Showing papers by "Nottingham Trent University published in 1992"

Informatisation and New Public Management: an alternative agenda for Public Administration:

Abstract: Introduction The contemporary academic agenda of public administration has been both shaped and sustained by a new approach to administration captured conceptually by the term 'new public management' (NPM). However, whilst new public management has come to provide the dominant agenda an emergent paradigm for public administration a second academic theme has developed, largely outside the UK, around the concept of 'informatisation' in public services organisation (Frissen and Snellen, 1990). The term 'informatisation' is used in the recognition that public services organisations and thus the administrative apparatus of the state are becoming strategically and centrally dependent upon the changing flows of informational resources which are made possible by powerful combinations of information and communications technologies. As with NPM 'informatisation' leads to insights about organisational development, about new bureaucratic forms, about new styles and techniques of management, about new relationships with customers and new conceptions of performance. But, whereas the point of departure for NPM is 'management', the point of departure for informatisation is 'information' and its communication. Thus we can begin to perceive the juxtaposition of competing emergent paradigms in what Kuhn would have called our 'immature science' of public administration. In the UK to date informatisation has received scant treatment in the study of public administration. It has been bedevilled by an implicit assumption that it is a narrow, technical field, entirely contiguous with information and communication technology (ICT). Technological innovation, however, is not the core focus of informatisation, nor should it be. Whilst ICTs provide a platform upon which processes in public administration occur, it is the qualitative changes in the way information is captured, managed, conveyed and applied which provide the student of public administration with his or her meat and drink. To borrow from Stigler's seminal