Incentives to Innovation in Development Governance: Some Aspects of Information System Designing

Electronic governance can accelerate innovation in governments. This innovation can be brought about by information acting as an incentive. Information systems (IS) can be designed to achieve that. Development administration (DA) in a country such as India, with its objective to elevate the social and economic status of deprived groups of rural poor, can employ IS as an engine for innovation with information as the incentive. DA is complex; it is an institution embraced by political parties, interest groups, civil services, line departments and tiers of governments. Innovation in this institution is a complex task that is not comparable to computerizing a private enterprise. Borrowing both from the developmental experience of India and from its experience with computerization, this paper develops a model of IS based on the following incentives: to generate information, to auction projects based on competitive status of information, to encourage information asymmetry and organizational capture, and to include elements of incomplete contracts and of distributed control rights. Further, a typology of five ISdesign aspects helps to guide the planning stage of a developmental project/program based on the above incentives. It concludes that such information incentives bring about innovation in governments. Such a model IS can be accepted as normative as well.