Assignment

Assignment

Summary

One of the major successes of the European INSPIRE legislation has been to translate custom and practice in the disparate European states into a common set of geographical objectives and a common list of data sets. However, since the legislation was passed, a global economic crisis has broken across the world and is placing public spending under unprecedented pressure. Governments are re-examining every part of their expenditure and reviewing the need for each and every government agency. Anything that can be privatised may be privatised. (Barr 2009)

Analysis

The problem with such a bottom-up examination of government activity is that it concentrates on each agency or activity in turn while losing sight of the question that needs to be asked which is “What must government do, (Byrne, Collins 2004) and why?” The answer changes over time, perhaps as a result of technological change; or through economic, political and social developments. Performing the functions of government, cost effectively and securely, is more important than the well-being or even survival of agencies currently carrying out the tasks.

David Osborne and Ted Gaebler

The need for change is the dominant theme in both the new public administration and in the reinventing government movement. Because both movements were in some sense revolutionary, it is axiomatic that the adherents to the movements were disappointed with the status quo and called for change. In some respects, members of the two movements were disappointed with the same things and were (are) seeking the same changes. (Masser 2005)

The new public administration developed a comparatively sophisticated concept of change, in part because change was the gear driving the other gears of the argument. The concept of change and other concepts were set out in three-column tables with the headings "From," "Transition," and "To." The new public administration attempted to describe the then-current state of affairs under "From"; the desired objective under "To," and the transition between the two. (Masser 1998) These three-column tables were applied to many concepts of public administration, such as rationality, organization structure, management, and so forth.

Obviously, the new public administration conception of change was rather process oriented, involving changeable or malleable organizational forms, developing criteria by which to judge effectiveness, institutionalizing change processes, emphasizing decrements as much as increments, and identifying change facilitation as the primary responsibility of leadership. The new public administration also was skeptical about technology as a solution to organizational or policy problems; indeed, it was argued that technology was more often the cause of government problems than the solution. (Osborne, Gaebler 1992) One set of agencies which have come under particular pressure in this environment are the National Mapping Agencies. The opening of Global Positioning Satellites to civilian use and the development of globally linked databases on the World Wide Web, accessible to citizens at effectively zero cost, has changed the way people use Geographical Information so fast that generally conservative institutions like National Mapping Agencies have been unable to keep pace.

The Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) system is taken for granted ...