Avances en gobierno electrónico: la conexión entre práctica, conocimiento e investigación.
| Autor | Dawes, Sharon S. |
| Cargo | Artículo en inglés - Ensayo |
Advancing Digital Government The Research-Practice-Knowledge Connection
INTRODUCTION
In October 1998, in the early days of the US National Science Foundation Digital Government Research Program, an agenda-setting workshop helped formulate the program's fundamental research directions. The workshop included computer scientists, social scientists, and national, state, and local government officials in open discussions to share, compare, and synthesize the views and ideas of all three communities. One of the most important results of the workshop was a "wish list" of needs created by the government participants that became a research agenda for the academics (Dawes et al., 1999):
* Interoperable systems that are trusted and secure, considering not only their potential but also their technological, organizational, and political limits.
* Models for electronic public service transactions and delivery systems including new methods of authentication, record keeping, security and access, as well as ways to measure costs and benefits.
* Better methods of information technology (it) management to ensure more efficient, flexible, and affordable systems, effective design processes, project and contract management, leadership models, and strategies for managing and supporting the it workforce.
* Methods and measures of citizen participation including questions about the nature of citizenship, the role of political leadership, and the limits of change in democratic institutions.
* Models for public-private partnerships and other networked organizational forms to account for the legal, economic, ethical, political, and technological dimensions of shared responsibility and accountability.
* Intuitive decision support tools for public officials that emphasize information search, selection, analysis, and sharing, and that include meaningful public participation.
* Archiving and electronic records management frameworks and tools to address record definition and content, version control, public access, ongoing preservation, and the ability of government to maintain history and accountability.
* Matching research resources to government needs by overcoming the mismatched expectations and time frames of government practitioners and academic researchers to help produce readily usable knowledge.
Fifteen years later, this list is still germane. This is not to say that no progress has been made, but rather to acknowledge that the domain of digital government in both practical and academic terms is still young and highly dynamic. The needs and problems expressed in 1998 remain salient today but their form and substance have changed with their technological, organizational, and political contexts. For instance, the trust and security challenges of 1998 were forever altered after September 11, 2001. The interest expressed in public participation remains strong, but today, thanks to the emergence of social media, the means and possibilities for public participation are dramatically different--and largely out of the hands of government. At the turn of the 21st century, we were beginning to make real progress on managing and preserving electronic records, but we did not anticipate that by 2008 literally billions of records would need to be preserved.
Not only have these fundamental digital government problems changed in nature, size, and scope, but traditional information and communications technology (ICT) challenges persist. The failure rate of investments in ICRS to meet governmental needs remains high and consumes both resources and credibility. In the US, for example, the seemingly never-ending reform of the back office systems of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the decade-long effort to build a new air traffic control system for the Federal Aviation Administration have been costly continuing targets for scrutiny and criticism by overseers and public watchdogs. Even today, open government and open data initiatives still rely heavily on finding different ways to use ICRS and less on ways to create new forms of public value.
These difficulties illustrate the two main categories of risk for ICT-enabled innovation and change in government and governance. First is a strong general tendency to believe that technology can solve problems that are not technological, ironically coupled with weak appreciation for the possible ways that technology truly can improve the way we live, learn, and work. Consequently, technology advocates and administrators responsible for government performance too often apply technological solutions to problems that demand policy, organizational, or institutional attention. This technology-first path frequently leads to undesirable results: sunk investments (sometimes huge ones) in the wrong tools or in tools that do not work well, do not meet real needs, actually make things worse, damage credibility, and reduce rather than add public value.
The second category of risk is even more threatening. It comprises social, political, and organizational factors that include failure to understand context, reliance on untested assumptions about what is needed and by whom, a tendency to ignore variation and diversity in the implementation environment, inadequate or inappropriate communication among stakeholders, and lack of trust in the capability or intentions of other actors. The public sector environment itself embodies principles and practices that work against unified, predictable progress from point A to point B: divided authority over decisions and resources, the need to consider and consult multiple stakeholders with different and often conflicting views, institutional constraints on power that are meant to prevent corruption but can also produce gridlock and add time and cost to most public processes. Organizational factors such as the need for coordination across program or organizational boundaries, inadequate capabilities or skills, insufficient or unpredictable funding, and stove-piped legal authority and funding streams all come into play. Finally, interdependencies among government programs and business processes contribute their own complexities to the "tangled problems" that make it so difficult to produce public value in the form of uniformly good schools, access to high quality health care, understandable and effective regulatory processes, or a healthy environment (Dawes, Cresswell, and Pardo, 2009).
Information-intensive and process-intensive public problems demand multi-faceted understanding and a fair amount of trial and error. They are good candidates for innovation, experimentation, learning, and adjustment that cut across domains of knowledge and action. However the unwillingness of the political system to tolerate failure can make these usual routes to innovation impossible (Kelman, 1998). A different approach is needed that mitigates the risks without preventing learning and creativity.
DIGITAL GOVERNMENT: AN OPPORTUNITY FOR CROSS-FERTILIZATION
The field of digital government encompasses--in fact, requires--both research and practice. (1) However, as in other professional fields such as public administration, information systems, and organizational management, a kind of culture gap exists between the practitioners who work toward tangible outcomes in the noisy and immediate practice environment and the academics whose methods call for precision and control in order to produce scientifically acceptable results. In digital government, these two ways of approaching the world could clearly benefit from more interaction and mutual understanding. However, the culture gap creates differences and conflicts that keep the two communities working in parallel instead of in concert (Bolton and Stolcis, 2003).
Ospina and Dodge (2005) characterize these communities as separate, but interdependent social systems that have different expectations and incompatible problem-solving and presentation styles. Interactions between the two systems are often unsatisfactory to both, giving rise to stereotypes that make further interaction unlikely. According to the stereotypes, academics see practitioners as subjective and too concerned with control. They regard them as subjects of research and eventual consumers of research-generated knowledge. They see themselves as objective, neutral, and true to rigorous methods, and therefore able to produce superior knowledge (Coplin, Merget and Bourdeaux, 2002). On the other hand, for practitioners stereotypical researchers are disconnected from the real world. Their work may meet high academic standards but it tends to be abstract, narrowly focused, and mainly addressed to other academics. Practitioners see themselves as immersed in a complex daily reality, focused on results, and publicly accountable for what they do and do not achieve (Streib, Slotkin, and Rivera, 2001).
The sterotypes contain seeds of truth but they mask more complicated realities. Government professionals are immersed in complex dynamic environments that are open to influence and resistant to control. They deal simultaneously with multiple demands, but tend to give sharpest attention to the problems that need immediate action. Because they and their organizations are bound by detailed legal prescriptions and subject to intense public oversight, they work in an atmosphere that rewards traditional approaches and risk avoidance. They view public administration as a profession with an attendant set of skills, competencies, and responsibilities. Their work is generally organized into separately funded service, administrative, or regulatory programs that each use specialized vocabularies and demand specialized skills and knowledge. When government professionals confront problems or unknowns, they favor timely practical advice to guide action, often relying on the products already on the market and on readily available private sector consultants.
By contrast, researchers are trying to push the...
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