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[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Information Technology Governance
The new conventional wisdom is that information technology (IT) is fundamentally altering almost every domain within which it is extensively implemented. The language of "transformation" is now widely employed by those discussing the impacts of IT in post-industrial societies. While many find this claim plausible, its widespread repetition cannot serve as an empirical verification of the extent or nature of the impacts of IT on individuals, organizations, society, or the political system.
Our primary goal in this article is to advance our knowledge about the impacts of IT on the political system, and particularly on public administration. In many discussions of these impacts, there is still a tendency to emphasize either a utopian pattern based on an idealization of the positive benefits that IT will bring to citizens, public administrators, and politicians or an Orwellian vision in which the effects of ITs are generally undemocratic, inequitable and dehumanizing.
It seems indisputable that applications of IT are increasingly pervasive in the world of public administration. Recent reports from the European Union indicate that the uses of IT in the Governance of public organizations are proliferating, from relatively straightforward office automation to a vast array of more sophisticated and complex applications that support many functions. There is a rapid diffusion of more advanced IT applications available for government, based on such capabilities as digital communications, IT-integrated processes, sophisticated data-sharing capabilities, geographic information systems, and web-based systems enabled by, interalia, office document automating systems, data warehouses, data mining techniques, Internet and mobile technologies. Such uses of IT make it feasible to access, integrate and analyze far more extensive data and to facilitate new patterns of communication, cooperative work, citizen-government linkages, and so on. Indeed, IT has been portrayed as a technology that might usher in an era of digital direct democracy..................
