Governance and information: myths, realities and the future.

• Author: Graham, Garth

Surrounded by the information economy, the information age, information highways, chief information officers, information management, and even the magazine Information Week, legislators, managers and citizens can be forgiven if they believe better information is a focus of contemporary management theory and practice. But behind the "informania" most likely lies an appetite for technology and any plausible excuse to buy it, play with it and discard it in favour of the next software upgrades. In today's culture, the technology tail wags the strategy and governance dog.

The Management Myth

The idea that government's information is managed is largely a myth. Information management is the application of management processes (such as leading, planning and evaluating) that inform. An irony of the "information age" we have been in for the past 20 years is the laissez-faire attitude to the management of information. For more than a hundred years, government bureaucracies have essentially been information producing, distributing and consuming organisms -- Peter Drucker and others have pointed out that information and knowledge are now the coin of the realm. Nevertheless, government's attention to matters informational is fixed on the technology, while the information, ostensibly the rationale for all the effort, remains untended, unmanaged and a non-issue for most bureaucrats.

Albert Einstein once said: "A fish will be the last to discover water." Bureaucrats and legislators may likewise be the last to discover information. Lack of attention to the value of information in governance may be a cultural or perceptual bias, but in any case information is not yet recognized as a resource by government bureaucracies, and it is not managed. Nor is organizational knowing and informing recognized as an objective.

In this "information age," even the technology is badly managed. Echoing findings of the US General Accounting Office, Charles Wang describes in his book, Techno Vision, (1) the misuse and abuse of technology in corporate America as "a screw-up of tragic proportions." About one-third of the total investment in hardware, software and training over the past decade has been wasted. Total cost: $1 trillion. Are governments apt to be smarter than corporations?

The real world of information management

Ursula Franklin's insightful 1989 Massey Lectures, The Real World of Technology, (2) aptly frame the real world of information management. At the levels of theory and popular perception, all appears well. But it is not. Never mind technocrats extolling the new promise of information technology, this is the reality of information management in the Canadian federal government:

* "Information management", in common conversation and trade magazines, means installing and "doing" technology, not managing either technology or information.

* Information is formally recognized as a resource by Canadian federal government administrative policy, yet resource management principles for information are not set out or understood, much less applied.

* The federal government does not have a business process model to guide its managers on how to manage informing processes and information resources (or even to help them define what information resources are in operational, pragmatic terms).

* Total government costs for acquiring, creating, packaging, formatting, storing, managing, disseminating, accessing and using information are not reported to Parliament. The Public Accounts of Canada, the basic information source for Parliament's financial oversight function, identifies as the universe of "information costs" only costs of publishing, printing, advertising and exposition services. Missing, for example, are the costs of: information required for financial control and public reporting; personnel and material services; scientific, economic and demographic information services; translation services; collection of tax data; and public relations information among others.

* Departmental managers are not accountable for expenditures on information-related effort funded by taxpayers, because no one knows what and where the information costs are or who is accountable. Yet US studies (3) have indicated that at least 40 percent of the operational costs of government are for information (suggesting about $10 billion annually for the Canadian federal government).

* Treasury Board Secretariat's highly touted Blueprint for Renewing Government Services Using Information Technology (4) takes a technocentric approach and is silent on 1) the views of the customers to be served, 2) the management of services, and 3) the social dimensions of service renewal. The value of information is blurred or overlooked, yet service operations are expected to provide citizens with useful information about how the service works, not just technology.

* The Office of the Auditor General of Canada has not yet undertaken rigorous value for money audits of information management. Parliament is thus not encouraged to exact what it has a right to receive: government's performance reporting on its information management responsibilities.

Fortunately, while the overall landscape of information management in government is dismal, there are encouraging signs. In the mid-nineties, finally, we are witnessing new and growing appreciation and acknowledgment of information's strategic value in both government and private sector North America. Innovative approaches, new concepts and fresh strategies for coming to grips with the management and use of information and its role in organizational learning are being developed. Legislators can support these initiatives.

From the mid-19th century to about 1960, what we now call information management amounted to physical paperwork and records management. Through the sixties and seventies, management's attention turned to emerging and rapidly changing information technologies and technical attributes, mostly dealt with by middle managers. Technical efficiency was the main objective. From the mid-seventies to the early nineties, the...