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Outline by Patrick Dean, April 2005

Terms: Information and Communication Technology (ITC)

Electronic commerce and ICTs have become powerful economic motors. Aiding in productivity increases and changing the world’s structure, but the public sector is advancing slowly.

Three aspects to take into account:

1) The reformist trends and the state modernization

2) The adoption of ICTs in the public sector

3) The organizational and institutional impacts of e-government projects

Toward a New Public Management

Three factors for public sector reform since 1970:

1) A sense of crisis in the public sector

2) A renewed ideology that provided a response to crisis

3) Political will and power to enact those responses

Bureaucratic organizations are dysfunctional. These dysfunctions stimulated interest in a new innovative framework rooted in neo-liberalism ideology. The new ideology allowed bureaucratic organizations to become big companies offering a range of services. (Pg.86)

Access to the internet and ICTs allow e-government projects to contribute to public administration reform (known as the modernization process). (pg.86)

Public administrators can be either subjects or objects to ICTs.

Subjects: Influencing the design of a telecommunications regulatory framework that promotes competition and facilitates citizen access, the formulation of measures that increase confidence in electronic transactions, or the establishment of minimum services to satisfy the demands of the less favored groups.

Objects: New opportunities offered by ICTs either internally or externally to increase their efficiency, effectiveness, and political legitimacy. This allows for the electronic or digital government initiatives to take place.

E-government is all activities based on ICTs that the state carries out in order to increase public management.

"E-government… is about the creation of new processes and new relationships between governed and governor." (pg.86)

Two types of e-government

1) Gathers initiatives under the name of the electronic or digital public administration or back office adjustments

2) electronic, digital, or online government or front office adjustments (pg. 87)

Digitization has cut transaction costs all the way to zero in some cases. (online bill payment and document download) Efficiency gains can be achieved. ICTs and internet may change the way governments pursue their goals. New opportunities arise when governments use networks.

"At the organizational level, important transformations occur because information technologies affect the chief characteristics of the Weberian bureaucracy, and therefore, they reshape the production, coordination, control, and direction processes that take place within the public sector." (pg.88)