Do CIO IT Budgets Explain Bigger or Smaller Governments? Theory and Evidence from U.S. State Governments

Abstract

G iven the recent concern on "big governments" and rising budget deficits in the United States and European nations, there has been a fundamental economic debate on the proper boundary and role of governments in a society. Inspired by this debate, we study the relationship between information technology (IT) and government size. Drawing on a broad range of the literature from multiple disciplines such as information systems, industrial organization, and political sciences, we present several theoretical mechanisms that explain the impact of IT on government expenditures. Using a variety of data on IT spending and state government expenditures, we find that greater IT investments made by a state chief information officer (CIO) are associated with lower state government spending. It is estimated that on average, a $1 increase in state CIO budgets is associated with a reduction of as much as $3.49 in state overall expenditures. This study contributes to the literature by identifying a key technological factor that affects government spending and showing that IT investments can be a means to restrain government growth.

Mitigating Traffic Congestion: The Role of Intelligent Transportation Systems

“…In the recent development of IT capabilities, coordination capabilities stress the role of IT to co-create relational value within a firm (Bharadwaj et al 2007) or within a value chain (Rai et al 2012), while reconfiguration (dynamic or improvisational) capabilities stress the ability of IT to pro-actively or spontaneously, respectively, reconfigure existing resources to build operational capabilities in response to turbulent environments (Pavlou and El Sawy 2010). Beyond the private sector, a burgeoning literature has begun to theorize IT value in the public sector (e.g., Pang et al 2014aPang et al , 2016. This literature argues that IT resources can be used to create societal value by developing public-sector IT capabilities.…”

“…25 Following extant organizational studies (e.g., Brynjolfsson and Hitt 2003), we use the amount of monetary investments in 511 Systems with federal aids to measure the degree and sophistication of ITS implementation. This is because additional funding is likely to allow states to develop more advanced ITS (e.g., Pang et al 2016). We retrieve funding data for 511 Systems from the Federal Aid Archive and matched them to our main dataset.…”

Current and Expected Roles and Capabilities of CIOs for the Innovation and Adoption of New Technology

“…The last important capabilities were considered as developing talent, balancing exploitation and innovation and managing the portfolio budget, value or risk. This is surprising as traditional CIOs often have limited IT knowledge and have a financial background and often focus on managing finance, keeping within budget, allocating money to projects and so on [18].…”

Modeling IT Value based on Meta-Analysis

“…Technology Resource IT Investment IT Investment [32], [34], [9], [44], [30], [31], [53] IT Budget [30], [6], [37], [50], [70] IT Spending [72] IT Infrastructure IT Infrastructure [39], [40], [51], [67], [73], [7] IT Vendor Support [35], [46], [67] IT Assets IT/Relationship Assets [78], [7], [45], [77], [35], [51], [73] IT Use [43], [65], [46], [79] IT Strategic [32], [67], [7] IT Alignment / Relatedness [48], [67], [74] IT Readiness / Commitment [35], [51] IT Planning and Management [40], [53], [44], [39], [48] Software, System Application [27], [40],…”