skills

05 Establishing an E-Government Support

for the implementation and coordination of the
initiatives
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Introduction
In 1960s and 1970s, as computers started to
appear in Government Organizations, some public
officials and commentators predicted that
information technology would bring a revolution to
Public Administration.

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