The Learning Administration - Shaping Change and Taking Off into the Future

E-services will change the future of business as well as private relationships. The rearrangement of value chains, new competitive arenas and the growing necessity and interest in overtaking public responsibility by citizens and private enterprises will lead us to new challenges in creating learning organisations and knowledge infrastructures. Precondition for a sustainable model of learning administration is to establish a dynamic environment for creating, sharing and using knowledge. The Knowledge Community Concept can be used as a framework for enabling the learning administration. PUBLIC ADMINISTRATIONS IN A STATE OF TRANSFORMATION The public administration is in a state of transformation. When, for example, we talk about administrations as "virtual“ or „lean“ or „e“ organisations (s. Mintzberg 1996), this is only a small developmental step on the way to a new division of labour between the public side, private business and private households; yet simultaneously it is a big step for the actual practice in many administrative bodies. The public administration will have to face a process of re-distribution of tasks in the light of empty cashdesks, but also under the pressure for a more effective and efficient use of resources and of citizens' needs for more service quality and it will certainly have to continue to face these challenges in the foreseeable future. Thus, public administration will have to re-think its organisational forms, but also its tasks without diminishing fundamental functions such as safeguarding order and safety or securing adequate living conditions. In other words: Under the assumption that cost reduction, improvement of service quality and a more democratic administration continue to be the aim of public administrations, the question of a re-distribution of labour between the public and the private sector must not be confused with a privatisation for privatisation’s sake. Against the background of comprehensive normative objectives such as • strategic control (efficiency of impacts and outcomes), • qualitative control (quality of the output), • political control (e.g. local content), the performance depth in the public sector must be re-adjusted (s. Naschold et al. 1996). The public sector's model must change towards a stronger service supply without giving up its regulating and balancing functions. Citizens' needs and interests must be regularly registered, analysed and taken as the basis for administrative decisions (citizen-related market research). Also, citizens' demand position is extended: citizens must be given a choice with regard to public service supply ("consumer choice). Yet, the debate about outsourcing and performance depth seems insufficient to us when it comes to grasping the scope of transformation accelerated by the information society. In his work on "communitarism" as a radical form of a taking on of societal responsibilities by citizens and enterprises, Etzoni (1995) has provided an analysis which re-states the restrictions of public regulating power in a programmatic way: The frontier between public and private sector, between economy as well as self-organisation and self-work are vanishing also and increasingly in the internet by new forms of interaction. Private "communities of interest" provide professional discussion and information up to the exchange of services and the participation in political processes. There is hardly any municipal administration in the Internet, which does not seek alliance with private providers in the electronic market places. On the way "from the administration of offices to a service organisation“ one or the other community turns into an Internet and service provider and competes and co-operates in the role of leadership for regional information systems. THE FUTURE OF PUBLIC E-SERVICES Public institutions regularly subject themselves to comparison and exchange in the national and, in the course of comparative achievement associations, increasingly in the international context. Moreover, they establish co-operation networks among themselves in order to jointly use expensive resources such as information technologies and staff. In the context of their achievement relations, public institutions cooperate intensively with private-commercial and private beneficial organisations. By doing so, they develop different models of partnerships in the service as well as the financing sector ("public-private-partnership"). Thus, when referring to public-private-partnerships in the area of communal services, we not only talk about "traditional" areas such as janitor services, the maintenance of buildings, management of green areas or parking lots but also, rather, open up a full spectrum of alternatives, for example through ICTS (s. Pröhl 1997): • New services through operating models for "electronic villages", offered by regional administrative bodies and private suppliers as, for example, in the case of the European co-operation program TeleRegions (www.teleregions.org) or that of Blacksburg, Virginia (www.bev.net). • Distance maintenance of communal information systems by contracting-out ICT-related services. For example, Telepolis Antwerpen takes over as a public contribution the complete "life-cycle-management" of the ICT infrastructure. The municipal administration is only responsible for defining service requirements and for public content. • Communal "information warehouses" facilitates a decentralisation of citizen services or of the social system in partnership with other service providers ("one-stopshop"). • Commercialisation of communal ICT-services and geographic data (www.fgdc.gov), electronic land registers etc. to enterprises and private households. • Distance control by private providers as communal contractors, for example through quality safeguarding (e.g. "transparent sewerage installations"). • Computer-supported participation procedures in major plannings with representatives of public interests on to private citizens (for example, in the context of „City 21Projects“ in Germany" or the "electronic neighbourhoods" in Phoenix, Arizona). • Information partnerships between police and private security services in the case of calamity protection, emergency and alarm systems (mindful that this implies a borderline to the intervention administration). • Computer-supported management systems for fullcapacity use in private and public infrastructural installations, e.g. in the area of large-scale facilities (e.g. the transportation, storage and processing of waste). Especially municipal administrations are challenged with these developments. Based on an investigation to identify „BestPractices in ServiceEngineering“ we have analysed major municipal strategies for developing information society. In our point of view there are two main dimensions to characterise these strategies (s. Figure 1): • The ServiceEngineeringProcess can be described by two different options: Inside-Out means, using internal knowledge and capabilities will lead to a more administration centred, transparent and efficient organisation; creating demand driven Outside-In orientated services will give more emphasis to Public-Private-Partnerships or, what we use to call it Citizen centred Administration. • The ServiceEngineeringAproach makes a fundamental difference between InfoSociety and InfoElite-Strategies. InfoSociety means that there is a strong orientation on a broad usage and a common access to services up to the use of new services for participation and democracy. The assumption of InfoElite is, that we will have a twostep-trigger-down-process in access and usage of eservices: if we are starting now with information and interactive services between municipal organisations and selected/advanced citizens/enterprises this will lead „automatically“ to a broad usage later on (triggerdown). It is obvious that in „living environments“ of municipal administrations there are many options for selecting individual strategies within this portfolio, but it makes also clear, that choosing a specific strategy and approach will have specific implications to the overall outcomes and developmental conditions in every region. ,QIR6RFLHW\ ,QIR(OLWH 2XVLGH ,Q ,QVLGH 2XW 3XEOLF 3ULYDWH 3DUWQHUVKLS 7UDQVSDUHQW