On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall near the Louisiana-Mississippi border. Despite early warnings, Katrina was the most destructive hurricane ever to hit the United States, with 1,250 casualties and damages estimated at $125 billion. The Congressional Bipartisan Select Committee appointed to investigate the preparation and response to Katrina was troubled by the lack of information sharing among federal and state agencies in the aftermath of the hurricane. Agencies were found to have made duplicative plans to evacuate the Superdome (where thousands of survivors found temporary shelter), resulting in a 24-hr delay to the evacuation. Likewise, agencies directed survivors to hospitals that were already overcrowded with patients sent by other agencies. Desperate survivors could not find comprehensive information regarding when, how, and to whom emergency supplies were being delivered. Life-sustaining generators were housed in lower floors susceptible to flooding because emergency plans containing instructions for their
Argues that leaders with extensive backgrounds in organizational politics are more likely than technology‐focused leaders to complete their information technology projects successfully. Describes how successful technological leaders in the public sector manage their projects, mainly upwards and outwards, and tailor their technical visions to the day‐to‐day reality of their organizations. Compares the evolution and fate of two information technology projects, one managed by a technology‐oriented scientist (success) and the other by a politics‐driven bureaucrat (failure). Proposes that senior decision makers can hone the political skills of their technological leaders by training them on the “soft” skills of management and helping them balance the skill sets of their teams. Suggests how to change current incentive systems in order to encourage technological leaders to politick their projects to success.
Web-based learning environments are popular on campus nowadays. These software packages improve communication between instructor and students, enable students to take charge over their learning processes, and provide feedback data to the instructor. Universities and colleges are called to foot the bill for these computerized tools by training teachers and students on how to use them, adding new computer classrooms, and upgrading the network backbone. Few, if any, of these academic institutions systematically collect and analyze data in order to assess if their investments in this new approach are paying off. How can academic institutions collect and analyze data in order to determine the effectiveness of the new computer mediated distance learning approach? This is the key question addressed in this article.
The rapidly growing governmental IT outsourcing trend raises different questions: Who, inside bureaucracy, governs computer systems after outsourcing? Which actors gain or lose political clout when the govern ment begins to aggressively outsource its IT operations? How does IT outsourcing change the relationships among bureaucrats, consultants, and vendors? The article highlights the Increasingly important and behind-the-scenes role the consultant plays as an intermediary between the MIS bureaucrat and technological vendors. IT consultants exert an enormous amount of political power because they are the "glue" binding together all the actors Involved In producing and maintaining public information technology. Regrettably, this new consultant-centered envi ronment is responsible for the degradation of the organizational and technological skills of MIS bureaucrats and also impairs the feedback information flow between bureaucrats and vendors regarding the status of public computer projects. Therefore, the article suggests that the unchecked power of IT consultants hinders the ability of bureaucrats to be accountable for the systems they manage.N umerous corporations and governments followed Kodaks 1989 landmark decision to outsource its IT operations. 1 For example, the British Benefits Agency out sourced OpStart, its massive social welfare computerization project that was hailed at the end of the 1980s as the largest computer project in Europe. Britain also outsourced the buildup of the new Inland Internal Revenue Service computer system. 2 Likewise, New Zealand outsourced the construction of its new Air Traffic Control system, Chicago City Hall outsourced the computerization of its parking violations fee collection system, and Singapore outsourced the automation of its border crossing checkpoints system. Today, organi zations spend about 9% of their IT dollars via outsourcing channels and will outsource even more of their IT operations in the next several years. 3
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