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"This book offers a fresh, comprehensive dialogue on issues that occur between the public management and information technology domains, with its focus on political issues and their effects on the larger public sector"--Provided by publisher

Twenty-five years after Nobel Laureate economist Robert Solow observed "seeing computers everywhere but in the productivity statistics," the question of productivity gains from information technologies (IT) remains unanswered. This study examines the role of IT on one of the major indicators of police productivity: crime clearance rates. Relying on a two-wave cohort panel research design of roughly 700 police agencies, the study reveals that significant IT advances were made between the pre and post time periods in the provision of computerized crime data, crime analysis capabilities, and real-time communications. Nonetheless, using multiple hierarchical regression analysis, the study provides robust evidence for suggesting that computerization had little influence on productivity gains. The results of this study raise several very important issues pertaining to the goals of public organizations. While this study is limited to policing, a narrow time period, and internal IT systems, the results are nonetheless noteworthy. The research illustrates that conventional explanations for the IT productivity paradox do little to explain the shortfall. In closing, the article offers rival, but yet untested, explanations that may prove worthy of additional research.

In an attempt to reap the purported benefits that "knowledge workers" bring to organizations, many police departments have shifted to a community problem–oriented policing philosophy. Rather than focusing on enforcement and incarceration, this philosophy is based on the dissemination of information to promote a proactive, preventative approach to reduce crime and disorder. In keeping with much of the contemporary literature on the "learning organization" (sometimes called the "knowledge organization"), police departments hope to deter crime through the knowledge benefits that derive from information and its associated technologies. With goals to stimulate productivity, performance, and effectiveness, police departments across the country are employing information technology to turn police officers into problem solvers and to leverage their intellectual capital to preempt crime and neighborhood deterioration.Many public and private organizations are striving to change their operations toward this same concept of the knowledge worker. Information technology is often touted as a vehicle for capturing, tracking, sorting, and providing information to advance knowledge, thus leading to improvements in service–delivery efforts. Based on an extensive study of police departments that have attempted to implement a knowledge–worker paradigm (supported by information technology initiatives), this research explores the feasibility, effectiveness, and limitations of information and technology in promoting the learning organization in the public sector.

On the 10th anniversary of the recommendations published by the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) on information system instruction in schools and departments of public administration, sweeping information management reforms were instituted throughout the federal sector by the passage of the Clinger-Cohen Act (CCA) of 1996. This research examines the extent to which these programs prepare students for the issues they will face in managing information resources in government. Based on a survey of 106 schools and departments of public administration, few programs are covering the topics recently mandated by the CCA or recommended a decade ago by NASPAA. If governments are to achieve the benefits of contemporary technological advances, schools and departments of public administration must reexamine their current approach to instruction in information resource management.