Dismantling the silos: extracting new value from IT investments in public administration

The drive for information technology‐led organizational and operational change in public administration has lagged behind that in the private sector. For good reasons, central public administrations are conservative by nature. Most public administrations are bureaucracies and bureaucracies tend to resist change. Nevertheless the pressure to obtain better value from public administration information technology investments is growing and the debate as to how to achieve this is increasingly important. Part of this debate is concerned with how best to confront the formidable and specific challenges faced by the sector. These include cultural, structural, resource and technical problems as well as a legacy of isolated developments which do not interrelate. The difficulties are compounded by the problems of evaluation generally in public administration – problems which are reflected in the evaluation of public sector information systems. This drive for change is reviewed and discussed in the context of the Irish civil service, in which there is a growing awareness of the strategic importance of breaking down specialized vertical systems and providing an integrated service to the citizen. A new approach to the problem, based on adapting the concept of business objects, is suggested.