Learning Organizations in the Public Sector? A Study of Police Agencies Employing Information and Technology to Advance Knowledge

Abstract

In an attempt to reap the purported benefits that "knowledge workers" bring to organizations, many police departments have shifted to a community problem-oriented policing philosophy. Rather than focusing on enforcement and incarceration, this philosophy is based on the dissemination of information to promote a proactive, preventative approach to reduce crime and disorder. In keeping with much of the contemporary literature on the "learning organization" (sometimes called the "knowledge organization"), police departments hope to deter crime through the knowledge benefits that derive from information and its associated technologies. With goals to stimulate productivity, performance, and effectiveness, police departments across the country are employing information technology to turn police officers into problem solvers and to leverage their intellectual capital to preempt crime and neighborhood deterioration.Many public and private organizations are striving to change their operations toward this same concept of the knowledge worker. Information technology is often touted as a vehicle for capturing, tracking, sorting, and providing information to advance knowledge, thus leading to improvements in service-delivery efforts. Based on an extensive study of police departments that have attempted to implement a knowledge-worker paradigm (supported by information technology initiatives), this research explores the feasibility, effectiveness, and limitations of information and technology in promoting the learning organization in the public sector.Mary Maureen Brown is an associate professor of public administration in the School of Government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she serves as the codirector of the Center for Public Technology. Her teaching and research interests concentrate on the use of information based technologies for reengineering operations to improve service delivery throughout all levels of government. Her service activities focus on the design, development, and implementation of advanced technologies to enhance organizational operations.Great attention has been given to the explosion of information technology that occurred during the last two decades of the twentieth century. In that short period, annual expenditures for information and technology grew to $600 billion in the United States and $2 trillion globally (G2 Research 1998; WITSA 1998-not found in references). With the information revolution came the resurrection of an age-old debate regarding the role of information in organizational decision making. The debate centers on how administrators employ information in decision making and problem solving. Some authorities advocate the use of information as a "signaling component" for feeding the decision process. In this approach, information is employed as a stabilizing or adaptive mechanism to gain leverage or control over a turbulent environment. These scholars assume a normative view of the "rational man." Others counter that information often is employed in a

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