MANAGING INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Managing Information Systems

Managing Information Systems

Introduction

In recent years the public sector has increasingly been under pressure to improve performance driven by a number of central government initiatives such as the Best Value regime and Public Performance Reporting. Added to this pressure is the current Modernising Government agenda or what has become known as information age government or e-government. Ambitious targets have been set for electronic service delivery culminating in the goal that all services be available electronically by 2004 (Cabinet Office 2005). Public services do not have the same bottom line aims of the private sector in terms of profit maximization but it is an over simplification to see the public sector as a pressure free environment. Internal markets and competitive funding have introduced business disciplines and there remains downward pressure on public expenditure and ever increasing statutory responsibilities. It is inevitable therefore that the pursuit of performance and value for money improvements will be linked to the e government agenda and the use of information technology (IT).

Literature Review

Pratchett (2007) estimates that the public sector currently spends £3bn per annum on IT services and this figure is anticipated to reach £4.75bn by 2004. (Cabinet Office 2002) This would tend to demonstrate not only that expenditure is significant and increasing but that the use of IT continues to be regarded as a tool to bring about the improvements identified in the strategies of public sector bodies. There may however be a danger that the introduction of IT systems are seen as an end in themselves instead of being part of a wider process to meet departments and agencies overall business objectives. There is widespread recognition that technology in itself does not bring about efficiency (Lenk 2007).

According to Johnson (2001) IT may provide the core mechanism for information flow and may therefore be an essential element in any business improvement but the processes undertaken by an organization need to be transformed or reengineered. This process change is the means by which departments and agencies respond to and anticipate changes in their environments. It is also an opportunity to bring in new ways of working that will deliver business objectives in a more efficient and effective way. Such transformation of processes is commonly known as Business Process Reengineering (BPR). It can be defined as the fundamental rethinking and radical design of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance such as cost quality service and speed. (Hammer and Champy 2003) Reengineering involves revising organizational processes. It means starting from scratch in designing the core business process instead of analysing the current one. It involves reconfiguration of work to better serve customers, the true evaluators of business performance. Reengineering forces us to radically challenge the way that organizations are run and to redesign the organizations around the desired outcomes rather than functions or departments. Traditionally, work improvement programmes look at functional areas such as marketing, accounting or manufacturing. BPR considers processes in their entirety and cuts across ...