Prescriptions for public sector information management: a review, analysis, and critique
- 2000
- p.414-35
- Dec
This article reviews, analyzes, and assesses prescriptions for public-sector management of information technology (IT). It draws on four sources of such prescriptions: (a) the best-practices literature, based primarily on expert opinion and focused on managerial processes; (b) the empirical IT research literature, based primarily on quantitative analyses of the IT function; (c) benchmarks (the attempt to develop objective measures of the success of IT in public-sector organisations); and (d) the problem/disaster literature, based primarily on analyses of problems and disasters that have occurred in public-sector IT systems. The best-practices literature offers guidance, but the prescriptions are too general, and the methods for identifying best practices need expansion. The empirical literature is valuable and can provide prescriptions for specific technological questions, but the body of research is too sparse and offers contradictory prescriptions. Benchmarking has potential, but the approach is very undeveloped and subject to corruption. The problem/disaster literature offers caautionary examples, but its empirical base is unrepresentative of most failures. - Reproduced