Building the Virtual State: Information Technology and Institutional Change [Paperback]

In Chapter 1, the author distinguishes between "objective" and "enacted" technology. Enacted technology is the result of the introduction of objective technology in a set of social relationships where resistance to introduction is possible. This distinction reflects the author's concern for possible gap between the potential of objective technology and the actuality of enacted technology.

Chapter 2 focuses on the National Policy Review (NPR), an initiative of the first term of the Clinton administration that was led by Vice President Al Gore. The NPR was supposed to come up with recommendations on how to "reengineer" government in a manner analogous to the contemporaneous reengineering of business - that is, via the introduction of information technologies to reduce the costs of sharing information within organizations. It was hoped that this would reduce hierarchy, make possible huge cost savings, and empower citizens. The NPR provoked a lot of discussion and debate within the government about how to accomplish these aims and the three experiments studied by Fountain were all influenced by it. Nevertheless, each of these experiments had its own impetus and logic that went considerably beyond the NPR.

The first experiment, the establishment of ITDB, followed mainly from the signing and ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). NAFTA required important changes in the handling of trade-related traffic across the U.S.-Canadian and U.S.-Mexican borders. The previous growth in international trade had already forced the U.S. Customs Bureau (a sub-agency of the Treasury Department) to automate its processing of trade clearances. The ITDB proposed to go much further by integrating a variety of trade and non-trade functions at the borders to deal with trade in both legal and illegal goods, legal and illegal immigration, while simultaneously upgrading the ability of the government to collect and analyze trade data. Unfortunately, worries about the potential delayed deliveries of goods due to overly ambitious government monitoring of trade on the part of businesses gave them a good reason to support efforts of the Customs Bureau to maintain primary authority over the processing of trade documents. The Customs Bureau felt threatened by ITDB and resisted efforts by other agencies to invade its turf. A series of bureaucratic battles ensued with the results well described by Fountain in Chapter 7.

In Chapter 8, Fountain considers the efforts of an interagency task force to establish a web site to provide a single portal for information about government regulations for small business owners. The U.S. Business Advisor was developed and deployed successfully and it won awards for utility and user-friendliness. However, the incentive structure within the U.S. government was not very good at encouraging the sort of continuous interagency coordination and cooperation needed to maintain the site, so it soon developed broken links that were not repaired and needed upgrades did not occur.

In Chapter 9, Fountain describes the efforts of the Ninth Infantry Division to modernize its information systems by creating a Divisional intranet. The first problem, that of overcoming the resistance of field commanders, to substituting paper-and-pencil-based systems with electronic ones, was dealt with by giving too much power to mid-level officers to design the system. The superior officers had difficulty specifying what particular information they needed because of the complexity of the tasks they performed, so they ended up being swamped with a lot of unnecessary information. The soldiers who previously were trained to submit written forms to the mid-level officers moved to electronic submission without sufficient training and without complete knowledge of how this information would be used at higher levels. They became "de-skilled." The mid-level officers suggested intranet designs that enabled them to do their jobs more efficiently but did not enhance the quality of information that went to their superior officers.

The best feature of this book, therefore, is the honest description of what actually happens -- as opposed to what is supposed to happen - when new information technology is introduced into government agencies. In order to get to this part of the book, however, the reader is made to plow through six chapters on theory, all quite well done, that do not necessarily have to be there given the empirical focus of the research. Students of bureaucracy and technology will certainly benefit from the reading of these chapters. But other readers may be excused for getting impatient when the first empirical material is introduced on page 107. Nevertheless, Jane Fountain's book is a serious and well-written effort to understand the challenges associated with modernizing the U.S. government by introducing new information technologies.

This book therefore should appeal to three audiences: first, to academics who are interested in organizational behavior, because the Virtual State is a significant addition to a growing literature on the autonomy and importance of institutions in society; second, to sophisticated lay readers, who would like to read a serious but readable treatment about how government "really" works, and, in particular, why, what often seem like easy fixes are, in fact, not so easy; and, third, to thoughtful public managers, who wish to improve organizational performance through the use of information technology.