Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

200 Public Management and Administration
of governance will mould and fashion the revolutionary potential of ICTs into
an evolutionary reality’ (1998, p. 93). And in conclusion to their book they
argue (1998, p. 170):
The heady images which are so often associated with ICTs, together with the technologically
determinist expectations that they will transform the nature of relationships in and
around governance, are balanced by the relative insusceptibility to change of the normative
and assumptive worlds which suffuse political institutions. The information polity is,
in consequence, an arena which will display the same kinds of political compromises and
policy confusions that characterize other important arenas of society. For all these reasons,
the intoxicating visions of government in the information age should be allowed to
dissipate in the thin air from whence they came.
Bellamy and Taylor issue a warning here of what might happen, but it is one
with some problems of its own. They also argue ‘the doctrines associated with
the NPM, as well as those implied by ambitious reinvention strategies, are predicated
on the highly questionable assumption that information can be made to
flow throughout the system of governance in ways which challenge fundamentally
the integrity of many of its information domains’ (1998, pp. 168–9). It is
axiomatic that any movement, any reform, will be modified by its implementation
and it is undoubted that the institutional inertia within government bureaucracy
makes it even harder to adapt to change. But it is a sclerotic society or
organization that allows for no attempt at change at all on the grounds that it is
all a bit too hard to implement. Also, other jurisdictions than the United
Kingdom, which is Bellamy and Taylor’s frame of reference, have implemented
various successful technologically driven changes. It is the case, however,
that implementation is a far from trivial task.
Conclusion
In some respects, e-government can be considered a second managerial reform,
another stage in the public management reforms that commenced in the 1980s.
It does present a further challenge to the traditional model of public administration
and, if implemented well, will transform the way public services are
organized and delivered. The greatest potential of the e-government reforms is
in operationalizing the theoretical changes, in changing from public administration
to public management, as described in earlier chapters. Contracting-out
requires sophisticated monitoring systems; new budgeting and accounting systems
require good information technologies, as does performance management.
E-government can assist in bringing into reality the theoretical changes
of the public management reforms.
In its special survey on e-government, The Economist argued ‘for the first time
since the establishment of the modern welfare state, there is now a real chance to
“re-invent” government – and make it a great deal better’ (24 June 2000). There
is much in this. By whatever name it is called – ‘reinventing government’