Information and Communications Technology

Abstract

The British public sector spends some £2bn a year on computers and télécommunications, representing between 1.5 per cent and 2 per cent of ail public expenditure. Moreover, expenditure is rising by some 10 per cent a year (Willcocks, 1994). These figures illustrate how the ‘new’ public services are becoming increasingly capital intensive and technologically sophisti-cated, presenting new opportunities, threats and challenges to those who manage them, as well as carrying important implications for those using them. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the significance of new information and communications technologies for managing and delivering the new public services. In doing so, it focuses on information and communications issues, rather than on technological innovation and its management. In other words, it is written on the assumption that the primary significance for the new public services lies in the opening up of new capabilities for generating, communicating and exploiting information. Governments in Britain have not been particularly quick or keen to recognise and exploit these capabilities. Nevertheless, the ‘new’ public services have created what Dunsire has referred to as a new ‘informational logic’ for public administration (Dunsire, 1995). ‘A new public administration is being forged, and new information flows, and the computer networks which facilitate and mediate them, are fundamental to the innovation process’ (Taylor and Williams, 1991, p. 172). In order to explore this claim more fully, it is helpful to set the emergence of electronic networks within the technological trajectory of information management in government.