Enterprise Resource Planning in the Public Sector: the Case of Investment Planning

In the last few years, the public administration (PA) underwent deep changes from a bureaucratic model to a managerial model. The administrative action is now based on principles of transparency, effectiveness,economization, efficiency, and wants to support the active participation of the citizens. Therefore, the P.A. needs to have an information system (IS) which is able to support this process of innovation of the public sector The present work in progress explores the introduction of the Information Communication Technology (ICT) as part of the transition of the Public Sector to the managerial model. The PA uses plans that organize the hierarchies, the tasks, the roles and the relations: it is the visible and “official” organizational structure that is known by the managers of the public sector. The introduction of an ERP is able to transform the relations, the procedures, the activities, the tasks, the minds, the mood of the persons that works in the organization in an invisible and surreptitious way. During our analysis of ERP systems in use, and in specific, the module of planning and programming, our hypothesis is that the organizational relations enacted by the new system are not limited inside of PA, but they go beyond. The technology is a platform which fixes the social relations that can be interpreted as an organizing flow that cannot easily portrayed by managerial charts. The technology organizes work structure in a technical, sociological and psychological sense, and the organizational structure can’t be separated from the technology, which, in the event of large scale infrastructures like ERP, is oriented to replace the explicit structure of the organization with an other, based on the software and on the exchange of electronic data, less visible and less declared.