Organizational and Social Issues in the Design and Deployment
of Human Centered Systems for Digital Governance

Noshir Contractor
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
nosh@uiuc.edu

This presentation extends the issues discussed and reported at the panel on Digital Government at an earlier NSF-sponsored Workshop on Human Centered Systems. That report underscored the recognition that from an organizational standpoint federal agencies differ from private sector businesses in terms of scale, the nature of the service-profit relationship, heterogeneity of participants, as well as concerns about access, privacy, and security. The report argued persuasively that these differences present an national challenge for the technical design of new information technologies as well as the migration of legacy systems. This presentation argues that the organizational and social issues involved in the design and deployment of these technologies pose an additional dimension to that national challenge. It makes this argument in three steps. First, it identifies some of the lessons learned from past evaluations of federal information systems. Second, it identifies two meta-theoretical perspectives from the social and organizational sciences that are relevant to the design and deployment of successful federal information systems. Third, it proposes Collaboratories as an infrastructure to design and deploy National Challenge "Test-beds" for digital governance.

Past studies of the use of information technologies in government agencies have debunked several of our conventional myths and tacit assumptions, by emphasizing the social and organizational character of the deployment process. For instance, they have found that:

• Government agencies are more likely to deploy an information technology if the individuals in charge of making the decision about the technology believe that the technology will reinforce their political power within the agency (Political reinforcement theory).
• Government agencies are more likely to use a new technology if they are given the flexibility of "re-inventing" various features and aspects of the technology. (Unintended uses of technologies).
• Government agencies will often ignore (or sidestep) requirements of entering data into large integrated information systems if the individuals charged with the responsibility of entering the data are not the ones who get any direct benefit from the databases.
• Government agencies are more likely to collect more complete data if these are automatically collected as part of the workflow, rather than requiring individuals to perform special data entry activities.
• Government agencies are not always committed to the collection of accurate data in their databases, especially if these data are likely to hinder management's ability to negotiate future budget requests.
• The support for improved boundary spanning activities (with customers) by government agencies does not necessarily entail the design of better kiosks and front-end interfaces for customers directly. This is because customers with the greatest need in terms of help and advice on education, health, welfare, etc. are often the least able to take advantage of these interactive services. Instead, government agencies need to design technologies that support their employees in assisting such disadvantaged customers.

Findings such as those reported above point to the need for integrating social and organizational issues into the design and deployment of National Challenge Info-structures for Digital Governance. More specifically there are at least two meta-theoretical frameworks in the social and organizational sciences that directly speak to the issue at hand.

First, theories of collective action and public goods offer important insights into the social and organizational factors that influence the actual use of a technologically well-designed information and communication system. These theories begin with the premise that public goods, such as federal information systems, have two distinctive characteristics: the impossibility of exclusion, meaning that members of the collective cannot be excluded from using the information even if they did not contribute to it, and jointness of supply, meaning that one person's use of the information does not necessarily diminish the level of information for other users. Within this framework, these theories examine individuals' investments in, and benefits from, participating in the production (or creation) as well as the distribution (or maintenance) of public goods such as information systems.

Second, theories of self-organization describe the mechanisms by which the norms surrounding the use of information systems evolve over time. It is widely recognized and accepted that the mechanisms influential in the design and initial use of an information system are not the same as those influential in the sustained use, diffusion, and growth of such systems. Recent developments in computational modeling and simulation techniques have the potential of providing us with the ability to assess and visualize the impacts of initial design and deployment decisions on the long term use of these information systems by individuals. Specifically, they can offer insights into how the creation, maintenance, and dissolution of communication, trust, resource, and knowledge networks influence (and are influenced by) the adoption and use of collective goods such as information systems.

The lessons learned from past studies as well as the recent substantive and methodological developments in the social and organizational sciences suggest the need for incorporating these components into the design of National Challenge Test-beds for Digital Governance.

Historically there have been very few examples of teams that were successful in strategically structuring multidisciplinary teams in the design and deployment of large scale information systems. Instead, it was more likely for a team of computer scientists and engineers to design systems, and for organizational scientists to come in after the event to evaluate these systems. The critical importance of the National Challenge "Test-beds" make this loosely-coupled relationship a potentially costly error.

Recent experiences of several NSF initiatives, including our own Team Engineering Collaboratory (the infrastructure used by physically distributed researchers on the NSF-funded Project CITY – Civil Info-structure TechnologY), suggest that a "Collaboratory" model is more likely to successfully and concurrently dovetail the expertise and efforts of computer scientists, domain experts, users, human-computer interface specialists, and organizational scientists. These Collaboratories, with their triadic focus on people, instruments, and data, are especially well suited to design federal systems that specifically address National Challenge questions such as:

• How do we structure federal information systems that provide incentives and reduce costs for all individuals who are responsible for contributing to, and obtaining information from, the systems?
• How do we structure sustainable information systems that minimize the cost of capturing and disseminating the migratory (or the "what?") knowledge and the embedded (or the "why?/how?") knowledge of an individual worker within such systems?
• How do we design systems that recognize and respond to the varying needs (in terms of data aggregation, and routine versus one-shot queries) and capabilities (in terms of technological access) of multiple external "customers" of the government , including private citizens, businesses, and the media?
• To what extent can the government offer incentives and safeguards for various external customers to provide authentic data TO the government via these information systems?
• How can agencies use these information systems as knowledge networks for the creation, maintenance, and dissolution of adhoc inter-agency initiatives?

The opportunity of using a new generation of technologies to usher the era of digital governance is flush with possibilities that were until recently unimaginable. It would be frustrating to see this cycle of progress delayed by our inability to recognize and incorporate the important social and organizational dimensions that influence the design and deployment of these new systems.