Papers in Current Issue

Volume 5 Issue 1 June 2007

Information System and Information Infrastructure Deployment: the Challenge of the Italian e-Justice Approach
Francesco Contini¹ and Antonio Cordella²
¹Research Institute on Judicial Systems, National Research Council, Bologna Italy
²Department of Information Systems, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

To avoid more failures in the developments of e-government projects, it seems necessary to abandon the idea that sees technological development as a mere process to automate procedures in simple contexts. The analysis conducted in this paper shows that the deployment of e-government cannot be managed following the same approaches used to develop tools for office automation. E-government plans are attempting to change the information infrastructure that support and guarantee the formal exchange of information within the public administration. The paper discusses a case, the Italian e-Justice program, and highlights that the obstacles currently faced by the Italian Ministry of Justice, can be explained as a wrong understanding of the infrastructural nature of e-Justice. Following the rationale that sees infrastructure development and deployment mainly concerned with the designing of “perfect tools” and “perfect rules”, the approach is focusing on the technicalities of the new information infrastructure. The Ministry of Justice does not consider the intricacy of this project with the existing social and technological installed base. Our concern is that such a complex information infrastructure, even if it will be successfully developed from a technological point of view, it will face overwhelming barriers in its organisational adoption.

This paper calls for a change in the rationalities that underpin the approach to the development and deployment of large information infrastructure in the public sector. Information infrastructures are not standing alone IT projects that can be managed following structured project management agendas. Information infrastructure are, by nature, shared and rooted in technological and social installed base. The management of projects that are aiming at changing this intricate socio-technical systems have to handle the unpredictable nature of the dynamic interplays that is characteristic element of these socio-technical systems. Cultivation is here proposed as an alternative managerial approach for e-government deployment that recognises and sees e-government deployment as the evolution of the existing socio-technical installed based rather than the design of a new office automation tools.

Keywords: Information systems development methodologies, information infrastructures, e-Justice,cultivation

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