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Citizen
Centricity: A Model of IS Value in Public Administration

Frank Bannister

Department of
Statistics

Trinity College,

Dublin 2

Ireland

[email-masked]

Abstract

While there is much common
ground in the measurement of IT value between the public sector and the
commercial world, there are also significant differences.  This is particularly so in the case of
public administration where evaluation of IT presents a number of specific
theoretical and practical problems. Starting from an exploration of the meaning
of IS value, the differences between IT value in public administration and the
commercial private sector are explored.
A taxonomy of IT value in public administration is developed and a model
of IT value for public administration is proposed.

1.  Introduction

1.1       A Question
of Scale and Perspective

By any measurement, government is big
business.  In many first world
countries the state absorbs approximately 40% of Gross National Product.
Government IT spend is correspondingly large. As Muid (1994) puts it, government
is at the apogee of an information industry, a phenomenon also noted by Hood
(1983) in his concept of the nodality of government and by many others (Snellen
1992).  Given the size of this
outlay, research into the IT value in the public sector has a relatively low
profile.  This is all the more
surprising given the general unease that IT in the public sector has not
delivered the value expected (Lenk 1990, Frokjaer & Korsbaek 1992, Pye 1992,
Margetts and Willcocks 1993, Bellamy and Taylor 1994, Willcocks 1994, Margetts
1999).

This
perception of poor value has not been helped by a number of high profile IT
failures[1]
and overruns.  Margetts and
Willcocks (1993) suggest that there are several factors that make IT projects in
the public sector inherently more risky and thus more prone to failure and high
cost.  However the question of
whether public administration is receiving good value from its IT investment is
much more complex and difficult to assess.
One reason for this is that there is no agreed model of IT value in
public administration.  In this
paper it will be argued that an agreed model is needed if IT development in a
given public administration is to be coherent. Such a model must be consistent
with current thinking in public administration whilst taking into account civil
service culture, legacy infrastructure and technology developments.  A model of IT value in public
administration based on the concept of citizen centricity, i.e. the precept that
the ultimate beneficiary of civil service IT system must be the citizen in all
his or her roles as customer, recipient, participant, taxpayer and so on, will
be proposed.

1.2       IT in Public
Administration

Developing a coherent theory of IT in
public administration is difficult given the current state of incoherence in
public administration theory in general (Mainzer
1994).  Van de Donk and
Snellen assert that not only has no such theory been developed, but that it is
virtually impossible to develop anything other than a ‘more or less mature’
theory (Van de Donk and Snellen 1998).  A widely discussed conceptual framework
is informatization (Frissen et al 1992).
Another useful concept is the Information Polity. (Taylor and Williams
1992, Bellamy and Taylor 1992, Bellamy and Taylor 1998).  More recently Heeks and Bhatnagar (1999)
have proposed the concept-reality gap as a frame for considering how IT can
contribute to the ‘reinvention of government’.

The concept of informatization can be
summarised as:

·
Introduction of IT to shape or take
care of the information retrieval process;

·
The arrangement of information flows
and information relationships to facilitate administrative or management
information process;

·
Changes in the organisational structure
into which IT is introduced;

·
The development of information policies
as a differentiated area of decision making in an organisation;

·
The use of specific expertise in the
field of IT through functionaries or consultants with specific tasks in this
field.

Informatization may be considered broadly
equivalent to the term information management in the sense of managing the
information needs of an organisation.
Looking at informatization policies across a range of European countries,
Snellen (1992) found that IT projects in the public sector during the period
from 1970 to 1990 were dominated by the values of efficiency and effectiveness,
controlled by the Ministry of Finance or its equivalent and that:

“the interest of representation with
informatization policies reinforces the internal orientation of those
policies”

(Snellen 1992, p21).  Inasmuch as customer service was a
consideration, it was viewed in terms of speed of delivery and absence of
errors.  Sometimes appearances were
deceptive. Even where projects were
deemed to be successful, ex-post research has shown that in many cases the
‘savings’ realised to have been illusory (Henman 1996).

Informatization is positioned
by Taylor (1998) as an alternative way of analysing what Heeks terms
“…the murky,
messy world of information systems and public sector reform.” (Heeks 1999b,
p76).  In the literature on informatization and
IT in public administration a major focus is on public sector reform and
re-engineering (Taylor and Williams 1992, Andersen 1999).  Informatization
should shift the emphasis from efficiency and effectiveness to reform, i.e. from
automation to information and thence to transformation.  The question is how does all of this
relate to the value of IT in public administration?  There is a need to respond to the challenge posed
by Wyatt:

“Rarely
has anyone explicitly addressed the question of why the public sector invests in
IT, and of what it is hoping to achieve if not increased competitive
advantage.”

(Wyatt 1991, p 25).  Indeed, if one ignores self-funding and
mandatory investments, why does a civil service invest in IT at all?

In
order to answer this question, a model of IT value in public administration is
necessary.  In the remainder of this
paper, such a model will be developed in four steps.

1.
First
a conceptual model of value will be developed.  This will provide a framework for what
follows.

2.
Secondly
the differences between public service and private commercial perceptions of IT
value will be explored.

3.
Using
a number of existing taxonomies of IT value, a taxonomy of IT value in public
administration will be distilled.

4.
Finally,
consolidating all of these, a model of IT value in public administration will be
put forward and discussed.

2.  Defining IT Value - A Grounded
Approach

2.1
Values and value

The concept of value
in economics goes back to Adam Smith’s concepts of value in exchange and value
in use (Samuelson 1976).  Economics
posits the rationale man and proceeds to build various predictive models of
behaviour on this assumption.  In
this model, the return on investment in IT is directly comparable with the
return on investment in a new piece of machinery or in research and development
(Engelbert 1991).  Psychologists and
decision theorists discuss value and decision making in quite different terms
(e.g. Tversky and Kahnehmen 1982, Plous 1993, March 1994).  In practice human and organisational
decision making is often seemingly irrational when viewed from a strictly
logical or economic perspective - a phenomenon Simon (1953) termed ‘bounded
rationality’.

To understand the
nature of IT value as perceived by a civil service we need a definition of value
which will encompass the economic, psychological, cultural and political aspects
of value.  The multidimensional
nature of IT value has been discussed by, inter alia, by Symons (1994) who
describes the need for multiple perspectives and Cronk and Fitzgerald who
discuss the value perspectives of functional groups and the dimensions of IS
business value (Cronk & Fitzgerald 1999).  To develop such a definition, we start
by distinguishing the concepts of ‘value’ and
‘Values’ (for clarity spelled with a capital ‘V’).  Values may be described as
normative characteristics or modes of behaviour that individuals, groups or
organisations hold to be right or at least better than other characteristics or
modes of behaviour.  Values have
their visible manifestation in the ways that individuals or groups behave and
interact with other individuals or groups.
For example beliefs in honesty, humility, self gratification, efficiency,
social equality, duty, thrift, service to others and so on are all Values which,
assuming they are applied, result in distinct forms of behaviour and distinct
choices.  Values present as
attitudes and beliefs which directly affect the way in which government
departments apply IT.

Given this
definition, ‘value’ is defined to be a quality applied to a good, service or
outcome which supports, meets or conforms with one or more of an individual or
group’s Values.  Thus a person who
holds strongly the Value that all humans should be treated with respect, is
likely to place value on improved work practice and ergonomic aspects of an IT
system.  An organisation whose
primary corporate Value is economy in the form of keeping taxation levels or
costs to a minimum will value an IT system which, say, reduces headcount[2].

The second
distinction is between value and benefits.
In assessing any information system, a government department will judge
the value it receives on its ability of the system to meet a number of stated
and unstated needs.  These may
include explicit external needs (e.g. implementing government policy) and/or
stated or unstated internal corporate or even individual Values.  Benefits can be thought of as an
operationalisation of the value construct.
Value is what we perceive; benefit is what we receive.  The relationship is illustrated in
diagram 1.

Diagram 1 -
Relationship between Values, value and Benefits.

The impact of the
objective needs, i.e. those values which are formally stated or specified
combines with Values which are implicit and may or may not be recognised by the
members of the organisation.
Together these substantially determine decisions about IT investment and
use.  Value perception is also
affected by the information available to the actor.  Civil servants will be aware of the
general economic and political climate and will be working within a broad
framework set down by government, the Ministry of Finance/Treasury or other
bodies.  In times of economic
cutbacks, there will be greater sensitivity to value for money than there might
be in times of budget surplus.

In summary, all
members of any organisation have Values, whether they acknowledge them or
not.  Values may be individual,
group or organisational/corporate Values may be fundamental or transient and may
be affected by current events.
These Values lead individuals and organisations to seek goods or outcomes
which deliver value - i.e. things which meet or comply with these Values.  For IT investments and outcomes, we term
this the value set.  Benefits
are the operationalisation of value.
In order to provide an appropriate basis for IT investment decisions in
public administration, it is necessary to define the value set for public
administration.

3.  Public and Private Perceptions of IT
Value

3.1
A Question of Perception

An important
issue is the difference between commercial and public administration perception
of value and benefits.  The
perception of the role of IT in, and the value of IT to, a commercial
organisation is inherently different from that of the civil service for a number
of reasons of which two are fundamental: motivation and complexity.

3.2
Motivation

Private sector commercial bodies are
driven by some combination of a need to:

·
survive,

·
grow,

·
make profits and/or

·
create wealth

The combination of growth and wealth
creation is the yardstick by which business performance is measured.  League tables of added shareholder value
are published indicating which companies are the most successful at achieving
these ends (e.g. by the Sunday Times).
Reflecting this, the language of business management, particularly since
the early 1980s, has been infused with the idea of competitive advantage (Porter
and Miller 1985). While more sophisticated tools to measure company performance
such as the Balanced Scorecard (Kaplan and Norton 1992, 1993) have been
developed, the fundamentals do not change.
Investments of any sort are (or should be) primarily measured against how
well they serve, directly or indirectly, the four criteria listed above.  A variety of other rationales for IT
investment may be invoked and filters used (e.g. Boynton et al 1994), but
ultimately they must serve these commercial imperatives.

The above four criteria either have quite
different meanings or no meaning at all in public administration.

Survival

Civil
services, like most organisations, seek to survive, indeed they are highly
effective at so doing, but the threats to their survival are primarily political
and social rather than economic. A civil service department does not normally
have competitors.  In Ireland, for
example, civil service departments constantly mutate, but the overall structure
and staffing levels have remained broadly stable over the past 30 years (Dooney
and O’Toole 1992).  With
constitutionally protected job security, most civil service managers do not
concern themselves unduly with Grove’s blunt assertion that one has to be
paranoid to survive (Grove 1996).

Growth

A civil
service may seek to expand, but the motivations for such growth are different
from those of a private company.
There are no shareholders or investment managers demanding year on year
increases in earnings.  Internally
generated growth driven by civil servants (as opposed to growth driven by
customer demand or government action) may be driven by a desire to provide
better or additional services or for less altruistic reasons such as power,
promotion or control, but not by external pressures to add shareholder
value.  Furthermore, unlike private
companies, any civil service has, in the central government Finance function, an
internal control mechanism which deliberately tries to restrain growth.

Profitability

Civil service
departments are not profit driven.
Department management may be motivated by cost savings or cost avoidance,
but this is a much more limited sphere than profit growth in part because costs
are only one side of profitability, but also because cost savings are bounded to
a much greater extent than profits.
The motivation in many civil service departments is still to  break-even each year.

Wealth Creation

Fourthly, while civil service departments
seek to create wealth (a more healthy population, better roads, better educated
workforce), such wealth creation is a vastly broader conception than that of
financially enriching shareholders, management or the workforce.  The value of such wealth is often difficult
to measure by comparison with such business metrics as increases in shareholders
funds or earnings per share (Wholly 1979, 1983, Boyle 1993, 1996).  The issue of such non material wealth
creation is, however, central to the mission of the civil service (Lalor 2000)
and has a fundamental impact on the role and value placed on IT.

3.3
Complexity

Business decisions can sometimes be very
complex (Clemen 1996), but in general public decisions are much more so.  There are several reasons why this is so
including:

·
Public sector decisions tend to have many
more stakeholders;

·
The scale of expenditure by public bodies
is, in general, far greater than that of private sector
organisations;

·
Many public sector decisions have the
force of law and are not optional.
They deal with citizens, not voluntary customers;

·
Democratic and political considerations
often add to the level of consultation required and consequently to the
timescale.

This
difference is often demonstrated when private sector decisions enter the public
arena.  For example, a decision as
to whether a company should invest in a waste incinerator can be evaluated in a
few weeks or at most months.
Obtaining planning permission to build such an incinerator may take
several years.

3.4
Interpretation

Given
the differences between private commercial and public administrative
motivations, it follows that the rationale for investing in general and in IT in
particular is frequently different.  However, even where value perceptions are
shared, they can take on a different connotation in public administration.  For example, many commercial IT
investment decisions would include several customer related benefits or values
including:

·
Better customer
service;

·
Enhancing customer
value;

·
Customer
retention;

·
Enhanced customer
profitability.

But there is a
fundamental difference between the customer/supplier relationship and the
citizen (customer of the state)/state relationship.  The commercial customer generally has
the option to reject a supplier’s product or service and buy elsewhere or, in
many cases, not buy at all.  The
state is not only a monopoly supplier or provider of many services, it often has
the authority to compel the citizen to deal with it.  For many of its services, there is no
market imperative for the state to treat its customers well[3].  Thus, in public administration, the
above values translate as follows:

·
Better customer
service can, up to a point,
be equated with better service to the citizen.  However, whereas a company may quickly
suffer the costs of poor customer service, the same is not necessarily true of
public services;

·
Enhancing customer
value may or may not be
meaningful.  In many instances the
‘customers’ are at most paying for the services they receive indirectly or, for
example in the case of social welfare benefits, may not be paying for them at
all;

·
Customer
retention is largely
irrelevant.  Customers can, of
course, choose not to use state services, but if they want to travel abroad,
drive a car or even eat, they may have no choice;

·
Enhanced customer
profitability has no direct
equivalent meaning in the civil service.
Lower cost per citizen served does have meaning, but this covers only
half of the full scope of this value metric.

Finally, there are
also values and benefits which are either only found in a civil service context
or which have a particular emphasis in the civil service which differentiates
them.  Examples of such values
include:

·
Assuring equality of
treatment;

·
Social
inclusion;

·
Facilitating the
democratic will.

None of these are
commercial values.  Many modern
businesses deliberately set out not to treat their customers equally (for
example frequent flier schemes, private banking and so on).  Social inclusion is not on the agenda of
most businesses (witness the current closure of unprofitable bank branches in
small rural communities) and facilitating the democratic will is not a Value
that many businesses espouse in practice, even with their own shareholders.

In building the
value set therefore, it is first necessary to differentiate those values which
are purely commercial, those which are shared by all and those which have a
different slant in public administration and then to add values which are
distinct to public administration.

4.  A Taxonomy of IT Value in Public
Administration

4.1
Values

The first step in
developing a model is to define a core set of Values for Public
Administration.  The following list
is proposed:

·
Duty Orientated
Responsibility to citizen

Responsibility to
the government;

Proper
use of public funds;

Efficient
and effective use of public funds;

Facilitating the
democratic will.

·
Service
Oriented
Service to the citizen;

Respect
for the individual.

·
Socially
Oriented
Respect for the citizen;

Social
inclusion;

Justice;

Fairness;

Equality
of treatment.

We term these core
values.  The traditional themes in
the study of Public Administration, i.e. accountability, responsibility,
responsiveness, control, equity, justice and democracy are implicit in the core
values.

The citizen appears
under each of the different headings reflecting the fact that (s)he has several
possible roles.  At any given time,
the citizen may be some of all of:

Taxpayer:

The person who ultimately funds public administration and IT
investment;

Customer:

Someone who buys a service from the state;

Client:

Someone on whose behalf the state acts;

Claimant:
Someone who has entitlements from the state;

Recipient:
A person who receives either money or authority from the
government;

Participant:       A member of
the public participating in democratic decision making or policy
formulation

Agent
Someone working for or on behalf of the state;

Individual
As a person in their own right.

The citizen
qua citizen, as a member of the polity is here term ‘participant’ to
avoid confusion.  The above list is
not exhaustive (a citizen could, for example, be a prisoner or a ward of the
state), but it covers the common roles a citizen can take.

These two constructs
will provide the basic structure underlying the model.

4.2
Value Categorisation

A six way framework
categorisation of IT value is now proposed.  IT value in public administration may be
classified as:

Foundational.
relating to the legacy of cost efficiency justified IT systems used in
public administration.  These values
are close to the traditional three Es of Value for Money, Efficiency,
Effectiveness and Economy (National Audit Office (UK)
1996);

Policy
formulation.
relating to the administration’s role in developing policy.  This includes responsibility to
government.

Democratic
relating to the support for and enhancing of democracy and citizen
involvement in the affairs of the state.
This includes informing the citizen, justice, fairness and
equity;

Service
relating to the provision of service to the citizen as customer, client,
claimant or recipient.  This
includes timeliness, accuracy and convenience to the
citizen;

Internal

relating to values which are directed towards employees and internal
operations of public administration.
This includes staff motivation and working
conditions;

External
relating to the state’s interactions with external organisations
including organisations outside of its jurisdiction. This may include many
mandatory elements.

4.3
Towards a Taxonomy of Values in Public
Administration

Several researchers
have presented or suggested lists or taxonomies of ‘IT benefits’ (Parker and
Benson, 1988, Clince et al, 1992, Farbey et al 1993, Coleman and Jamieson 1994,
Bannister 1995, Remenyi et al 1995, Remenyi and Sherwood Smith 1997).  Most of these lists are not sector
specific, although some of them are grouped in different ways.  In converting these taxonomies/lists to
a taxonomy of IT value in public administration, four issues must be
addressed.

·
First, it is
necessary to distinguish between benefits and values. Benefits and values,
though closely related, are not the same thing. This difference/relationship
must first be made explicit.

·
Secondly, most of
the lists are generic and/or business oriented.  As has been shown, there are IT benefits
and values which may be important in the commercial sector, but which have no
relevance in public administration.

·
Thirdly, there will
be benefits and values in public administration which may have little or no
importance in business.  A superset
of such lists will not yield a comprehensive list of IT public sector value
metrics and will contain many irrelevant metrics.

·
Finally where
benefits and values do overlap, they may have different meanings or
interpretations in each sector.

The following steps
were then taken:

·
Following an
extensive literature search, an extensive list of benefits and values was
compiled;

·
This set was
filtered to remove those benefits and values which are not relevant or not
applicable in public administration;

·
Where appropriate,
benefits were restructured or re-formulated as values;

·
The resulting set
was reviewed and, where necessary, values were restructured and/or re-formulated
in public administration terms;

·
The list was then
augmented with a number of values which emerged from the background research in
the Irish civil service and from the broader public administration
literature;

·
The values
identified were categorised using the headings above.

The resulting
taxonomy is shown in the following table:

Table 1 - Taxonomy
of IT Values in Public Administration

Category

Value

Core
Values Supported

Foundational

Positive
cost benefit

Efficient
and effective use of public funds

Cost
savings/reduced headcount

Proper
use of public funds

Avoided
future costs

Responsibility
to the citizen as taxpayer

Positive
return on investment

Responsibility
to government

Positive
net present value

Risk
reduction

Greater
staff efficiency

Better
control/reduction in fraud and waste

Increase
in capacity/throughput

Mandatory

Policy
Formulation

Better
management information

Responsibility
to government

Support
for decisions

Proper
use of public funds

Responsibility
to the citizen as participant

Democratic

Citizen
access to information

Social
inclusion

Transparency

Justice

Flexibility

Fairness

Policy
alignment

Facilitating
the democratic will

Responsibility
to the citizen as participant

Service

Good
service to the customer

Service
to the citizen as customer

Good
service to the citizen

Service
to citizen as client

Meeting
public demands

Service
to the citizen as recipient

Service
to the citizen as claimant

Respect
for the citizen as individual

Social
inclusion

Justice

Fairness

Equality
of treatment

Internal

Improved
staff morale

Responsibility
to the citizen as agent

Improved
internal communications

Respect
for the citizen as individual

Improved
ability to attract staff

Efficient
and effective use of public funds

Better
staff retention

Proper
use of public funds

More
motivated staff

Responsibility
to the citizen as taxpayer

Empowering
staff

Greater
staff creativity

External

Being
abreast of the private sector

Reputation
and Image

Having
a good public image

Being
abreast of other Administrations

Matching
other external benchmarks

5.  A Citizen Centric Model

5.1
A Citizen Centric Model

Combining this
taxonomy of IT values with the constructs previously discussed, a model can be
developed.  The model posits an IT
value core which is made up of six major components delivering services directly
and indirectly to the citizen.  This
model is shown in diagram 2.

Diagram 2 -
Relationship between Values, value and Benefits.

The foundation on
which this rests are the core values of public administration.  The model is both supported by
infrastructure and supporting constructs.

5.2
Supporting Constructs

The core values and
the operationalisation of value are supported by a number of supporting concepts
including:

The Whole Person Concept:  The essence of this concept is that
civil service should view citizens as an entity rather than a ‘social slices’
(Nora & Minc, 1978).
Traditionally, most civil service systems (and by implication departments
and sub units of departments) deal with only one aspect of a citizen’s
life.  The whole person concept
emerged during the development of systems for the UK DSS Operational Strategy
(Fallon 1993), but as envisaged here is wider than the DSS’s interpretation
which Adler and Sainsbury (1990) found be more akin to a ‘whole claimant’
concept.

The Lifetime Events Concept  The life event concept envisages
the civil service being able to track citizens through those events in their
life that bring them into contact with the state.  This includes major events such
as:

·
birth;

·
marriage;

·
separation/divorce;

·
death;

as well as many other
milestones:

·
reaching voting
age;

·
entry to the
workforce;

·
retirement;

·
becoming a parent;

·
buying a house.

and other events which may only affect a
subset of the population as well as various licenses and authorisations issued
by the state.

The One Stop Shop.  The one stop shop is simple in concept,
but its implications are profound.
In essence this says that a citizen should, if he or she requires, be
able to avail of or make contact with all the state services that are relevant
to him or her at a single location.
This might be an office, a counter in an office or a web site.

Multiple Modes of
Access.
This principle states that there should be a variety of means whereby the
citizen can transact his business with the state.  With technological advance, the range of
ways in which citizens can potentially undertake transactions with the state has
increased.  These methods now
include:

·
Direct face to face contact (in an office
or in the home);

·
Post;

·
E-mail;

·
Telephone (fixed and
mobile);

·
Fax;

·
Web (computer, television or WAP
based);

·
Teletext;

·
Interactive
television;

·
Courier;

·
Pager;

·
Automatic Teller
Machine;

·
Kiosk.

the development of the e-delivery of
public services, there will remain a need for a variety of other methods of
delivery.  Not all modes of delivery
will be IT enabled.

5.3
Infrastructure

Finally there is a
need for a technical and organisational infrastructure to support the delivery
of benefits.  Briefly this
encompasses integration of systems, communications and privacy issues.  This means on the one hand the ability
to both access and combine information where necessary, but on the other the
ability to separate and isolate information where the privacy or rights of the
individual would otherwise be compromised.
The design of such an infrastructure will be influenced by the Values
held by departments and individual civil servants.  There is much work in hand on this, but
a discussion of it is outside of the scope of this paper.

6.  Conclusion

It is important to
stress that the model proposed in this paper is not a model of IT value in
government, but a model of IT value in public administration.  This paper has deliberately avoided what
might be loosely termed wider political agendas such as the re-invention of
government through technology, e-government and the information society as well
as many of the wider and more complex issues surrounding IT in public
administration.  The objective has
been to develop a model of core values, i.e. values which are independent of
current government policies, dominant ideologies or political fashions.  It is in this sense a politically, but
not a value, neutral model.  The
responsibility of the public administration is to both government and
citizen.  If government policy is to
decentralise, privatise state companies or put a PC in every classroom, it is
the function of civil servants to execute these policies and where appropriate
to use IT as effectively as possible to achieve government aims.

IT value in public
administration is measured by its contribution to the good of the citizen.  It is argued here that the primary aim
of IT in public administration is to serve the citizen and the society in which
(s)he lives.  In many countries, the
civil service has a long and honourable tradition of providing a politically
neutral service - a service which can protect, and in the past has protected,
the citizen from the government.
These values will inform IT values and decisions made about IT
acquisitions.  An agreed model would
provide a valuable reference for IT decision making in the civil
service.

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[1] Particularly in the UK.  See
www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199900/cmselect/cmpubacc/65/6502.htm

[2] (In extreme case, Values
become mindsets or ideology.  An
example of this effect was manifest in the UK during the 1980s where the Values
espoused by the Conservative government of the time had very dramatic impact on
IT decisions during that period (Fallon 1993, Margetts 1999, Heeks 1999a).  In such a climate, IT value can
degenerate to financial efficiency and effectiveness with the latter being
ill-defined and of much less importance than the former (Bekkers and Frissen
1991)).

[3]  Although in a modern democracy,
government departments which consistently fail to deliver service over a long
period of time will normally be reformed, abolished or split up amongst other
departments - there is a limit to public
tolerance.