UAB Can Information Technology Help Improve Trust in Government Discussion

can information technology help improve trust in government and why leadership fails when it comes to Information Technology (IT) issues. Gather your understanding from the theories and readings in this module.

case study on leadership and IT failure

1. What are the Keys to Effective Leadership? (Links to an external site.) (Government Technology, 2014)
2. Technology Fiascoes and the failure of analysis (Links to an external site.) (Governing Magazine, 2013)

End of Surveillance
Lecture 7
Ends and means
 If leaders know what is that we ought to produce that benefits us, it means
the leaders know the end (or focus on a desired result).
 Once the end is known, all we need is the means to reach the end.
 If the end is known then technology becomes the means to that end.
When the end is known technology is used to automate or routinize the
result for the desired end.
 When a leader does not perceive the end to be known, rather thinks it must
be discovered, technology becomes the enabler for discovering ways that
improves human condition
How do we utilize technology to be
informed?
 Gather information to meet the purposeful ends of the society.
 How to manage a project
 How to develop a website
 How to make environment friendly vehicle
When we know what is that we want to produce, we gather information and
build a model/system to figure out how this can be accomplished. Information
is the key to making this plan.
Information technology is the best tool to help us develop this system and
maintain it with periodic updates.
information is primarily used to administer –
organize, process, and monitor – a system
created by society, and technology reinforces
the administration’s capability. The
administrative focus is meant to ask how to
solve a problem.
It does not beg the question why solve it?
Monitoring a system
 People have to maintain the system (such as a database or software
program).
 It will require data gathering, i.e., input (ingredients for the system) in order
to generate output.
 The system is programmed to signal whether the output is acceptable or
not acceptable.
 A whole administrative apparatus (human and periphery machines) is
dependent on the system.
Success and failures
 Systems are created to replicate successes.
 The logic that drive systems often rely on quantifiable input. Variables that
are not quantifiable, like human values, are not considered in the model
when developing systems.
 No one questions a system when it continues to produce what is expected
from it.
 Systems should empower people to interpret new and unknown realities (as
we are ignorant about so many things). This way we can learn from failures
– why some things work and others don’t.
Practice-administration dichotomy
 Administration
 The idea is to develop a formal organizing and monitoring system that will be
neutral and reliable to produce results.
 Bureaucratic authority
 Centralized technological systems (ex. Enterprise architecture, large scale cloudbased systems.
 Practice
 Learning from emerging situations that cannot be built into a system beforehand.
Open systems and open software that connects people socially (Facebook,
Youtube, Vimeo, Twitter, Snapchat)
Administration
 Helps us formalize and organize a given plan or policy.
 Provides control and stability
 Maintains a strict level of hierarchy in terms of authority.
 Maintaining formal codes
 Legal implications if rules are violated.
Practice
 Open system that allows people to take control of what they want to know.
 Practice-based information (contextual) incorporates the unexpected as
well as the expected into the decision model.
 In practice, people are not concerned about measuring or quantifying
objectives.
 Practice helps answer questions about why certain things happen and why
some projects fail.
Practice-administration dichotomy
 The more we routinize behavior, the more we find technology helpful in
automating the routine. Administration becomes efficient but produces the
same results as human cannot intervene into a already live system.
 In order to discover future paths to success, we must learn from practice by
allowing ourselves to question certain routines and enable technology to
help us contextualize unknown realities.
 Information with context is a resource for learning.
Objectifying the goals through measurable
outcomes may well serve the purpose of
maintaining as well as controlling a stable and
functioning democracy but not without cost of
losing trust in government. Technology has only
made it easier to collect and monitor the
information necessary for the functions of a
stable democracy. The dominance of
technology for developing techniques and the
sheer dominance of the internet-based data
gathering should be of concern for any citizens
who care for democratic ideals
How do we end surveillance?
The more we invest in the administrative side of governance
to maintain the status quo, the more we alienate citizens
and lose their trust. In contrast, the more we pay attention to
the informal practice-based governance, the more we bring
citizens closer to the government. The one who wishes to
incorporate practice into administration becomes a walking
theoretician. (p. 182)
PracticeAdministration
Dichotomy
E-DEMOCARCY and Digital
Divide
How to strengthen democracy through electronic means
Akhlaque Haque, PhD
E-Democracy
E-Democracy is a way of broadening political participation by enabling
citizens to connect with one another and their elected public officials
through information and communication technologies (ICT).
The role of ICT and e-democracy
Information
management
(electronic
information to
citizens)
Electronic
bureaucracy
(government
service
delivery)
Civil society
(transforms the
government
citizen
interaction)
Direct
democracy
(direct citizen
input)
ICT can provide better access to individuals who
are well equipped, better educated and politically
organized
• How to combine individual preferences into collective agenda?
• Whose input is more important?
• What if many do not have access to the online government?
Digital divide can be defined in terms of access:
• Dichotomous access: differential access to the internet based on
race, gender, ethnicity, regional terms
• Continuous access: Continuity of access — convenience of access
(school, work etc), speed of access (broadband vs. modem etc); time
of access (discretionary time available); cost of access
• Skilled access: having access based on competencies for use of IT.
Government Policy Towards Digital Divide
• Programs were eliminated in 2003 based on evidence of
disappearance of digital divide. The were added in 2004 but with
one-sixth funding:
• Technology opportunities program (TOP)
• Community Technology Center
• If information is a resource, such resources should be accessible and
equitable to all.
• Building of information capital is a type of social capital needed by nations
seeking to maintain and improve quality of life.
Digital Divide
• Gender – male are inherently bias towards computing (stereotype or
fact?)
• Continuity access, gender gap may be inevitable (until work, home
responsibilities start shifting among male female)
• UCLA study (2004): Gender gap may be cultural. 20% gap in Italy in contrast
to 2% in Taiwan.
• Race – education is directly related to computer accessibility.
• Resources in school districts vary – leading to bias towards white affluent
school districts
• IT sector job are white-male dominated (may deter or discourage IT career
paths within minorities and women)
Digital Divide – contd.
• Government investment to close the gap
•
•
•
•
Education investment in the 80s
Telecommunication Act of 1996 (E-rate telephone tax)
Library Services and Technology Act of 1996
New Millennium Classrooms Act 2000 (tax breaks to corporations to donate
computers)
• 97% of Public Schools have internet access
• Digital Divide by Income
• Three times as many high income households were connected to internet
than the lowest income group (DeGroat, Dteroit study, 2004)
• Digital Divide Among Senior Americans
• Whereas 4 out of 5 12-35 year old are online, 1 out of 3 seniors are online.
• International Digital Divide
• See UPAN Study
Layers of E-Democracy
E-participation
E-civics
E-legislating
E-voting
E-campaigning
E-Activism is the
outermost layer (not
shown)
Approaches to E-democracy
• Technological determinism
• Vehicle of change is through e-activism and e-campaign
• Socio-technical approach
• Build collaboration through e-activism and implement creative participative
system through e-civics and e-participation.
• Systems approach
• Tend to focus primarily through e-civic engagement to create best practices
of e-government.
• Reinforcement approach
• Information tools serve hierarchy in each domain of the e-democracy.
The Middleman Paradox
Literature on e-government often argues that e-democracy is
founded on the idea of streamlining political
communications and altering aspects of political decisionmaking in order to improve the effectiveness and efficiency
of democracy.
However,
The very same politicians who would be responsible for
introducing new forms of citizen participation for political
decision-making are explicitly or implicitly opposing these
reforms
SMP Model of Political Communication
Leadership, Ethics and
Technology
Lecture 5
What we learned so far
 Technology enables
 Human creativity through contextualization of the information from the real world
 Technology constrains
 Human creativity through automation of routine activity
 Black box is a concept that relates to automation where the human action
is reduced to a machine-action that performs the operation. For example,
an alarm clock can be a black box as it automates our action to wake up
from bed in the morning. Can you think of how many black boxes you use
on a daily basis? Black box can be any “thing” that connects to human. A
paper map is also a black box.
Leadership fails..
 When it retreats to routine action
 Increasing dependency on techniques
 Increasing dependency on technology and faith in technological outcome
 When it imposes rules to limit human creativity (see workers as mere
technicians)
Leadership and organization behavior
 Relatively enduring organizations are highly adaptable (less tied to high
end centralized machinery) making them natural communities.
 Investment in human relations increases commitment and productivity
 There is an ongoing struggle between natural informal organization and
formal standardized machinery
 “A closed system of action corresponding to a closed system of logic would
result in instrumental perfection in reality.”
Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933)
 We don’t know the end. Outcome is not given. Therefore..
 Guidance should be by the law of the situation.
 Learning by doing (learn on the job)
 Governance from a distance fails because we are detached from
practices on the ground
Leadership is about building relationships to
understand emerging values
 Technological leadership calls for using relational tools embedded within
emerging information technology tools to interpret reality as opposed to
discovering them from data. Rather than getting involved in observing
reality to predict the future, technology leaders take charge of
informalizing the formality for understanding values that generate new and
emerging situations. (p. 90)
Data mining, caveats…
 Powerful analytic tool to understand reality
 Can be dangerously flawed…
 Data collected for one purpose (school academic record) but used for another
purpose (finding out who may not succeed in life)
 Pressure from government to reduce cost can push public managers to use
public data to identify groups who should be provided fewer services because it
is cost efficient.
 People who are more dependent on government can be tracked on a
continuous basis (elderly, disabled and the poor)
 Aggregating data by social groups and classes and labeling them depending
on whether they are wanted or unwanted by the majority
Artificial intelligence (AI)
 Developing intelligent machines that mimic human cognition.
 Machine is “taught” to learn the human behavior and follows a pattern of
expected outcome based on real life scenarios.
 Surveillance of human action to learn from their behavior so machine can
direct humans how to become intelligent (predict the next steps and so
on).
 Decontextualizes reality in order to fit the reality into a model (virtual
reality).
 What is regression to statistical analysis is artificial intelligence to software
programming.
Michael Gazzaniga (1939 There is nothing called free will. We are born social and bound to our social
milieu.
 We are responsible for our own actions, what we learn, unlearn and relearn through our own interpretive lenses.
 Once detached to society, responsibility can be blamed on “things” and
techniques.
Leadership praxis
 Taking responsibility
 Technology should be used to build human relations, not to reinforce predetermined orders or situations that are detrimental to relationships.
 Leaders must use social skills and technology skills to build social
relationships with clients/citizens.
 Data about people does not build relationships, but it can help organize
people for systematic monitoring.
 The true definition of leadership praxis therefore is to correct the imbalance
created by systematic, one-sided data collection with two-sided social
relationship exchange.
Leadership Issues in IT
 Increasing dependency on Technology
 Technology does not replace leadership responsibility but increases it
 Access to IT is a democratic right of every citizen
 How to translate IT’s capacity to inform
 Information technology can
 Constrain human creativity through automation or
 enable building relationships from observing emerging situations and
understanding the values of others.