Public management is also an obvious area that can be supported by information technology. Following is a preliminary list of public management IT issues:

• Hiring, training, and maintaining a skilled IT workforce
• Financing IT
• Outsourcing or privatization of government information resource management functions
• Telecommuting

One of the issues that appears to be of critical importance to government practitioners is hiring, training, and maintaining a skilled IT workforce. CIO featured an article on finding the right people for Federal government CIO positions. A recent CTG project on state-local information systems highlighted this issue as well.

Another critical issue that governments are facing with respect to IT focuses on mechanisms for funding IT projects. CIO featured an article on shifting to an investment-oriented way of thinking about government IT spending. The Strategic Computing and Telecommunications in the Public Sector program at the Kennedy School of Government conducted a workshop on Overcoming Budget Barriers: Funding Information Technology Projects in the Public Sector that sought to identify the barriers to government IT funding and possible solutions for addressing these barriers.

Other public management IT issues are focused on using IT to support internal agency operations. For example, reengineering was a topic on the agenda for the American Public Welfare Association Information Systems Management 1997 Conference. A proposal to CTG from the New York State Office of the Comptroller sought to develop a Computer-Assisted Travel Audit Software and focused on reengineering and automating the travel audit process. Related to issues of reengineering are those associated with the use of IT to more effectively deliver services to citizens, a topic at the 1997 NASIRE conference.

While not necessarily discussed in the context of IT issues around performance measurement and activity-based costing were on the agendas of International City/County Management Association and the National Association of State Auditors, Comptrollers, and Treasurers respectively. These types of issues have implicit information management components in that information will have to be defined, collected, and used in different ways in order to more effectively evaluate program performance or more directly tie the costs of operations to the activities that support them. A proposal to CTG from the Tompkins County Department of Public Works in New York State is also related to evaluating public perception of the performance of government services. This proposal sought to investigate the use of kiosks to support computerized customer service surveys of government services.

The 1997 Conference of National Association of State Information Resource Executives (NASIRE) was highly focused on the management and dissemination of public information. Topics at the conference included public stewardship - managing the people’s information, international perspectives on public stewardship, the role of government in public stewardship, and public information and dissemination (including issues of access and ethics). Another issue of interest addressed at the Annual Conference is privatization or outsourcing of government information resource management functions.

Telecommuting is an important issue of emerging importance for government practitioners. As the technology to facilitate telecommuting becomes more widely available and commonplace, more and more government employees may be working from home or other remote locations, at least part of the time. This option may require that policies and procedures be in place to support telecommuting and may also require that different mechanisms for performance evaluation be developed. A proposal to CTG from the New York State Energy Office sought to evaluate the potential for Telecommuting at that agency as well as several others.