Serving the citizen: A proposed model for
IT value in public administration

Frank Bannister

While there is much common ground in the
measurement of information technology (IT) value between the public
sector and the commercial world, there are also significant differences.
This is particularly so in the case of public administration, where
evaluation of IT presents a number of specific theoretical and practical
problems. Starting from an exploration of the meaning of information
systems (IS) value, the differences between IT value in public
administration and the commercial private sector are explored. A
taxonomy of IT value in public administration is developed, and a model
of IT value for public administration is
proposed.

Introduction
A question of scale and perspective

By any measurement, government is big business.
In many OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development)
countries, including Ireland, the state absorbs approximately 40% of gross
national product. The government IT spend is correspondingly large. As
Muid (1994) puts it, government is at the apogee of an information
industry, a phenomenon also noted by Hood (1983) in his concept of the
nodality of government, and by many others (Snellen 1992). Given the size
of this outlay, research into IT value in the public sector has a
relatively low profile. This is all the more surprising, given the general
unease that IT in the public sector has not delivered the value expected
(for example, Lenk 1990; Frokjaer & Korsbaek 1992; Pye 1992; Margetts
& Willcocks 1993; Bellamy & Taylor 1994; Willcocks 1994; Margetts
1999).

This perception of poor value has not been
helped by a number of high profile IT failures and overruns. Margetts
& Willcocks (1993) suggest that there are several factors that make IT
projects in the public sector inherently more risky, and thus more prone
to failure and high cost. However, the question of whether public
administration is receiving good value from its IT investment is much more
complex and difficult to assess. One reason for this is that there is no
agreed model of IT value in public administration. In this paper, it will
be argued that an agreed model is needed if IT development in a given
public administration is to be coherent. Such a model must be consistent
with current thinking in public administration, while taking into account
civil service culture, legacy infrastructure and technology developments.
A model of IT value in public administration based on the concept of
citizen centricity - the precept that the ultimate beneficiary of a civil
service IT system must be the citizen in all his or her roles as customer,
recipient, participant, taxpayer and so on - will be proposed.

IT in public administration

Developing a coherent theory of IT in public
administration is difficult, given the current state of incoherence in
public administration theory in general (Mainzer 1994). Indeed, Van de
Donk & Snellen (1998) assert that not only has no such theory been
developed, but that it is virtually impossible to develop anything other
than a "more or less mature" theory. The most widely discussed conceptual
framework is "informatization" (Frissen, Brussaard, Snellen & Wolters
1992). Another useful concept is the Information Polity (Taylor &
Williams 1990; Bellamy & Taylor 1992 1998). More recently, Heeks &
Bhatnagar (1999) proposed the concept-reality gap as a frame for
considering how IT can contribute to the "reinvention of
government".

The concept of informatization can be
summarised as:

The introduction of IT to shape or take care
of the informa- tion retrieval process

The arrangement of information flows and
information rela- tionships to facilitate administrative or management
infor- mation process

Changes in the organisational structure in
which IT is intro- duced

The development of information policies as a
differentiated area of decision making in an organisation

The use of specific expertise in the field
of IT through func- tionaries or consultants with specific tasks in this
field.

Informatization may be considered broadly
equivalent to the term information management in the sense of managing the
information needs of an organisation. Looking at informatization policies
across a range of European countries, Snellen (1992) found that IT
projects in the public sector during the period from 1970 to 1990 were
dominated by the values of efficiency and effectiveness, controlled by the
Ministry of Finance or its equivalent, and that "the interest of
representation with informatization policies reinforces the internal
orientation of those policies" (Snellen 1992: 21). Inasmuch as customer
service was a consideration, it was viewed in terms of speed of delivery
and absence of errors. Sometimes, even where projects were deemed to be
successful, ex post research has shown the 'savings' realised to have been
illusory (Henman 1996).

Informatization is positioned by Taylor (1998)
as an alternative way of analysing what Heeks (1999b: 76) terms "the
murky, messy world of information systems and public sector reform". In
the literature on informatization and IT in public administration, a major
focus is on public sector reform and reengineering (see, for example,
Taylor & Williams 1990; Andersen 1999). Informatization should shift
the emphasis from efficiency and effectiveness to reform - from automation
to information and thence to transformation. The question is how all this
relates to the value of IT in public administration. There is a need to
respond to the challenge posed by Wyatt (1991: 25): "Rarely has anyone
explicitly addressed the question of why the public sector invests in IT,
and of what it is hoping to achieve if not increased competitive
advantage." Indeed, if one ignores self-funding and mandatory or survival
investments, one might ask why a civil service would invest in IT at
all.

In order to answer this question, a model of IT
value in public administration is necessary. We now seek to formalise and
develop such a model. This will be done in four steps:

A conceptual model of value will be
developed to provide a framework for what follows.

The differences between public service and
private com- mercial perceptions of IT value will be explored.

Using a number of existing taxonomies of IT
value, a taxon- omy of IT value in public administration will be
distilled.

Consolidating all of these, a model of IT
value in public administration will be put forward and discussed.

Defining IT value - A grounded approach
Values and value

The concept of value in economics goes back to
Adam Smith's concepts of value in exchange and value in use (Samuelson
1976). Economics posits the rational man and proceeds to build various
predictive models of behaviour on this assumption. In this model, the
return on investment in IT is directly comparable with the return on
investment in a new piece of machinery or in research and development
(Engelbert 1991). Psychologists and decision theorists discuss value and
decision making in quite different terms (for example, Tversky &
Kahnehmen 1982; Plous 1993; March 1994). In practice, human and
organisational decision making is often seemingly irrational when viewed
from a strictly logical or economic perspective - a phenomenon Simon
(1953) termed "bounded rationality".

To understand the nature of IT value as
perceived by a civil service, we need a definition of value that will
encompass the economic, psychological, cultural and political aspects of
value. The multidimensional nature of IT value has been discussed, inter
alia, by Symons (1994), who describes the need for multiple perspectives,
and by Cronk & Fitzgerald (1999), who discuss the value perspectives
of functional groups and dimensions of IS business value. To develop such
a definition, we start by distinguishing the concepts of 'value' and
'Values' (for clarity spelled with a capital 'V'). Values may be described
as normative characteristics or modes of behaviour that individuals,
groups or organisations hold to be right, or at least better than other
characteristics or modes of behaviour. Values have their visible
manifestation in the ways that individuals or groups behave and interact
with other individuals or groups. For example, beliefs in honesty,
humility, self gratification, efficiency, social equality, duty, thrift,
service to others, and so on, are all Values that, assuming they are
applied, result in distinct forms of behaviour and choices. Values present
as attitudes and beliefs that directly affect the way in which government
departments apply IT.

Given this definition, 'value' is defined as a
quality applied to a good, service or outcome that supports, meets or
conforms with one or more of the Values of an individual or group. Thus, a
person who holds strongly the Value that all humans should be treated with
respect, is likely to place value on the work practice and ergonomic
aspects of an IT system. An organisation whose primary corporate Value is
economy in the form of keeping taxation levels or costs to a minimum will
value an IT system that, say, reduces headcount. In extreme cases, Values
become mindsets or ideology. An example of this effect was manifest in the
United Kingdom during the 1980s, where the Values espoused by the
Conservative government of the time had very dramatic impact on IT
decisions during that period (Fallon 1993; Margetts 1999; Heeks 1999a). In
such a climate, IT value can degenerate to financial efficiency and
effectiveness, with the latter being ill-defined and of much less
importance than the former (Bekkers & Frissen 1991).

The second distinction is between value and
benefits. In assessing any information system, a government department
will judge the value it receives on the ability of the system to meet a
number of stated and unstated needs. These may include explicit external
needs (such as implementing government policy) and/or stated or unstated
internal corporate or even individual Values. Benefits can be thought of
as an operationalisation of the value construct. Value is what we
perceive; benefit is what we receive. The relationship is illustrated in
Figure 1.

The impact of the objective needs - those
values that are generally formally stated or specified - combines with
Values that are implicit and that may or may not be recognised by the
members of the organisation. Together, these substantially determine
decisions about IT investment and use. Value perception is also affected
by the information available to the actor. For example, civil servants
will also be acutely aware of the general economic and political climate
and will be working within a broad framework set down by government, the
Ministry of Finance/Treasury or other bodies. In times of economic
cutbacks, there will be greater sensitivity to value for money than there
might be in times of budget surplus.

In summary, all members of any organisation
have Values, whether they acknowledge them or not. Values may be
individual, group or organisational/corporate. They may be fundamental or
transient and may be affected by current events. These Values lead
individuals and organisations to seek goods or outcomes that deliver value
- things that meet or comply with these Values. For IT investments and
outcomes, we term this the value set. Benefits are the operationalisation
of value. In order, therefore, to provide an appropriate basis for IT
investment decisions in public administration, it is necessary to define
the value set for public administration.

Public and private perceptions of IT
value
A question of perception

An important issue is the difference between
commercial and public administration perception of value and benefits. The
perception of the role of IT in, and the value of IT to, a commercial
organisation is inherently different from that of the civil service for a
number of reasons, two of which are fundamental: motivation and
complexity.

Motivation

Private sector commercial bodies are driven by
some combination of a need to:

Survive

Grow

Make profits

Create wealth.

The combination of growth and wealth creation
is the yardstick by which business performance is measured. League tables
of added shareholder value are published indicating which companies are
the most successful at achieving these ends (for example, by the Sunday
Times). Reflecting this, the language of business management, particularly
since the early 1980s, has been infused with the idea of competitive
advantage (Porter & Miller 1985). While more sophisticated tools to
measure company performance have been developed - such as the Balanced
Scorecard (Kaplan & Norton 1992, 1993) - the fundamentals do not
change. Investments of any sort are (or should be) primarily measured
against how well they serve, directly or indirectly, the four criteria
listed above. A variety of other rationales for IT investment may be
invoked and filters used (for example, Boynton, Zmud & Jacobs 1994),
but ultimately they must serve these commercial imperatives.

The above four criteria either have quite
different meanings or no meaning at all in public
administration.

Survival

Civil services, like most organisations, seek
to survive; indeed, they are highly effective at so doing, but the threats
to their survival are primarily political and social, rather than
economic. A civil service department does not normally have competitors.
In Ireland, as elsewhere, civil service departments constantly mutate, but
the overall structure and staffing levels have remained broadly stable
over the past 30 years (Dooney & O'Toole 1992). With constitutionally
protected job security, most civil service managers do not concern
themselves unduly with Grove's (1996) blunt assertion, "You have to be
paranoid to survive."

Growth

A civil service may seek to expand, but the
motivations for such growth are different from those of a private company.
There are no shareholders or investment managers demanding year-on-year
increases in earnings. Internally generated growth driven by civil
servants (as opposed to growth driven by customer demand or government
action) may be driven by a desire to provide better or additional
services, or for less altruistic reasons such as power, promotion or
control, but not by external pressures to add shareholder value.
Furthermore, unlike private companies, any civil service has, in the
central government Finance function, an internal control mechanism that
deliberately tries to restrain growth.

Profitability

Civil service departments are not profit
driven. Department management may be motivated by cost savings or cost
avoidance, but this is a much more limited sphere than profit growth, in
part because costs are only one side of profitability, but also because
cost savings are bounded to a much greater extent than profits. The
motivation in the civil service is still to come in on budget - in crude
terms, to breakeven.

Wealth creation

While civil service departments seek to create
wealth (a healthier population, better roads, a better educated
workforce), such wealth creation is a vastly broader conception than that
of financially enriching shareholders, management or the workforce. The
value of such wealth is often difficult to measure by comparison with such
metrics as increases in shareholders funds or earnings per share (Wholey
1979, 1983; Boyle 1993, 1996). The issue of such non-material wealth
creation is, however, central to the mission of the civil service (Lalor
2000) and has a fundamental impact on the role and value placed on IT.
This needs to be recognised.

Complexity

Business decisions can sometimes be very
complex (Clemen 1996), but, in general, public decisions are much more so.
There are several reasons why this is so, including:

Public sector decisions tend to have many
more stakeholders.

The scale of expenditure by public bodies
is, in general, far greater than that of private sector
organisations.

Many public sector decisions have the force
of law and are not optional. They deal with citizens, not volunteer
customers.

Democratic and political considerations
often add to the level of consultation required, and consequently to the
timescale.

This last difference is often demonstrated when
private sector decisions enter the public arena. For example, a decision
as to whether a company should invest in a waste incinerator can be
evaluated in a few weeks or, at most, months. Obtaining planning
permission to build an incinerator may take several years,
however.

Interpretation

Given the differences between private
commercial and public administrative motivations, it follows that the
rationale for investing in general, and in IT in particular, is frequently
different. However, even where value perceptions are shared, they can take
on a different connotation in a public administration context. For
example, many commercial IT investment decisions would include several
customer-related benefits or values including:

Better customer service

Enhancing customer value

Customer retention

Enhanced customer profitability.

There is, however, a fundamental difference
between the customer/supplier relationship and the citizen (customer of
the state)/state relationship. The commercial customer generally has the
option of rejecting a supplier's product or service and buying elsewhere
or, in many cases, not buying at all. The state is not only a monopoly
supplier or provider of many services, but it often has the authority to
compel the citizen to deal with it. For many of its services, there is no
market imperative for the state to treat its customers well (although in a
modern democracy, government departments which consistently fail to
deliver service over a long period of time will normally be reformed,
abolished or split up among other departments - there is a limit to public
tolerance). Thus, in public administration, the above values translate as
follows:

Better customer service can, up to a point,
be equated with better service to the citizen. Whereas a company may
quick- ly suffer the costs of poor customer service, the same is not
necessarily true of public services.

Enhancing customer value may or may not be
meaningful. In many instances, the 'customers' are at most paying for
the services they receive indirectly or, in the case of social wel- fare
benefits, for example, may not be paying for them at all.

Customer retention is largely irrelevant.
Customers can, of course, choose not to use state services, but if they
want to tra-vel abroad, drive a car or even eat, they may have no
choice.

Enhanced customer profitability has no
direct equivalent meaning in the civil service. Lower cost per citizen
served does have meaning, but this covers only half of the full scope of
this value metric.

Finally, there are also values and benefits
which are either only found in a civil service context or which have a
particular emphasis in the civil service which differentiates them.
Examples of such values include:

Assuring equality of treatment

Social inclusion

Facilitating the democratic will.

None of these are commercial values. Many
modern businesses deliberately set out not to treat their customers
equally (for example, frequent flier schemes, private banking and so on).
Social inclusion is not on the agenda of most businesses (witness the
current closure of unprofitable bank branches in small rural communities)
and facilitating the democratic will is not a Value that many businesses
espouse in practice, even with their own shareholders.

In building the value set therefore, it is
first necessary to differentiate those values that are purely commercial,
those that are shared by all and those that have a different slant in
public administration, and then to add values that are distinct to public
administration.

A taxonomy of IT value in public
administration
Values

To develop a taxonomy of IT value in public
administration, we first define a core set of Values for public
administration. The following list is proposed:

Duty orientated

Responsibility to the citizen

Responsibility to the government

Proper use of public funds

Efficient and effective use of public
funds

Facilitating the democratic will

Service oriented

Service to the citizen

Respect for the individual

Socially oriented

Respect for the citizen

Social inclusion

Justice

Fairness

Equality of treatment.

We term these 'core values'. The traditional
themes in the study of public administration - accountability,
responsibility, responsiveness, control, equity, justice and democracy -
are implicit in the core values.

The citizen appears under each of the different
headings, reflecting the fact that he or she has several possible roles.
At any given time, the citizen may be some or all of the
following:

Taxpayer:

The person who ultimately
funds public admin- istration and IT investment

Customer:

Someone who buys a service
from the state

Client:

Someone on whose behalf
the state acts

Claimant:

Someone who has
entitlements from the state

Recipient:

A person who receives
either treasure or author- ity from the government

Participant:

A member of the public
participating in demo- cratic decision making or policy
formulation

Agent:

Someone working for or on
behalf of the state

Individual

A person in their own
right.

The citizen qua
citizen, as a member of the polity, is here termed 'participant' to avoid
confusion. The above list is not exhaustive (a citizen could, for example,
be a prisoner or a ward of the state), but it covers all the normal roles
a citizen can take.

These two constructs will provide the basic
structure underlying the model.

Value categorisation

A six-way framework categorisation of IT value
is now proposed. IT value in public administration may be classified
as:

Foundational

This relates to the legacy of cost efficiency,
which has justified IT systems used in public administration. These values
are close to the traditional three E's associated with value for money:
efficiency, effectiveness and economy (National Audit Office (UK)
1996).

Policy formulation

This relates to the administration's role in
developing policy and includes responsibility to government.

Democratic

This relates to the support for and enhancement
of democracy and citizen involvement in the affairs of the state,
including justice, fairness, equity and keeping the citizen
informed.

Service

This relates to the provision of service to the
citizen as customer, client, claimant or recipient and includes the
criteria of timeliness, accuracy and convenience to the
citizen.

Internal

This relates to values that affect employees
and the internal operations of public administration, including staff
motivation and working conditions.

External

This relates to the state's interactions with
external organisations - some of which may be outside its jurisdiction -
and may include many mandatory elements.

Towards a taxonomy of Values in public
administration

In the middle tier of this structure are the IT
values relevant to public administration. To derive a set of such values,
we start from existing research. Several researchers have presented or
suggested lists or taxonomies of 'IT benefits' (Parker & Benson 1988;
Clince, Blennerhassett & Campbell 1992; Farbey, Land & Targett
1993; Coleman & Jamieson 1994; Bannister 1995; Remenyi, Money &
Twite 1995; Remenyi & Sherwood Smith 1997). Most of these lists are
not sector specific, although some of them are grouped in different ways.
In converting these taxonomies/lists to a taxonomy of IT value in public
administration, four issues must be addressed:

We need to distinguish between benefits and
values. Benefits and values, though closely related, are not the same
thing. This difference/relationship must first be made explicit.

Most of the lists are generic and/or
business oriented. As has been shown, IT benefits and values that are
important in the commercial sector may have no relevance in public
administration.

Benefits and values in public administration
may have little or no importance in business. A superset of such lists
will not give a comprehensive list of IT public sector value metrics and
will contain many irrelevant metrics.

Where benefits and values do overlap, they
may have different meanings or interpretations in each sector.

The following steps were then taken:

Following a wide literature search, an
extensive list of benefits and values was compiled.

This set was filtered to remove benefits and
values that are not relevant or applicable to public
administration.

Where appropriate, benefits were
restructured or reformulated as values.

The resulting set was reviewed, and, where
necessary, values were restructured and/or reformulated in public
administration terms.

The list was then augmented with a number of
values that emerged from the background research into the Irish civil
service and from the broader public administration literature.

The identified values were categorised using
the headings above.

The resulting taxonomy is shown in Table
1.

Table 1. Taxonomy of IT values in public
administration

Category

Value

Core values
supported

Foundational

Positive cost
benefit
Cost savings/reduced headcount
Avoided future
costs
Positive return on investment
Positive net present
value
Risk reduction
Greater staff efficiency
Better
control/reduction in fraud and waste
Increase in
capacity/throughput
Mandatory

Efficient and
effective use of public funds
Proper use of public
funds
Responsibility to the citizen as taxpayer
Responsibility to
government

Policy
formulation

Better
management information
Support for decisions

Responsibility
to government
Proper use of public funds
Responsibility to the
citizen as participant

Democratic

Citizen access
to information
Transparency
Flexibility
Policy
alignment

Social
inclusion
Justice
Fairness
Facilitating the democratic
will
Responsibility to the citizen as participant

Service

Good service to
the customer
Good service to the citizen
Meeting public
demands

Service to the
citizen as customer
Service to the citizen as client
Service to the
citizen as recipient
Service to the citizen as claimant
Respect for
the citizen as individual
Social
inclusion
Justice
Fairness
Equality of treatment

Internal

Improved staff
morale
Improved internal communications
Improved ability to attract
staff
Better staff retention
More motivated staff
Empowering
staff
Greater staff creativity

Responsibility
to the citizen as agent
Respect for the citizen as
individual
Efficient and effective use of public funds
Proper use of
public funds
Responsibility to the citizen as taxpayer

External

Being abreast of
the private sector
Having a good public image
Being abreast of other
administrations
Matching other external benchmarks

Reputation and
image

Figure 2.
Relationships between Values, values and Benefits

Citizen centricity - A new model of IT value
in public administration
A citizen-centric model

Combining this taxonomy of IT values with the
constructs previously discussed, a model can be developed. The model
posits an IT value core which is made up of six major components
delivering services directly and indirectly to the citizen. This model is
shown in Figure 2.
The foundation on which this rests are the core
values of public administration. The model is supported both by
infrastructure and supporting constructs.

Supporting constructs

The core values and the operationalisation of
value are supported by a number of supporting concepts
including:

The whole person concept

The essence of this concept is that the civil
service should view citizens as entities rather than as 'social slices'
(Nora & Minc 1978). Traditionally, most civil service systems (and,
by implication, departments and sub-units of departments) deal with only
one aspect of a citizen's life. The whole person concept emerged during
the development of systems for the UK DSS (Department of Social
Security) Operational Strategy (Fallon 1993), but, as envisaged here, is
much wider than the DSS's interpretation, which Adler & Sainsbury
(1990) found to be more akin to a "whole claimant"
concept.

The lifetime events concept

The lifetime events concept envisages the
civil service being able to track citizens through those events in their
life that bring them into contact with the state. This includes major
events (birth, marriage, separation/divorce and death), many other
milestones (reaching voting age, entry to the workforce, retirement,
becoming a parent and buying a house), events which may affect only a
subset of the population, as well as the issuing of various licences and
authorisations by the state.

The one-stop shop

The one-stop shop is simple in concept, but
its implications are profound. The essence of the concept is the notion
that a citizen should, if he or she requires, be able to make contact
with all the state services that are relevant to him or her at a single
location. This might be a single office, a single counter in an office
or (more questionably) a single web site.

Multiple modes of access

This principle states that there should be a
variety of means whereby the citizen can transact his or her business
with the state. With technological advance, the range of ways in which
citizens can potentially undertake transactions with the state has
increased. These methods now include:

Direct face-to-face contact (in an office or
in the home)

Post

E-mail

Telephone (fixed and mobile)

Fax

Web (computer, television or WAP
based)

Teletext

Courier

Pager

Automatic teller machine

Kiosk.

Notwithstanding developments in the
electronic delivery of public services, the need remains for a variety
of other methods of delivery. Not all modes of delivery will be enabled
by information and communication technologies.

Infrastructure

Finally, there is a need for a technical and
organisational infrastructure to support the delivery of benefits.
Briefly, this encompasses integration of systems, communications and
privacy issues. This means, on the one hand, the ability to both access
and combine information where necessary, but, on the other, the ability to
separate and isolate information where the privacy or rights of the
individual would otherwise be compromised. The design of such an
infrastructure will be influenced by the Values held by departments and
individual civil servants. There is much work in hand on this, but a
discussion of it is outside of the scope of this paper.

Conclusion
It is important to stress that the model proposed in this
paper is not a model of IT value in government, but a model of IT value in
public administration. This paper has deliberately avoided what might be
loosely termed wider political agendas, such as the reinvention of
government through technology, e-government and the information society,
as well as many of the wider and more complex issues surrounding IT in
public administration. The objective has been to develop a model of core
values - values which are independent of current government policies,
dominant ideologies or political fashions. It is in this sense a
politically neutral, but not value neutral, model. The responsibility of
public administration is to both government and citizen. If government
policy is to decentralise, to privatise state companies or to put a
personal computer in every classroom, it is the function of civil servants
to execute these policies and, where appropriate, to use IT as effectively
as possible to achieve government aims. IT value in public administration
is measured by its contribution to the good of the citizen. It is argued
here that the primary aim of IT in public administration is to serve the
citizen and the society in which he or she lives. In Irish society, the
civil service has a long and honourable tradition of providing a
politically neutral service - a service that can protect, and in the past
has protected, the citizen from the government. These values will inform
IT values and decisions made about IT acquisitions. An agreed model would
provide a valuable reference for IT decision making in the civil
service.

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Southern African Business Review Special Issue
on Information Technology 2000 4(2): 33-40
Serving the citizen: A
proposed model for IT value in public administration
Frank Bannister is
in the Department of Statistics, Trinity College, Dublin
E-mail: [email-masked]