Abstract
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During the last 8 years, both in Romania and in all the states which recently adhered or planned to adhere to the European Union, a large and, in some cases, sudden concern for automating different areas of public administration occured. External viewers considered this a promising sign for fast and deep reformation of the administrative systems of the newcomers, and the Union financed, by both preadheration instruments and structural funds, a multitude of projects, waiting for spectacular results. Unfortunately, quite many of these projects which focused on IT&C in public institutions did not confirm the confidence and, what is in our oppinion even worse, precious years have passed without bringing the expected upgrade of the public systems to the level of the developed countries.
A wide spread opinion was infirmed, that the backwardness of the administrative act in the ex-socialist states was mainly a matter of lack of modern technology. The hardware and software, as well as management techniques, brought in the public institutions by the projects mentioned above were the latest generation, but the final result – the welfare and satisfaction of the citizens – were still to come. Of course, the phenomenon raised some major questions, and the experts in public administration, the analysts and automated information systems integrators tried to give pertinent explanations of this failure. A large number of studies were dedicated to this subject, and their main goal was to establish whether the causes of the failures were connected with the human resource or with the technology.
What we try to prove in this paperwork is that updating of the management of the public system is not a problem with a unique, well verified, solution, universal to all the levels of the public management and all the countries, but an equation which can have one, more or no solution at a certain moment, depending on a complex bunch of different parameters, of economic, psychologic, social, technological or other nature. Another objective of this paper is to figure out a family of methods which can help in diagnosing the correct status of the management information system of a public institution related to the level of technical culture, social problems, the level of the institutional system of all the area or country, as well as identifying the most appropriate technological level of an IT&C solution which fits best the problem and the expected results.
Using already confirmed diagnosis methods (as, for example, maturity model) and design approaches (such as OODA Loop) we will propose a methodology for settling the balance among the level of knowledge, the managerial demands, the organizational culture and the level of communication and information technology, as main variables which determine the degree of utility or success of an integrated IT solution for a public administration management problem.
In a mathematical approach we will make some considerations about the way of finding a global optimum for the multivariable function of success of an automated management information system and a projection of this result on the restrictions system of the Romanian public administration, hoping that the model will be, afterwards, confirmed in other countries.
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