The role of information technology in enhancing the administrative capacity of the civil service: lessons from the USA

Abstract

The New Public Management (NPM) model has inspired reforms both in the advanced as well as developing countries. However, due to the prevalence of a wide gap in administrative capacity, developing and advanced countries cannot have equal pace in implementing the NPM. The major objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the administrative capacity of a public organisation is a function of both high-level human resource capacity and the effective utilisation of Information Technology. In order to substantiate this, the paper elicited data from civil service employees in Ethiopia and USA, so that the gap analysis between the two countries can be discerned. In addition to this, the paper analyses the impact of IT on the trends of the civil service employees with different levels of capacities. The analysis led to two major findings. First, the increase in investment in IT had been negatively affecting the sizes of jobs that require low human resource capacity. Secondly, the increase in investment in IT had no impact on the size of jobs that require high-level of human resource capacity. Furthermore, the reduction in the size of the jobs that require low-level human resource capacity has an effect on the size of supervisors, which is the main proxy for measuring the hierarchical levels of an organisation. In conclusion, the experience of organisational change in developed countries such as USA can help developing countries to closely consider the dimension of information technology in the course of reforming their public service organisations.