Suchergebnisse

When one set of social actors passes functions, knowledge of techniques and control of implementation in their key role areas to other actors there could be a number of possible causes and consequences. Some such transfers of control are mutually beneficial, a simple re-division of labour which acknowledges a changing social or environmental context or just the shifting balance of the preferences and priorities amongst the actors involved. But other transfers of control are less innocent and more 'coerced', with powers surrendered under pressure and their transfer carrying with it significant feed-through implications for future interactions, and possible ratcheteffects. This paper explores a critical area of this kind for the modern liberal democratic state, the out-sourcing of information and communications technologies (ICTs) from in-house provision by single-country government bureaucracies to multi-national service delivery and system integration companies. We consider first the extent and patterning of conventional ICT out-sourcing in the UK at central government level. Part 2 examines some key possible of the causes and consequences of the out-sourcing trend, and of the significance of a new and general public/private sector interface. The final section is more prospective, arguing that established patterns of control over ICTs have major implications for the transformation of governance now underway in advanced industrial countries towards a 'digital state' form, centred on Web-based public services.

This paper explores the extent and character of cross-sectoral and cross-national policy learning within the area of government information technology policy. We look particularly at two issues as windows into the wider current development of the sector: the evolution of IT contracting forms and structures, and the development of e-government policies. We explore these issues in three (former) Westminster systems with divergent new public management (NPM) pathways, Britain, Australia and New Zealand. In a complex and hard to penetrate sector like government IT there are no 'perfect' cases, no typical representatives of a wider population. The point of our comparative work is primarily to introduce a requisite degree of diagnostic diversity to help explore the variety of causation patterns operating to differentiate national government characteristics from one another. The primary research methodology used has been detailed Web research and systematic documentation analysis across the three governments, extensive interviewing with over 110 officials and IT industry personnel across our countries (mainly focusing on central governments), and somein depth unobtrusive measures censuses and survey work within the UK carried out during 1999 and 2001. The paper has four parts. The first briefly situates the government IT sector within the range of policy learning and policy transfer experiences, brings out its salience for the contemporary evolution of state-civil society relations, and considers some key interpretative expectations that might find applicability in this area. Part 2 sketches salient features ofthe basic institutional structures and NPM experiences of our three countries in order to focus down on the development of their government IT contracting regimes over the last decade. We show how initially institutionally linked or NPM emulating countries have in fact diverged to very different current contracting models. Part 3 considers the progress of egovernment initiatives across the case countries and ...

1. During September and October 2005, a team from the LSE Public Policy Group carried out seven focus groups as part of the Achieving Innovation in central government organisations (London: The Stationary Office, 2006) HC 1447 Session 2005-2006, published 25 July 2006. All the focus groups took place at the London School of Economics in Central London. The seven groups were made up of: project manager level civil servants; mid-level civil servants; and senior civil servants. We also ran four comparative focus groups with: management consultants and IT practitioners, both groups had some experience of working with government; a general business group; and local authority chief executives or senior staff. 2. These focus groups were undertaken in order to feedback some early results from a survey we had sent out to 126 central government organisations. The survey asked central government organisations to nominate an innovation and then provide details about its origins, triggers, costs, barriers and impacts. More details on this, and the full report, can be downloaded free from the Publications pages of www.nao.gov.uk or from the site at www.GovernmentOnTheWeb.org.