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Exploring the stovepipe culture While some researchers explore more traditional nuts-and-bolts methods for improving and streamlining the way information technology serves Americans, a growing subfield of DG scientists is focusing studies on the very nature and evolution of electronically-enhanced governance. Researchers at the Harvard-based National Center for Digital Government are probing for answers to some of the deepest questions dogging government IT workers: How should agencies cooperate in the digital age? How is IT changing policy - and the act of policymaking itself? What are the risks and benefits of internet-based governance? Launched in June, 2002 with a $1.5-million NSF Digital Government grant, the center's components include competitively awarded pre-doctoral fellowships to heolp build the nation's next generation of DG scholars, other support for graduate students, seminars, workshops, and other forms of outreach and community building. Its policy scientists have already begun street-level research at the center (full name: The National Center for Digital Government: Integrating Information and Institutions) with projects such as these:
"It's a great historical period for us to be able to carry out this research," says Jane E. Fountain, the center's principal investigator and director, and an associate professor of public policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
But it must simultaneously fight to overcome an entrenched bureaucratic culture and oversight structure that reinforces the tendency for most federal agencies to operate in stovepipe fashion, as vertically aligned entities that seldom collaborate. In this arena of tremendous potential and challenge, the National Center for Digital Government is working to establish a global research community to study - and ultimately help - the electronic evolution of America's governments as well as governments abroad, according to Fountain. "The general objective of the center is to create an intellectual space for people interested in studying the potential transformational effects of technology and government," says David Lazer, the center's associate director and an assistant professor of public policy at the Kennedy School. "Just because technology has a transformational opportunity doesn't mean it will occur," he says. "One has to study the nexus between the two to determine what's desirable. If one looks at the Web pages of members of Congress, they rarely offer any information ... or explanations ... regarding the votes of the member. The reason why is that offices are afraid of people doing opposition research for a future opponent, and that would just make it easier (for the other side)." Fountain's research will follow the two-dozen Bush initiatives as they progress: "We're not only examining these projects and how they are unfolding, but also need to analyze developments in the institutional context - that is, oversight, budgetary and legislative structures, and how they are changing as well," she says. "All of that together adds up to what political scientists call political development - change in the structure of the nation-state and in the policymaking processes used by career public managers." Meanwhile, center researcher Cary Coglianese is preparing a report on a DG-funded workshop on e-rulemaking that took place in January, 2003. The workshop was convened to develop a research agenda for studying the way IT affects - and effects - government policy. "The whole rulemaking process itself is rich in rules that government agencies must follow about who they speak to, when they get public comment and who they can ask information from," says Coglianese, an associate professor of public policy at the Kennedy School. "All of that is a highly entrenched bureaucratic process, and it's also one in which you've had people working on it for decades, and you really have to think about a cultural change - about reorganizing the business of regulating." For example: Hundreds of federal agencies enact nearly 4,000 rules every year. Yet only 16 of the organizations even allow people to comment by e-mail - and only four of those have fully digitized their docketing systems on the Web for use by citizens, says Coglianese. "For years, these dockets - which contained not only public comments but supporting studies - traditionally were file cabinets," he says. Coglianese says that the report on the e-rulemaking workshop, due out in Spring, 2003, might include recommendations such as these:
Another National Center for Digital Government workshop is gearing up to study how government agencies use identity and identifiers in presenting and protecting publicly acquired data: The Virtual Citizen: Identity, Autonomy, and Accountability: A Civic Scenario Exploration of the Role of Identity in On-Line Governance. "You can't get much information on these initiatives on the Web. We need to go dig it out of official and unofficial documents, white papers and reports to OMB and the Hill ... It's all government data, but while some of them are easily accessed, others are not easily available. Just putting together an accurate, detailed description of the ways in which public servants are using information and communication technologies will be quite valuable." The far-reaching potential of new e-government initiatives make this an especially important and fascinating time to be engaged in digital government policy research, says Fountain: "What we're seeing right now are not changes in the location of organizational boxes. The structural changes are deeper, in the business processes of the agencies," she says. "It's a pretty dramatic restructuring." |
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