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1. What are three phases of e-government development? In what phase of e-government development do governments currently reside?2. Has e-government had an impact on managerial effectiveness? If so, provide some examples or research evidence that shows its impact.
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Antonio Cordella and Niccolò Tempini
E‐government and organizational change:
reappraising the role of ICT and
bureaucracy in public service delivery
Article (Accepted version)
(Refereed)
Original citation:
Cordella, Antonio and Tempini, Niccolò (2015) E‐government and organizational change:
reappraising the role of ICT and bureaucracy in public service delivery. Government Information
Quarterly . ISSN 0740-624X
DOI: 10.1016/j.giq.2015.03.005
© 2015 Elsevier Inc.
This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/62121/
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The article will appear in a forthcoming issue of Government Information Quarterly.
This is a version of the author-‐accepted manuscript.
Please cite as follows:
Cordella, A., and Tempini, N. 2015. E-‐government and organizational change:
Reappraising the role of ICT and bureaucracy in public service delivery. Government
Information Quarterly, forthcoming.
E-‐government and organizational change: Reappraising the
role of ICT and bureaucracy in public service delivery
Abstract
There is a substantial literature on e-government that discusses information and communication
technology (ICT) as an instrument for reducing the role of bureaucracy in government
organizations. The purpose of this paper is to offer a critical discussion of this literature and to
provide a complementary argument, which favors the use of ICT in the public sector to support
the operations of bureaucratic organizations. Based on the findings of a case study – of the
Venice municipality in Italy – the paper discusses how ICT can be used to support rather than
eliminate bureaucracy. Using the concepts of e-bureaucracy and functional simplification and
closure, the paper proposes evidence and support for the argument that bureaucracy should be
preserved and enhanced where e-government policies are concerned. Functional simplification
and closure are very valuable concepts for explaining why this should be a viable approach.
1
Introduction
The adoption of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in public sector
organizations has been often associated with reform programs aiming at reducing the
inefficiencies generated by bureaucratic burden (Osborne and Plastrik 1997; Accounts 2008;
Clegg 2007). Governments’ investments in public sector information systems are generally
associated with organizational transformations designed to enhance efficiency and policy
effectiveness (Fountain 2001; Bellamy and Taylor 1998; Gil-Garcia and Pardo 2005;
Gronlund and Horan 2004; Kamarck 2007). In this context ICTs in public sector are deployed
to pursue a cluster of ideas and practices that prescribe using private sector and business
approaches in the public sector (Hood 1991; Cordella and Iannacci 2010; Cordella and Bonina
2012) to enhance organizational efficiency and effectiveness and hence reduce bureaucratic
burden. This paper challenges the vision of public sector ICTs as solutions mainly designed to
reduce the span of public bureaucracy, as often proposed by e-government policies informed
by the New Public Management (NPM) ideology. The paper offers empirical evidence that
ICTs can enable alternative organizational solutions, which make public sector organizations
more efficient and effective by supporting the bureaucratic coordination. These alternative
solutions are those found in the organizational structures defined by the e-bureaucratic form
(Cordella 2007). E-bureaucracies are organizations that follow the procedural logic of a public
bureaucracy, to coordinate the execution of organization activities, and hence to deliver
services, but rely on ICTs to sustain procedural efficiency. ICTs are used in order to facilitate
and support the fundamental organizational functions of coordination and control of
bureaucratic organizations. These functions are defined in the legal-normative set of rules
designed to standardize the administrative procedure and the delivery of public services. The
paper not only provides empirical evidence to describe the functioning e-bureaucracies, but
also offers theoretical insights to explain and justify why ICTs can improve the efficiency of
bureaucratic organizations. It is here suggested that ICTs can make bureaucratic organizations
more valuable for the delivery of public services than the organizational configurations
prescribed by the NPM ideology and materialized in the “Contract State” (Cordella and
Willcocks 2012; du Gay 1994).
Building on the findings of the case of the Municipality of Venice, the paper will argue that egovernment projects can deliver better services by introducing a new inter-organizational
layer of bureaucratic coordination. This outcome is discussed and explained by using
Mintzberg’s (1983) taxonomy of bureaucratic organizations – machinery and professional
bureaucracy – in conjunction with theories of technology – functional simplification and
closure – as proposed by Luhmann and Kallinikos (Luhmann 2005; Kallinikos 2005).
2
ICT reforms and Bureaucracy
Bureaucracies have historically been conceived as structures aimed at increasing the
efficiency in organizational practices and procedures. According to Weber’s (1947)
theorization, bureaucracy delivers organizational efficiency by following procedures and
coordination mechanisms that incorporate rules and instrumental systems designed to
rationalize administrative efficiency (Clegg 2007). Weber defines a set of attributes that
bureaucratic organizations must have in order to fulfill these goals: a formal and explicit
hierarchical structure of authority; a detailed, rationalized division of labor; a set of formal,
explicit, comprehensive and stable rules that are impersonally enforced in decision making
and lead to predictable and determinate results; and the separation of the functions in the
organization from the person entitled to exercise that organizational function. These
organizational principles, designed by Weber as instruments for maximizing organizational
efficiency, also mediate the relationship between citizens and the state and deliver specific
democratic values such as equality and fairness (Peters 2001).
For a long time bureaucracies have successfully – often through struggle – fulfilled the goals
of organizing the operation of the administrative apparatus of the state and consistently
guaranteed the superior goals of equity and impartiality in public service delivery. More
recently, due to the increased areas of public sector interventions – consequence of the
expansion of the welfare state –the need for integration within public offices has increased.
More integration has fostered the need of producing and exchanging information between
citizens, between citizens and the public administration, and among different branches of the
public administration, to deliver public services. This has overloaded the bureaucratic
organization with information that now needs to be processed in order to provide the services
that a more pervasive welfare state has to serve. The increased complexity of administrative
processes has dramatically reduced the efficiency of bureaucracy increasing the already
evident limitations that bureaucratic organizations have – in their capacity to deliver service
consistently and respond to the unpredictable challenges arising in times of higher
environmental uncertainty. These failures have generated waves of justified criticisms
towards public sector bureaucracies and their ability to fulfill the mandate of delivering
efficient and effective services (Heeks 2002).
While these criticisms are founded and justified by the failures of bureaucracies in delivering
public services, the solution of eliminating bureaucracies is not necessary the best one for
both the state and the citizens. Bureaucratic organizations do in fact enforce organizational
principles that deliver two sets of positive values. On the one hand, bureaucracies rationalize
administrative procedures making service delivery more efficient (consistently delivering
homogeneous outcomes) and effective (outcomes are determined by process structure); on the
other, the bureaucratic principle of rule-bounded behavior – which univocally determines the
outcome of administrative procedures, and guarantees their predictability according to the
impersonal bureaucratic principle (Kallinikos 2004; Perrow 1986) enforces the democratic
values of impartiality, fairness and equality in the delivery of public services.
The adoption of ICTs in the public sector has often been driven by a narrow view which
favors non-bureaucratic organizational arrangements rather than questioning whether ICTs
can improve the ability of public administrations to deliver efficient and effective services by
leveraging bureaucracies’ ability to perform their mandate fulfilling the superior goals of
impartiality, equality and fairness, along with efficient and effective organizational
arrangements. Instead, by following the latter view Cordella (2007) suggests reconsidering the
role of ICT in public sector reforms and proposes the thinking of ICT as an instrument to
support bureaucratic organizations rather than to eliminate them. He advises that the
implementation of ICT to automate existing administrative procedures could improve the
administrative system’s efficiency and effectiveness without changing its underpinning logic
(Nohria and Berkley 1994) which is to grant equal, impartial and fair treatments for every
citizen interacting with the bureaucratic organization. The potential of ICTs to support and
hence make public bureaucracies more efficient and effective is however not new. It has been
well documented in the history of the adoption of ICT in the public sector. Since the 1980s,
ICTs have been designed and implemented in order to provide proper and adequate tools and
solutions supporting the bureaucratic organization effectively.
Office automation software, database management systems, work flow management systems,
automated decision support systems, and more recently web services, e-services and cloud
shared systems, are some examples of technology-mediated solutions designed to make
bureaucratic organizations more effective and efficient by incorporating into the ICT systems
multiple levels of control and standardization of bureaucratic processes. More effective,
efficient and transparent monitoring and controlling mechanisms enabled by ICT technologies
can indeed prove valuable solutions for the design and implementation of more functional
bureaucratic organizations, increasing the homogeneity and predictability of administrative
procedures and their alignment with the normative and legal framework which govern every
public sector bureaucracy. ICTs in this context can power functions which are needed by
bureaucratic organizations to fulfill their mundane tasks and to increase the flexibility and
agility of the organization in responding to changing environmental conditions. These
organizations also need to overcome the information processing challenges associated with
the expanding domain of public intervention. The expanding complexity and uncertainty of
this domain is the reason why public sector bureaucracies have to exchange and process more
information, exacerbating their becoming more inefficient and ineffective when adequate
action is not taken. Organizations that are able to exploit ICT to support the bureaucratic
processes in order to overcome these challenges are good examples of e-bureaucracies
(Cordella 2007). The e-bureaucratic form is thus recommended as an e-government policy
that helps to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the action of the public
administration while reinforcing the bureaucratic values of equality and impartiality in the
state service to citizenship.
In its present formulation, this theory of e-bureaucracy does not account of the different kinds
of impact that ICTs can have on bureaucratic organizations, which differ in the nature of the
executed tasks, level of uncertainty, and internal coordination mechanisms. To fill this gap,
this paper builds on Mintzberg’s taxonomy of bureaucratic organizations (1983) which
distinguishes machinery bureaucracy from professional bureaucracy on the basis of the nature
of the standardization mechanisms used to uniform, rationalize, and coordinate the work
procedures and activities involved. Machinery bureaucracies are organizations effective at
executing simple tasks, which by their nature can be fully determined in advance of their
execution, and whose solutions can easily be predicted and therefore automated. Professional
bureaucracies instead deal with complex tasks. These tasks involve uncertainty and
ambiguity, and can only be solved in a semi-standardized way by applying general principles
to particular cases. Task solutions cannot be automated but only elaborated through
application of human analytical skills. As we will explain through the empirical evidence and
mobilizing this taxonomy, ICT can be a powerful ally in the effort for offloading, through
streamlining and automation, the burden of machinery bureaucracy operations, in order to
refocus organizational resources on the execution of professional bureaucracy tasks, requiring
human judgment.
In order to explain how information and communication technologies can embed bureaucratic
rationality and operationalize associated values and principles, we will draw from a
theoretical framework, that of information technology as functional simplification and
closure. In the following section we introduce the framework. In so doing, in this paper we
aim at building an account able to counter the dominant view in e-government research,
which conceives ICT as solution to eliminate bureaucracies.
3
Functional simplification and closure
While e-government literature has mostly treated ICT artifacts as linear catalysts of
transformation of public sector organizations and structures (West 2004; Layne and Lee
2001), we feel there are more nuanced accounts of the properties of technological artifacts
that can help to better theorize the role of ICT in e-government reforms. ICTs are not simple
tools that straightforwardly allow to increase organizational productivity (Kallinikos 2005).
ICTs encompass properties which enable them to frame the causal connection of the
organizational practices, events, and processes they mediate (Kallinikos 2005; Luhmann
2005). ICTs do not simply offer a neutral support to better execute existing organizational
activities but rather offer a new way to enframe (Ciborra and Hanseth 1998) and couple predefined logical sequences of actions mapping the organizational procedures and practices they
intend to mediate (Luhmann 2005). As a result, ICTs construct a new set of structured
sequences and interdependences that regulate the way in which organizational procedures and
processes are executed. Therefore, ICTs carry regulative properties that structure social and
organizational orders, providing stable and standardized means of social interaction (Bovens
and Zouridis 2002; Kallinikos 2005) shaped into the technical functionalities of the systems.
Work sequences and flows are described into the technological functions, making the
reduction of complexity in causal or instrumental relations that are standardized and stabilized
in scripts one essential characteristic of information technologies. The design of a system
encloses relational causalities as described in the scripts of technology and, at the same time,
excludes other possible causalities by not including relational interdependences into the very
same scripts. Kallinikos (2005) argues that this is a fundamental characteristic of ICT which
results from the combined effects of functional simplification and closure.
These two concepts are powerful analytical devices that provide an understanding of what the
essence of an information technology is, when it is contextualized in the social systems within
which it is deployed. Functional simplification and closure are the processes by which the
automation of an operation or function is constituted in the technology’s material substrate.
Since technology is necessarily designed to perform certain functions, the concepts of
functional simplification and closure help to explain what performative logic is embedded in a
technology, and how the operations of standardization and automation of tasks are modeled to
allow for technology to perform the functions it has been designed for. ICTs disambiguate the
causal chain connecting select organizational events and the operationalization of tasks by
embedment in the artifact. Functional simplification and closure explain the essential
character of technology.
Still, the capacity to capture the characteristics of functional simplification and closure that
are at the heart of a specific information technology is a different kind of challenge than
merely acknowledging that the definition of an information technology is always associated
with the functional simplification and closure logics it encompasses. The concept of
functional simplification “coincides with the identification and selection (hence the reduction
of complexity) of sets of operations that are thereby instrumented as strict cause-effect
couplings in which a particular cause is expected to lead to its specific effects” (Kallinikos
2006, 22). Functional simplification embodies the operational logic that underpins how a
technology defines the problem domain it applies to and the steps that need to be taken in
order to solve that problem domain. Functional simplification is the process through which
information technology breaks down a task or problem into sets of operations that need to be
performed sequentially in order to solve it. Defining functional simplification of a technology
implies explaining the segments of operations that the information technology embeds,
performs and standardizes. As the information technology standardizes sequences of
operations, it attempts to disentangle and disambiguate the operations from the messy and
local domains of the social world it is going to apply to. ICT selects, extracts, and isolates
from the social world sequences of operations to be performed in order to achieve a specific
outcome which satisfies particular requirements (Kallinikos 2006). It attempts to reduce the
complexity of the world by capturing the essential causal chains needed to produce an output
into its functionalities.
Functional closure is then the necessary complement to functional simplification. The
technology construction process necessarily entails the isolation and black-boxing of the
sequential operations, ensuring their execution is protected from external interference.
Functional closure “implies the construction of a kind of protective cocoon (from fences to
social practices) that is placed around the selected causal sequences or processes to
safeguard undesired interference and ensure their repeatable and reliable operation”
(Kallinikos 2006, 33). An information technology works so that standardized operations are
executed in an automatic fashion. The automation of the operations executed by the
information technology implies that the operations retain an autonomous character. While the
information technology interacts with the user, the computations that are executed as a result
of user interaction proceed in isolation until an outcome is produced. Information technology
is often responsive to interaction with the user but only at certain steps of the task flow (i.e.
data input, command confirmations, etc.), while the operations that occur between one step of
interaction and another are black-boxed and independent from the user. In this way the
construction of a technology can be described as the construction of a simple, robust world
(Berg 1998) unambiguous in its self-referential working, transacting with the outer
environment only when reaching one of a limited number of pivotal points (or outcomes). The
essence of an information technology is described by the dyad of functional simplification
and closure and not by either one of the two alone, since each of the concepts concerns a
different and limited aspect of the functional operationalization that an information
technology constitutes. Only taken together the two concepts are able to define an information
technology in operation.
The process of technology construction through functional simplification and closure has farreaching consequences for organizational settings. In fact, functional simplification and
closure result in a separation of the operation of the technical system form the organizational
and social action, processes, and practices that are executed by the same system (Kallinikos
2006, 36). Once organizational procedures and protocols have been delegated to technological
automation, the abstraction that functional simplification produces implies that procedures
and protocols are, to a degree, isolated from the organizational setting they originated from.
Moreover, the technological substrate for the execution of procedures and protocols are open
to “become highly regulated through prescriptions, the specification of skill profiles and
requirements and role formation” (Kallinikos 2006, 34), information technology equating to a
regulative regime (Kallinikos 2009) that stabilizes and structures social interaction (Bovens
and Zouridis 2002; Kallinikos 2005).
While a technology can embody functional simplification and closure that are more or less
aligned with organizational needs, these concepts are not quantitative measures. It would
make no sense to say that a technology is more functionally simplified than another, since all
technologies embody different configurations of functional simplification and closure.
“Simplified, in this context, does not mean simple” (Kallinikos 2006, 33). Functional
simplification and closure are not directly commensurable to quantification. However,
different configurations can perhaps be evaluated and compared in terms of their effects, since
different configurations will perform in ways that are more or less aligned with organizational
needs.
In this purview, we think that the regulative powers of ICT should be put at the center of the
analysis, if we set out to understand the implication of ICTs in e-bureaucratic strategies. Case
study research is perhaps the most suitable approach for examining a phenomenon in its
natural setting (Benbasat, Goldstein, and Mead 1987) and therefore the ideal vehicle for
gaining a deeper understanding of the political, social and technical factors that shape egovernment deployments. Moreover, case study is a powerful methodology for investigating
alternative frameworks or hypotheses on a topic, for the flexibility it allows to the researcher
to start with a broad focus, evaluate the spectrum of expected and unexpected phenomena that
the case represents and selectively narrow down on the phenomena that relate to the most
important questions. Case study allows then to construct causal chains involving the
phenomena of interest, and provides robust devices of theoretical validation in multiple
sources of evidence and evidence triangulation (Yin, 2009). To offer the ground needed for
this analysis the paper focuses on how the local administration in Venice, Italy has designed
an ICT platform called IRIS, which encompasses the ideas presented and discussed in this
review.
4
Methodology
We studied the IRIS information system that is part of a major project “Amministrazione 2.0”
by the Venice administration. This is a web-based system that leverages the Internet for
crowdsourcing from the distributed public of the citizenship the monitoring of the territory of
the municipality and the reporting of maintenance and management problems. Data collection
relied on a number of different sources. We collected data from open-ended qualitative
interviews, questionnaires, direct observation of the system and data mining, and secondary
data sources. Secondary sources included legal and government documents, technical
documentation and public press releases. The aim of the research was to understand how the
‘Amministrazione 2.0’ project was translated into action through a number of ICTs projects,
and what role technology was having in shaping the success or failure of these projects. In
other words, we set out to understand how the public administration of Venice supported its
bureaucratic principles and rationalized its administrative procedures through deployment of
solutions based on innovative uses of the ICT.
To start the research and find potential leads for investigation, we conducted four in-depth
interviews (duration 45’ – 1h15’) with the main executives involved in the project. We
initially designed the interviews with an adaptive aim. Initially we discussed several different
projects all part of the major ‘Amministrazione 2.0’ initiative. Progressively, the interviews
converged on the investigation of IRIS as this system was bearing the most interesting results
– in relation to the background of a dominant critique of bureaucracy as in the NPM literature
and our interest in the role of technology for bureaucracy. Table 1 below presents a detailed
summary of the actors interviewed. We followed a semi-structured approach to the
interviews, supporting the data collection process by preparing interview guides, customized
for each interviewee, and maintaining a balance between passivity and over-direction
(Walsham 1995). The interviews were tape-recorded. Each interview was transcribed into text
to ensure a reliable analysis of the relevant data.
Position
Involvement
Vice-mayor of Venice
Creator and political sponsor of the
“Amministrazione 2.0” project and its children
projects
Head of the Information Systems and Digital Citizenship
Public administrator and institutional administrator
Office of the Local Government
of the IRIS project
Chief Executive of Venis Spa
Software development of IRIS
Supervisor of the IRIS project at the Information Systems
Head of the IRIS Rooms
and Digital Citizenship Office
[Table 1]
We enriched our understanding by analyzing a number of essential documents about IRIS,
some provided to us by the administration and others collected from publicly available
sources. Amongst these were all four versions of the normative agreement, records about the
software updates rolled out to IRIS, summaries about personnel training, an application for a
ministerial prize for public sector innovation, letters to the citizenship, and internal statistics.
All these data sources allowed us to triangulate (Yin 2008) the evidence we have gathered
from the case study. In order to integrate our data with a range of differentiated perspectives
on the project and defend a neutral standpoint (Walsham 2006), after an initial analysis of the
data in our possession we provided a short qualitative questionnaire to the offices
participating in IRIS. We collected 17 responses from 38 recipients of the questionnaire.
Finally, in order to build our argument we mined the database of requests that is available at
the IRIS portal (further explanation will follow in the findings section).
From the initial analysis of the IRIS case data a theme emerged and required explanation.
IRIS was apparently a successful system that relieved several previously independent
organizations and the public relations offices of the municipality from the burden of
administrative work. At the same time, the system was presented as a major success by the
administration, which claimed that the public had made sense and adopted the technology. We
set out to understand how e-government projects can be designed to support bureaucratic
organization and coordination rather than just to eliminate or reduce them. To explain our
arguments, we built on the notion of e-bureaucracy (Cordella 2007) and looked at a specific
case which seems to support the argument for e-government developments which aim to
support bureaucratic organizations by making their coordination more efficient. The notion of
functional simplification and closure was also introduced to account for the effects of
information technologies in streamlining bureaucratic functions.
5
The IRIS platform
5.1
System routine
A citizen, who wants action to be taken about a problem pertaining to the public territory of
Venice, be it for instance floating waste, road holes, illegal docking or swarms of mosquitoes,
can issue a maintenance request through a digital platform called IRIS (Internet Reporting
Information System). This is a public sector ICT solution designed to provide better and
quicker solutions to common problems related to the maintenance of the city of Venice. IRIS
was launched in late May 2008, as part of the major project “Amministrazione 2.0”, in one of
the six municipalities of the council of Venice, and finally extended to the whole city in
December 2009. To date (February 2015) the system has recorded more than 23,000 requests,
leveraged from a large potential user base of 270,000 residents (plus 8.5 million tourists per
year). The system was designed to digitize a process that was already in place. The IRIS
platform permits citizens to digitally submit requests for intervention to the relevant office of
the public administration of Venice. Figure 1 compares the submission processes before and
after the implementation of IRIS.
Letter
Floating Waste
Visit attempt
Request gets lost
Floating Waste
Environment Office
Veritas SPA
Municipal Police
Phone call
Public Works Office
Difficult handling of multiple
responsibility
Graffiti
IRIS
Public Works Office
Graffiti
Municipal Police
Endless negotiations before
success
Insula SPA
IRIS Room
Rats
Rats
Veritas SPA
Shallow Canal
Insula SPA
Shallow Canal
Before IRIS
Request notification management in Lido Pellestrina, Venice
Before IRIS
Environment Office
With IRIS
Request notification management in Lido Pellestrina, Venice
IRIS
[Figure 1]
When a submission is made the user must attribute a geo-reference to the request, either by
clicking on the map or searching the toponymic database via a textual search. The user must
also assign the request to one problem class, from a list of 19 specific classes, or by selecting
the generic ‘Unclassified’. Furthermore, she can attach pictures to better explain the nature of
the problem, and any other information which might be useful for the office in addressing the
problem. The system stores the request in the database, and makes it instantly available to the
public. The user receives email notifications when the request is updated by the organization
in charge of the request. Using the comment function, any user can comment on the updates,
since the comment function is not restricted to the user who initially made the request.
Requests can also be submitted via MMS, although this option has hardly been used. When a
request is received by IRIS, the system automatically notifies the responsible organization via
e-mail. Since responsibility depends on the nature of the problem and its location, the
legitimate recipient of the request is identified according to the class and location indicated by
the citizen.
A request has a life cycle that can iterate between five possible statuses. Two working days
are initially allowed to the recipient organization to acknowledge the request: then it is given
the initial status of “case acknowledged”. Within two more working days, the organization
must take an initial decision by submitting information (e.g. request number or plans) to the
request’s page. The status then changes to “under evaluation
