by Maria Christina Binz-Scharf
Co-authored with David Lazer
The information government paradigm focuses on how information flows through government. Many of the chapters in this... more
The information government paradigm focuses on how information flows through government. Many of the chapters in this volume concentrate on the potential impact of technology on information flows. This chapter’s focus is the converse, asking what the impact of information flows on the use of information technology in government is. The role of the institutions, informal networks, and other mechanisms of information diffusion are critical to understanding how information and communication technology (ICT) is integrated into government because ICT creates a novel malleability to information flows, which poses substantial challenges to government managers. Novelty by its nature poses risks to any manager for two reasons: first, there is the possibility of unanticipated consequences, and, second, there are costs involved in trying to minimize what is unanticipated. One critical mechanism that individuals use to manage novelty is to learn from others’ experiences. People learn from each other by multiple mechanisms—through personal networks, from organizations, through news media. Within the organization, such a learning network generally includes peers and individuals involved in the relevant processes. In addition, organizations rely heavily on others’ experiences. Intergovernmental organizations are especially important in bridging distant parts of a diffuse policy community, as well in aggregating information by offering their take on what constitutes good practice. In short, it takes a (human) network to process the information involved in building a (transformational ICT) network. Drawing on interview data we collected from e-government projects (see Binz-Scharf 2003; Binz-Scharf and Lazer 2007), we begin by examining the collective (human) information processing challenges that the development of e-government presents to organizations. The implementation of e-government involves, in significant part, a search—for information, solutions, opportunities. Because e-government is a global phenomenon, many individuals are simultaneously engaged in parallel searches to deal with similar issues. How those individuals are connected must have a major impact on the course of development of e-government globally. In this chapter, we begin with a discussion of the challenges of managing novelty. We then turn to the diffusion of information literature to examine how the structure of a network might affect the performance of the system. We break this down into two subsidiary questions: (1) How does the network affect the diffusion of information? (2) How does the system sustain the creation of new information? We then examine the roles of different intra- and interorganizational networks in the e-government arena.
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