Frank Bannister

Acts of faith: instinct, value and IT investment decisions

Although well over 1000 journal articles, conference papers, books, technical notes and theses have been written on the subject of information technology (IT) evaluation, only a relatively small subset of this literature has been concerned with the core issues of what precisely is meant by the term ‘value’ and with the process of making (specifically) IT investment decisions. All too often, the problem and highly complex issue of value is either simplified, ignored or assumed away. Instead the focus of much of the research to date has been on evaluation methodologies and, within this literature, there are different strands of thought which can be classified as partisan, composite and meta approaches to evaluation. Research shows that a small number of partisan techniques are used by most decision makers with a minority using a single technique and a majority using a mixture of such techniques of whom a substantial minority use a formal composite approach. It is argued that, in mapping the set of evaluation methodologies on to what is termed the investment opportunity space, that there is a limit to what can be achieved by formal rational evaluation methods. This limit becomes evident when decision makers fall back on ‘gut feel’ and other non-formal/rigorous ways of making decisions. It is suggested that an understanding of these more complex processes and decision making, in IT as elsewhere, needs tools drawn from philosophy and psychology.

Dismantling the silos: extracting new value from IT investments in public administration

The drive for information technology‐led organizational and operational change in public administration has lagged behind that in the private sector. For good reasons, central public administrations are conservative by nature. Most public administrations are bureaucracies and bureaucracies tend to resist change. Nevertheless the pressure to obtain better value from public administration information technology investments is growing and the debate as to how to achieve this is increasingly important. Part of this debate is concerned with how best to confront the formidable and specific challenges faced by the sector. These include cultural, structural, resource and technical problems as well as a legacy of isolated developments which do not interrelate. The difficulties are compounded by the problems of evaluation generally in public administration – problems which are reflected in the evaluation of public sector information systems. This drive for change is reviewed and discussed in the context of the Irish civil service, in which there is a growing awareness of the strategic importance of breaking down specialized vertical systems and providing an integrated service to the citizen. A new approach to the problem, based on adapting the concept of business objects, is suggested.

The curse of the benchmark: an assessment of the validity and value of e-government comparisons:

Benchmarking of e-government and the information society is a booming business. This phenomenon raises several interesting questions. Why does this particular part of the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) world receive so much of this type of attention? Why are there so many benchmarks? What do they purport to measure? Who reads these and how much credence is given to them? Do they play a valuable role in advancing e-government and e-society or is their impact actually negative? This article looks at these and a number of related questions including the degree of consistency between different benchmarks, trends over time and the importance or otherwise that governments place on these reports. From this, some tentative theories about the role of benchmarking, the pressures that benchmarks place on public managers and their significance are proposed and some limitations of benchmarks are identified and discussed.

The Trouble with Transparency: A Critical Review of Openness in e‐Government

Transparency in public administration is generally held to be desirable, something to be fostered and enabled. This long standing idea has gained considerable further momentum with the emergence of e-government and the affordances of computing in general and the Internet in particular. This paper examines the argument that transparency may, in certain and not uncommon circumstances, be inimical to good government and good governance and suggests that the importance of understanding why this is so has increased as information and communications technology permeates government and society. It suggests that in an electronic age, the scope and nature of transparency needs to be carefully managed, and that expectations of the benefits of ICT enabled transparency may be too high.

Trust and transformational government: A proposed framework for research

Abstract This paper examines the concepts of trust and transformational government, both of which have been the subject of increasing attention in recent times. It explores what trust and transformation mean, or could mean, for government, governance and public administration and whether transformational government is just a feel-good phrase or a genuinely new departure. As part of this, the question of what precisely is being, or could be, transformed is examined. The results of this examination suggest that the expectation that technology-enabled change has the ability to increase citizen trust, thereby transforming government may be too high, but that more research is needed. A framework for such research is proposed.

ICT, public values and transformative government: A framework and programme for research

Abstract Many adjectives are used in the context of transforming government including making it more open, transparent, participative, agile, responsive and so forth. Most, if not all, of these adjectives are either in themselves public values or reflect one or more underlying public values. This paper examines the relationship between information and communications technology (ICT), transformative government and such public values and proposes a framework for further research. A study of the literature on public values is used to develop a typology of public sector values likely to be affected by ICT. This impact is examined for a number of these values. For others hypotheses about the impact of ICT on other values are then posited. It is argued that ICTs can and do have transformational impacts on public values, though not always for the better, concludes that values are a potential powerful lens for considering such impacts and sets out a programme of research into these relationships.

Barriers to open data release: A view from the top

The pressure for governments to release much of the vast reservoir of data that they collectively hold continues to grow. This pressure is grounded not just in principles such as the right of the public to know or freedom of information, but in beliefs about the economic, social, administrative and political benefits that will flow from the wide availability of such data. However it is also acknowledged that there is a considerable gap between such expectations and current realities one component of which is the many barriers to open data release. This paper examines these barriers from the perspective of senior managers in Irish central and local government. A taxonomy of such barriers is proposed and compared with other classifications of barriers in the literature. The paper concludes with some reflections on the implications for the opening up of government data.

Government website service quality: a study of the Irish revenue online service

Online taxation systems have been among the most successful of e-government applications both in terms of citizen take-up and savings to the taxpayer. Understanding the factors that lead to high take-up is of potential interest to other public sector online service providers. This paper examines the quality of the online service provided by the Irish Revenue Commissioners’ tax filing and collection system, Revenue Online Service (ROS). A modified version of the recently operationalized E-S-QUAL instrument is used to examine online service quality from the point of view of the citizens and tax practitioners who use this eGovernment system. The findings show that efficiency and ease of completion are the dimensions of website service quality that most influence ROS users’ perceptions of value and convenience as well as their intentions to use and recommend the website to their peers. The practical implications of these findings include the fact that providers of public sector e-services should concentrate on communicating the functionality of their e-services. In addition, they should focus on reducing citizen concerns regarding misuse or mismanagement of personal data.

The great theory hunt: Does e-government really have a problem?

Abstract A persistent leitmotif of the e-government literature in the last decade has been a degree of angst about the absence of theory in the field. Some scholars have argued that until such time as this deficiency is remedied, e-government will never be recognized as a proper discipline. In addition to being under-theorized, it is has also been contended that the e-government literature is overdependent on the descriptive case study or case history. This paper examines the validity of the claim that e-government is under-theorized and explores the counter-argument that, far from being short of theory, a great deal of good and valuable theory can be found in the e-government literature. The meaning of theory and problems with defining it are discussed and the implications of these problems for assessing the state of theory in e-government are explored in this light. The parallels between this discussion and problems associated with theory in the wider fields of public administration and information systems are briefly considered. From this it is conjectured that concerns regarding the absence of a coherent body of theoretical knowledge in the field of e-government may be overstated.

Forward to the past: Lessons for the future of e-government from the story so far

While the development of e-government since the early 1990s has been characterized by many successful applications and systems, it has also been notable for a number of failures to fully realise visions and for several stalled ideas. Governments, professionals and indeed scholars have a tendency to embrace the latest technological developments before older ones have been fully exploited or in some cases even fully understood and this can leave a trail of uncompleted projects in its wake. The future success of e-government depends in part on understanding this phenomenon, addressing it and developing the ability to discern when a technology or concept is no longer of value and therefore should be abandoned and when a task needs to be finished properly, no matter how unglamorous that task may be.