From automation to knowledge management: modernizing British government with ICTS

In the UK, as elsewhere, the development of new, technologically-enabled ways of managing and communicating information is coming to the fore in relation to government reform. As these quotations from recent policy documents illustrate well, the shift to information-age government is seen as a key element in the British Government's modernization strategy. Thus far, however, the rhetoric of information-age government has outstripped its achievements and governments still have a long way to go in fulfilling the radical promises made for the transformatory powers of information and communications technologies (ICTS). It remains the case that governments make heaviest use of computers as production technology, for automating data-processing in the back offices of public administration. Much less use has so far been made of ICTS as informating technology, for example for marshalling new kinds of information for policy-makers or for establishing new, more interactive and flexible ways of communicating with service users and citizens. At the end of the 20th century, the reality of British Government, for example, was that most data were still being captured from members of the public on paper forms. Few departments had systematic arrangements for doing business with the public over the telephone, still less for conducting transactions over the internet. Huge quantities of data flowed into government, but most of these data were locked into stand-alone mainframe processing systems with restricted inter-operability. The result is that inflexible information management is widely acknowledged to be an important barrier to modernizing government, as the present Government is pledged to do. Modernizing the use of ICTS lies, therefore, at the heart of the Blair Government's commitment to public service reform and this article describes how this important task is being approached.