In recent years, there has been growing concern in the UK that local services aimed at risky or vulnerable people are ineffective, because of persistent failure to share information about their clients. Despite considerable national policy effort to encourage better information-sharing, previous research indicates that there are many cases where information is still not shared when it should be, or where it is shared when it should not be, with potentially devastating results. This article uses data from the largest empirical study of local information-sharing yet undertaken to examine four policysectors where multi-agency working has come to the fore. It shows variations in their information-sharing and confidentiality practices can be explained by neo-Durkheimian institutional theory and uses insights from this theory to argue that current policy tools, emphasising formal regulation, are unlikely to lead to consistent and acceptable outcomes, not least because of unresolved conflicts in values and aims.
A major thrust in public service computing in the late 1990s is the building of electronic bridges between the large‐scale computer systems which have been embedded into the complex bureaucratic structures of late twentieth‐century government. This process includes the development of electronic links between government functions, across departmental boundaries and, even, across tiers of government. Increasingly, it also involves electronic data exchange with customers and suppliers. Contextualizes these changes in the managerialist agendas of contemporary government, and explores the significance of informational politics in institutional and managerial change, by examining a particularly ambitious and sensitive case, the co‐ordination of computerization in the criminal justice system. In this way, it contributes to the critique of technicist accounts of technology‐induced change, by proposing and developing a theoretical perspective on the interaction of technology, information and institutional dynamics in the “information polity”.
The tension between the goals of integrated, seamless public services, requiring more extensive data sharing, and of privacy protection, now represents a major challenge for UK policy-makers, regulators and service managers. In Part I of this article (see Public Administration volume 83, number 1, pp. 111-33), we showed that attempts to manage this tension are being made at two levels. First, a settlement is being attempted at the level of general data protection law and the rules that govern datasharing practices across the public sector. We refer to this as the horizontal dimension of the governance of data sharing and privacy. Secondly, settlements are also being attempted within particular fields of public policy and service delivery; this we refer to as the vertical dimension.In this second part, we enquire whether risks to privacy are greater in some policy sectors than others. We do this, first by showing how the Labour Government's policy agenda is producing stronger imperatives towards data sharing than was the case under previous administrations in three fields of public policy and services, and by examining the safeguards introduced in these fields. We then compare the settlements emerging from differing practices within each of these policy sectors, before briefly assessing which, if any, principles of data protection seem to be most at risk and in which policy contexts. Four strategies for the governance of data sharing and privacy are recapitulated -namely, seeking to make the two commitments consistent or even mutually reinforcing; mitigating the tensions with safeguards such as detailed guidelines; allowing privacy to take precedence over integration; and allowing data sharing to take precedence over privacy. We argue that the UK government has increasingly sought to pursue the second strategy and that the vertical dimension is, in practice, much more important in defining the settlement between data sharing and privacy than is the horizontal dimension. This strategy is, however, potentially unstable and may not be sustainable. The conclusion proposes a radical recasting of the way in which the idea of a 'balance' between privacy and datasharing imperatives is conceived.
IntroductionThe contemporary academic agenda of public administration has been both shaped and sustained by a new approach to administration captured conceptually by the term 'new public management' (NPM). However, whilst new public management has come to provide the dominant agenda -an emergent paradigm for public administration -a second academic theme has developed, largely outside the UK, around the concept of 'informatisation' in public services organisation (Frissen and Snellen, 1990). The term 'informatisation' is used in the recognition that public services organisations -and thus the administrative apparatus of the state -are becoming strategically and centrally dependent upon the changing flows of informational resources which are made possible by powerful combinations of information and communications technologies. As with NPM 'informatisation' leads to insights about organisational development, about new bureaucratic forms, about new styles and techniques of management, about new relationships with customers and new conceptions of performance. But, whereas the point of departure for NPM is 'management', the point of departure for informatisation is 'information' and its communication. Thus we can begin to perceive the juxtaposition of competing emergent paradigms in what Kuhn would have called our 'immature science' of public administration.In the UK to date informatisation has received scant treatment in the study of public administration. It has been bedevilled by an implicit assumption that it is a narrow, technical field, entirely contiguous with information and communication technology (ICT).Technological innovation, however, is not the core focus of informatisation, nor should it be. Whilst ICTs provide a platform upon which processes in public administration occur, it is the qualitative changes in the way information is captured, managed, conveyed and applied which provide the student of public administration with his or her meat and drink. To borrow from Stigler's seminal
This Green Paper marks the beginning of a new phase of . . . radical and wide-ranging reform. It will be founded on the new possibilities offered by information technology . . . It will change fundamentally and for the better the way that government provides services to citizens and businesses. (Foreword by the Minister for Public Service to the Green Paper, government.direct, November 1996) The e-government strategy is a fundamental element in our Modernising Government programme. It identifies a common framework and direction for change across the public sector. (Foreword by the Minister of State, Cabinet Office, to E-government: A Strategic Framework for Public Services in the Information Age, April 2000)In the UK, as elsewhere, the development of new, technologically-enabled ways of managing and communicating information is coming to the fore in relation to government reform. As these quotations from recent policy documents illustrate well, the shift to information-age government is seen as a key element in the British Government's modernization strategy. Thus far, however, the rhetoric of information-age government has outstripped its achievements and governments still have a long way to go in fulfilling the radical promises made for the transformatory powers of information and communications technologies (icts). It remains the case that governments make heaviest use of computers as production technology, for automating data-processing in the back offices of public administration. Much less use has so far been made of icts as informating technology, for example for marshalling new kinds of information for policy-makers or for establishing new, more interactive and flexible ways of communicating with service users and citizens. At the end of the 20th century, the reality of British Government, for example, was that most data were still being captured from members of the public on paper forms. Few departments had systematic arrangements for doing business with the public over the telephone, still less for conducting transactions over the internet (Bellamy and Taylor, 1998a; National Audit Office, 1999). Huge quantities of data flowed into government, but most of these data were locked into stand-alone mainframe processing systems with restricted inter-operability. The result is that inflexible information management is widely
The creation of the new Social Security Benefits Agency in 1991 coincided with the final installation in local offices of the first Operational Strategy computer systems, which automated large parts of social security benefits administration. Since then the agency has refocused its strategic thinking towards a ten‐year development programme which is centred around plans for‘one‐stop’benefits delivery. The article shows why this programme is dependent on‘informatization’‐ the generation from, and application to, social security administration of new kinds of information, made possible by information and communications technologies (icts). It assesses the feasibility and implications of informatizing benefits administration and the likely effects of continuing pressures to reduce administrative costs. It argues that, whilst the agency will become more customer focused, the practical outcomes are likely to be two‐edged for claimants. At a policy level, informatization will reinforce political pressures to rationalize and target the benefits system, especially if information‐management problems are controlled by a shift to the client group principle.
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