Information Technology and Government: The Need for New Leadership

Beginning with their introduction into organizational life in the 1950s, information technologies (IT) were thought to raise delegation issues, not leadership issues. Public sector and other leaders were encouraged to delegate IT to "the experts"--to specialized IT staff and vendors. Computing and telecommunications weren't seen as requiring much in the way of political problem solving or leadership. Nor were they seen as offering solutions to important political or policy problems. As a result, senior general managers were minimally involved in technology matters, and technology experts were minimally involved in organizational strategy or operations.
We've come a long way since the 1950s. The technologies are different and the applications are different. But to what extent is "management by delegation" still the rule for IT issues, and with what impacts on government and the larger society? What, if anything, could and should be done?
This study addresses these questions, focusing heavily on the views of practitioners directly involved in governmental IT projects. This paper will define the study's subject and approach, then summarize its primary findings and recommendations.

IT leadership and government performance

For the purposes of this study, we define leadership simply as behaviors which "go in front" so as to influence (and improve) the performance of others (the followers). This sense of leadership is widely shared among practitioners. And in case after case there is copious evidence suggesting leadership's strong impact: from Napoleon's armies, to Magic Johnson's Los Angeles Lakers, to first-graders learning to read, groups that are otherwise equivalent produce markedly different results due to good or bad leadership.
Figure 1 illustrates the primary concepts and relationships explored in this study. In general, we sought to understand how IT leadership, in combination with environmental and other factors, influences government performance. In particular, we evaluated a range of commonly pursued options for improving governmental IT leadership. These options focused heavily but not exclusively on: (1) actors: getting the right people and skills involved in the IT leadership process (e.g., changing the role of IT managers, general managers, oversight agency personnel), and (2) activities: getting the IT leadership process to focus on the right mix of things to do (e.g., changing the emphasis on communication, education, planning, funding).


As Figure 1 suggests, many factors in addition to leadership actors and activities influence performance. Three were of particular importance:

1. The type or level of group involved. Leadership for individual IT projects is different than for entire organizations (which often deal with many projects simultaneously) or for the larger society (and its vast array of organizational and other relationships). In this study we focused primarily on individual projects, but also sought lessons for IT leadership on an organization-wide and society-wide basis.
2. Trends in information technologies and their applications. IT leadership must adjust to rapid technological changes and the doubling of the cost-effectiveness of computers every 18 months. As computers become dramatically cheaper, they are more pervasively used, and the easy applications have already been addressed. The new applications are different:
   • They continue to support existing work flows, but also create fundamentally different work flows.
   • They continue to displace clerical workers, but also redefine the careers of front-line personnel and the managerial ranks.
   • They continue to change communication flows inside the organization, but also change communications outside the organization and even outside the jurisdiction.
   Information technologies have thus become more than a tool for incremental change; in many situations they can now be used for quantum-leap, revolutionary change. This poses fundamentally new challenges for leadership.
3. The nature of the public sector environment. Private organizations have responded rather rapidly and aggressively to changes in IT, primarily by giving front-line and senior general managers a stronger role in IT leadership. But before governments rush to emulate private sector IT leadership practices, we should consider the differences between the sectors. To begin, public agencies deal with spill-overs, or the need to intervene in market transactions to protect the rights and welfare of third parties (as when enforcing regulations and redistributing income); this makes determining the value of a given activity in the public sector inherently more complex, subjective, and controversial than it would be in the private sector. In addition, public agencies have considerable monopoly power (e.g., military forces, tax agencies, public schools). Concerned about potential abuses of this power, we have typically forced public agencies to operate under extensive checks and balances and requirements for due process. In general, we have built our public agencies for caution, not speed: we have been willing to sacrifice efficiency in order to retain democratic controls. This trade-off may also make a difference when it comes to designing IT leadership strategies for the public sector.

A rational strategy depends on estimates of the impacts of the options considered. But estimating the impacts of leadership initiatives is inevitably uncertain, given the complex and ambiguous nature of factors and interrelationships involved. To help with such estimates, we began with the views of practitioners directly involved with governmental IT issues and activities. The summary conclusions of the study which follow are based on surveys of practitioner views as interpreted in the context of recent literature and field work exploring computing applications in public sector contexts.


Jerry Mechling