Alana Northrop

Police use of computers

Police Use of Computers Alana Northrop Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations University of California, Irvine | www.crito.uci.edu

Lessons for managing information technology in the public sector

Over the past 6 years, master’s of public education students in a graduate course at California State University, Fullerton, interviewed about 460 practitioners about information technology applications and issues. Based on these interviews and the resulting papers and orals, nine lessons were gleaned. These lessons represent the wisdom of the workplace across a great variety of positions and departments. The top two lessons are that managers must support the application and their employees using it and that managers must devote more resources and ongoing thought to training. This article is also about the usefulness of the course assignment to students, professors, and practitioners.

The Management of Computer Applications in Local Government

Computing has become a general purpose tool for American local governments, spanning such activities as monitoring departmental expenditures, paying employees, monitoring sick leave, sending utility bills, analyzing community demographic data, locating fire stations, allocating manpower, and forecasting the fiscal impacts of urban development.1 Yet, the performance of computer technology in American local governments has been disappointing. Time and again, research has indicated that many of the expected benefits of computing are not being realized by most local governments.2 For this reason, much research has focused on ways to improve the performance of computer technology in organizations.3 While a wide array of recommendations has been generated by this research, many recommendations are contradictory, and most are based on case studies in a very limited number of governmental settings. The aim of the present study was to test empirically the various recommendations by using survey data that was systematically gathered in 42 American cities in

Curriculum Recommendations for Public Management Education in Computing: The Final Report of the NASPAA Ad Hoc Committee on Computers in Public Management Education

The systematic education of public managers has undergone various changes throughout its history. As recently as the nineteenth century, there was no formal educational program because it was thought that any citizen could perform the duties of a government employee. However, by the early 1900s this attitude started to change, and specialized education for public managers began. During the 1930s and 1940s, scientific management techniques were incorporated into programs; then social sciences and human relations became solid parts of the curricula in the 1950s and 1960s. These general changes in public management curricula reflected changes in society, duties of government, and advance in knowledge. Today, if we are to continue to educate qualified public managers, we must update our programs to reflect the continuing changes in society, government, and knowledge-particularly those changes precipitated by the computer age.

Municipal Reform and the Changing Pattern of Urban Party Politics

This study discusses the contribution of municipal reform structures to the decline of old-style party politics and to the rise of group politics. Through an analysis of a nation wide survey of chief executives in American cities 50,000 and over in population, a typol ogy permits us to speculate, first, on the decline of old-style politics and the relative emergence of alternative political styles predicted in the local government literature: nonpluralist, group, or coalition politics. Second, the typology permits us to assess the relative contribution of municipal reform structures as compared with national reforms, ethos, socioeconomic, and regional factors in shaping the distribution of com munity group influence.

Management Policy for Greater Computer Benefits: Friendly Software, Computer Literacy, or Formal Training

Using data from over 3,000 public employees in 46 U.S. cities in 1988, this article in vestigates three classes of factors commonly thought to affect computer use: training, friendliness of software, and user computer background. Computer use is analyzed as 11 specific tasks (such as programming, record searching) and is further broken down by organizational role of user, for example, manager and street-level employee. Some findings are that (1) the computer literacy or prior coursework of employees is more important to their computer use than how many years an employee has used computers; and (2) for most employees the user friendliness of programs is relevant, and weakly so, only for generic tasks such as searching a file or entering data. More generally, the data lead us to highlight training because it can be used to compensate for weaknesses in present software as well as in the computer literacy and experience of users. Keywords: computing benefits, friendly software, computer literacy, training.