Enhancing the Effectiveness of Computers in Public Organizations Through Appropriate Use of Technology

It has been less than four decades since the first commercially available computer-the Universal Automatic Computer or Univac I-was built in 1951. Nevertheless, computer technology has already evolved through four generations, including the vacuum tube-based computers of the 1950s, the transistor-based computers of the 1960s, the integrated circuit-based computers of the 1970s, and the very large scale integrated (VLSI) circuitbased computers of the early 1980s. Computer technology is affecting nearly every aspect of our lives. It is now being credited for spawning a new era-the age. The computer's impact in public organizations is perhaps best exemplified by its contribution in the law enforcement area. In a survey of 79 cities, Dial found that law enforcement was the single most recurring computer application area, accounting for 15 percent of all computer applications.' In a subsequent survey of U.S. cities, Kraemer noted that law enforcement applications were second only to those in finance (i.e., payroll, accounting, and tax collection).2 Yet, in a recent national assessment of police command, control, and communications systems, Colton et al. found that current computer applications to a large extent simply replaced previous manual operations . . . [and] the potential of the computer has not been fully utilized.3 The limited effectiveness of computers in public organizations-in particular, local governments-is due to a host of problems, such as data quality and accessibility issues, system evolution and interface difficulties, and organizational and political concerns.4 Many solutions have been offered to overcome these problems, including the active involvement of users at each stage of system development, a stronger role for the information systems executive, a resistanceavoidance interaction between system features and organizational context, and the presence of a third party to overcome the power symmetry and semantic gap between users and data processing specialists.5 The focus of this paper is on technological solutions. The paper is based on our understanding of problems

Business · Advanced Database Systems and Queries · Computer Science · Data Visualization and Analytics · Peer-to-Peer Network Technologies

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