Designing electronic information systems for the future: Social workers and the challenge of New Public Management

Abstract

There is a well-established critique of current forms of electronic information systems (IS) in social work organisations and attention is now turning to their redesign for the future. In this article we go beyond critiques that have established how this occurred to explore one of the reasons why current forms of IS have been observed to undermine frontline practice. In the same way that technological artefacts are observed to mediate human action by ‘configuring the user’, IS have also been developed, or configured, according to ideas about how things should be done, known as ‘embodied structures’. In this article, examples of IS functionality are drawn upon to demonstrate how the logics of New Public Management (NPM) have been embodied in current forms of IS. It is argued that the logics of NPM must be challenged if new forms of IS are to be developed that amplify the ability of practitioners.

Keywords

electronic information systems embodied structures New Public Management participatory design social workers

Introduction

Electronic information systems (IS) of the kind that have been implemented in social work organisations, most notably those providing services to children and families, have attracted significant criticism from both researchers and formal inquiries. In England and Wales, the Integrated Children’s System has been criticised for the unintended and adverse consequences of its implementation, particularly how it can impair the decision making of practitioners and reorder their priorities away from providing services to children and families (see, for example, Shaw et al., 2009; Peckover, White and Hall, 2008; Pithouse et al., 2009; Broadhurst et al., 2010). In her review of child protection services, Munro concluded that current forms of IS present ‘substantial obstacles to good practice’ (2011: 114). Similar concerns have arisen from formal inquiries into child protection agencies in Australia. In New South Wales, Justice Wood concluded that the IS was ‘not adequately suited for the purpose of supporting workers to assess and intervene in the lives of children and young people, and its complexities and shortcomings continue to be a source of frustration and delay to its staff’ (Wood, 2008: 3). In Victoria, the Ombudsman’s inquiry (2009) into state child protection services raised concerns that the IS lacked functionality, impaired efficiency and, most seriously, that its demands distracted frontline practitioners from their most important task of working with families and other professionals to safeguard vulnerable children at risk of abuse and neglect.

Having acknowledged that current forms of IS are problematic, attention is now turning to how they might be better designed so that they support the work of frontline practitioners (see Munro, 2011). Interpretive and particularly ethnographic approaches have been successfully used to enhance understanding of practice in relation to IS in business organisations (Checkland and Holwell, 1998; Tinker, 1998) and, more recently, human service organisations (McBride, 2008; White et al., 2009; Gillingham, 2011), with the rationale that detailed information gathered from close observation of the work carried out by social workers can inform design. Whilst it is not yet clear exactly how these descriptions can be translated into design specifications (Randall, Harper and Rouncefield, 2007), the ‘turn to ethnography’ in IS design has recently shown promise in the field of science and technology studies (Shilton, 2013). In acknowledgement of the lack of input that practitioners have had into the design of IS (Munro, 2005), participatory design approaches are being developed and implemented (White et al., 2010). However, current and emerging approaches to IS redesign remain impoverished without serious consideration of the socio-political forces underpinning the deployment and advancement of such technologies. The analysis proffered in this article goes beyond describing how IS have undermined social work practice to explore why this has occurred. It is argued that without such analyses, we risk repeating the mistakes of the past when redesigning IS for the future.

There has been a range of opinion about how such flawed IS designs came to be implemented. An uncritical and overly optimistic approach to the ability of technology to improve the delivery of public services has been blamed (see Garrett, 2005; Parton, 2008) and in the rush to implement technology, it has been suggested that human service organisations have struggled to specify their needs to IS providers (Senyucel, 2008). As noted above, practitioners have not been sufficiently involved in design and it has been the perceived needs of senior managers that have taken precedence over those of frontline practitioners in the design of IS (Tregeagle and Darcy, 2008). White et al. (2010) provide a critical genealogy of the development of the Integrated Children’s System (ICS) in England and Wales and describe it as being afflicted by Keil’s (1995) notion of project escalation, where fervour to continue with a project is impervious to any criticism or objection. They describe the discourse that surrounded its development, notably the belief that the ICS would provide greater safety for children through better case recording and greater bureaucratic discipline. Such discipline is imposed on social work practice through the inclusion of business rules within the ICS that prescribe social work processes, reducing individual professional discretion, described by Wastell et al. (2010) as a ‘command and control’ approach to the management of social work practice. Control is maintained and made possible by the affordance of information technology to make work processes more easily auditable.

The themes identified in the development of the ICS resonate strongly with the findings of the research discussed in this article. In this article though, the analysis draws more broadly and internationally from findings from human service organisations that provide a range of social services beyond child protection, such as residential and community services for older people and people with disabilities. It is argued that, across the social welfare sector, there has been an over-riding force that has influenced how IS have come to be designed, namely the logics that emerge as guiding principles from the discourse of New Public Management (NPM). Information and communication technology more generally has been inculcated in the globalisation of neoliberal ideas (West and Heath, 2011), but in this article the focus is on how these ideas manifest in IS specifically. Detailed examples of how NPM logics have influenced various facets of the design of IS are provided, in particular those that have given rise to the most concern in evaluations (as mentioned above). Firstly, some background is provided to explain how IS can be imbued with values and ideas that take them beyond being merely passive ‘tools’ for recording information.

Configuring the user and ‘embodied structures’

Electronic information systems, by their very nature, impose structure on the activity of their users and texture the work environment to varying extents, possibly altering priorities, goals, the nature of the tasks carried out by practitioners and even the knowledge base they draw from (Ley and Seelmeyer, 2008). In this way, they can be said to ‘configure the user’ by providing ‘material answers to the ethical question of how to act’ (Verbeek, 2006: 361). For example, IS in human service organisations, control, shape and restrict the information that is recorded (Aas, 2004; Shaw et al., 2009: Gillingham, 2014). This process has been criticised by, for example, Parton (2008), who argues that ‘surface’ descriptions of what service users do have replaced ‘depth’ explanations that draw from psychological and sociological theories to explore and pursue interventions that address why they might be experiencing difficulty. Such criticisms of IS resonate with broader literature tracing the links between NPM and de-professionalisation in the public sector (Bezes et al., 2011).

At a general level, IS contain structures that are socially constructed, which represent ‘world views’ or ‘discourses’ and ideas about how things should be, and how they should be done (Henman, 1995; Regan, 2003). As Orlikowski (1992: 410) explains, IS designers ‘build into technology certain interpretive schemes (rules reflecting knowledge of the work being automated)’, known as ‘embodied structures’. More specifically, these embodied structures may be deliberate attempts to shape work practices through the use of ‘business rules’, as in the case of IS in human service organisations that contain structures to guide case management or decision making (Gillingham, 2013). Thus, IS designers are doing what Verbeek describes as ‘ethics by other means’ (2006: 369) by configuring users towards specific actions imbued with normative discourses of not only what social work is, but also how it should be thought about and acted upon.

However, the reaction of users to these embodied structures may not be straightforward and predictable, as users need to interpret them for use in their daily work and exercise discretion in how they use them. Drawing from Giddens’ (1984) ‘structuration theory’, Orlikowski (2000) refers to the reaction of users to structures within IS as the process of ‘enactment’. This approach to investigating how IS affect work practices starts with human action and examines how it ‘enacts emergent structures through their recurrent interaction with the technology at hand’ (Orlikowski, 2000: 407) to produce ‘technologies-in-practice’. Evaluating technologies-in-practice has led researchers, as outlined above, to conclude that current forms of IS undermine rather than support frontline social work practice. The approach taken in this article, though, is to focus on the embodied structures as crucial considerations in the future design and deployment of IS. We refer to these embodied structures as ‘logics’, in the sense that they manifest in IS as a set of organising and guiding principles.

Before focussing on how NPM logics have become embedded in and shaped IS design, some background information about the research that has informed the observations made in this article is provided.

The research

The arguments presented in this article are informed by observations arising from the first author’s ongoing ethnographic research concerning how IS might be designed for the future. The author is engaged with four non-government agencies in Australia, two local authority social service departments in England, one in New Zealand and one in Scotland in projects to redesign, implement and evaluate new forms of IS.

Specific methods of data collection have included participant observation, an analysis of agency policy documents and interviews with frontline practitioners (25), administrators (5), managers (15), information and communication technology professionals within agencies (7) and vendors (3). During the first two years of the project, in two agencies preparing to implement an IS, the researcher has attended a number of formal meetings about IS with staff from all levels of the agencies. In particular, design workshops for both practitioners and managers (9 in total, with more to come) were attended. The aim of these workshops was defined at both agencies as exercises in ‘mapping’ the needs and activities of staff in various parts of the organisation in relation to the functionality of an IS. More detailed descriptions of the processes are provided in Gillingham (2015a). The author also attended presentations by vendors of IS to agencies (4).

During data collection, the author took extensive notes and later typed them up into a Field Diary. Drawing from a ‘grounded theory approach’, data were analysed as the research proceeded, with the author using a form of memo writing in the Field Diary (Lempert, 2007). Emergent themes assisted with focussing subsequent data collection. Identifying, understanding and interpreting themes in the data was an iterative process in which ‘ideas [were] used to make sense of data and data [were] used to change […] ideas’ (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007: 159). Theoretically the research is informed by concepts drawn from social informatics, defined as ‘the interdisciplinary study of the design, uses and consequences of information technology that takes into account their intersection with institutional and cultural contexts’ (Kling, 1999: 205).

In this article, the findings from the initial stage of the research are reported, in which the aim has been to understand more fully why problems with IS in social work have emerged. Clearance to conduct the research was granted by the University of Queensland human research ethics committee (reference number 2012000143).

NPM and human service organisations

As a set of ideas about the reform of public administration since the 1980s, the characteristics of New Public Management have been described as a concern with the reduction in funding (in response to perceived overspending), and the introduction of management approaches from the commercial and business sector, such as performance management, performance auditing, and strategic management and planning. More broadly, it includes the introduction of competitive markets into the provision of public services, the contracting out and privatisation of services and, of particular pertinence, the increased use of information technology (see Gruening, 2001, for full discussion). Much has been written about NPM as an approach to the organisation and delivery of public social services (see, for example, Lynn, 2006: 104–135; Maheshwari and Gadkari, 2010: 64–69) and within this article, no attempt can be made to reflect the breadth, depth or nuances of ensuing debates. What follows is a selective approach that aims to illustrate how particular logics of NPM have been embedded in IS, which resonate throughout the critical evaluations of IS. Different facets of NPM have been disaggregated for discussion but it is acknowledged that, both conceptually and practically, there is considerable overlap. It is also worth noting that terms such as audit, transparency, accountability, surveillance and control have taken on subtly different meanings due to their appropriation within NPM discourse. As Lorenz (2012: 600) describes, NPM ‘parasitizes the everyday meanings of their concepts […] and simultaneously perverts all their original meanings’.

Audit

A key tenet of an NPM approach to the organisation of public social services is the need for audit, which can be further operationalised into concepts of accountability, efficiency and effectiveness. As Munro (2004) describes, the need for audit arose as public trust in public sector professionals to be self-regulating and act in the public interest was eroded (see also White et al., 2010; Parton, 2008). Value for money, in terms of accounting for expenditure related to efficiency and effectiveness, assumed a new importance (Tilbury, 2004). As Burton and van den Broek (2009) describe, ‘[r]egulation and accountability of professional practice are reflected in the abundance of processes, procedures, monitoring and audit systems which feature strongly in much of the new public management schema’ (p. 1328). This notion accords with Leicht et al. (2009), suggesting that the rise of audit culture reflects how ‘governments decreasingly trust professionals and increasingly trust expert systems for monitoring and evaluating professional work’ (p. 590). The adverse effects of audit on frontline practice have been noted across the industrialised world, for example, in the UK (Munro, 2004, 2011), Sweden (Hoejer and Forkby, 2011) and Australia (Burton and van den Broek, 2009). Quantitative performance indicators can, for example, re-orient priorities within a human service organisation away from a concern with the effectiveness of services for individual service users (Munro, 2004). A key problem with performance indicators is that they are based on the types of information about social work activity that can be most easily and reliably recorded (see, for example, Tilbury, 2004). Typically, performance indicators are based on measurements of service inputs, outputs and throughputs, such as the numbers of referrals, service users seen, cases closed and so on. The problem is that such measures, in focussing on the quantitative aspects of service delivery, do not capture more qualitatively expressed measures of outcomes for individual service users and, as Rogowski (2011) observes, ‘practitioners’ success is now often simply measured in terms of whether managers’ targets have been met’ (p. 157).

Capturing the information required to assess organisational activity against quantitatively oriented performance indicators is of course possible without using IS, but IS make it much easier to do so and extend the range of information that can be captured. Henman (1999: 112, emphasis in original) articulates this precisely: ‘Due to the fundamental composition of computers, they are more suited to and adept at quantitative rather than qualitative tasks. Consequently, the widespread use of and reliance upon computers has led to an increased focus on quantification.’ The unintended consequences of these particular abilities of IS should not be underestimated. In the current research project, as outlined above, the need to be able to capture and report on myriad sets of quantitative data has emerged as an imperative in specifying the functionality of IS (Gillingham, 2015b). Non-government agencies in Australia have to report to government and other funding authorities regularly and frequently and much time can be taken in doing so. This is especially so when non-routine requests for data are made to respond to a political imperative. An IS that can capture data at the press of a button is therefore a very attractive option, but magnifying this ability with an IS increases expectations about the range and amount of quantifiable data that should be captured and reported on. This, in turn, magnifies the problems created by focussing on quantitative measurement of service delivery.

Transparency and accountability

Clearly linked to the growth in the mistrust of public service professionals is the demand within an NPM approach that organisational activities, at every level, be ‘transparent’, or visible. This demand has been linked to the need for ‘accountability’ by individual practitioners for both decisions and actions. The rise in the importance of accountability in social work has been well documented (for example Reder, Duncan and Gray, 1993; Harlow, 2004; Gillingham, 2009). Current forms of IS are heavily implicated in how accountability has come to be operationalised in human service organisations. As Burton and van den Broek (2009) propose, social workers have always struggled to manage tensions between accountability to the organisation and to service users, but ‘the introduction of new public management coupled with developments in computing and other technologies constitute, we propose, substantial change in expectations and accountabilities’ (p. 1327).

One development in IS has been that the daily work of practitioners, at least as it has been recorded, has been rendered visible in ways that social workers in the 1970s and much of the 1980s would find unimaginable. Before IS were implemented that required detailed and standardised information about almost every aspect of service delivery, there were few guidelines or rules about case recording and the completion of case files was sporadic and inconsistent (see Parsloe and Stevenson, 1978). Monitoring activity through case recording was also difficult as case files might be piled under desks and it mostly took the form of team leaders and managers approaching practitioners to discuss case progress. With the advent of IS, managers and team leaders across an entire jurisdiction can access case files both easily and at any time.

The ability of IS to create almost endless space for the recording of service user information and case activity, fuelled by the NPM imperative to demonstrate accountability, has also increased the pressure on practitioners to record such information. This increased pressure has led to a reordering of priorities, as mentioned above, with the demonstration of accountability becoming a more significant activity than working with services users. Child protection practitioners have been observed to spend between 60 and 80% of their time working on an IS (Gillingham, 2009; Holmes et al., 2009). Whether such time is time well spent is questionable, including whether such practices actually generate the organisational ‘efficiencies’ that NPM claims to engender through IS. At the level of individual service users, case file audits have revealed how files, at one extreme, can contain very little information and, at the other, be so full of description that finding the essence of a situation is made very difficult (Gillingham, 2015b). At an organisational level, doubts have also been raised about the quality and reliability of data aggregated from electronic case files (Wood, 2008; Shaw et al., 2009).

The suggestion here is not that practitioners should return to using only paper-based files, but rather to elucidate the dynamic within a human service organisation created by the reification of accountability within an NPM approach, particularly when it is an embodied structure in an IS. Recent research has, for example, demonstrated that carefully designed IS do not have to dominate workloads. In a study of the cost of providing out-of-home placements for children, Tregeagle et al. (2011) found that practitioners spent only 16.3% of their time on administrative tasks.

Surveillance and control

Surveillance and control of both practitioners and work processes is closely allied to transparency and accountability and is an important facet of the NPM approach to organising human services. As Lorenz argues, ‘NPM is an organisational discourse that promotes and legitimises the takeover of power by managers in public organisations that were formally run by professionals in accordance with their standards’ (2012: 610). The aim of such control is to reduce the uncertainty in both process and outcome associated with individual employees exercising discretion (Ritzer, 1996). Yet, as Henman (2004: 176) suggests, digital surveillance is linked to governing because surveillance provides a ‘calculated practice for managing and manipulating human behaviour’, which in turn seeks to ‘produce calculative subjects, objects and spaces amenable for governing’. Indeed, the ability of technology to extend the capacity of the state to surveil and consequently govern citizens has been noted in the critical literature on the development of databases by governments (Parton, 2008; Garrett, 2009; Ruppert, 2012). IS can also be used by management within a human service organisation to surveil and thereby exert control over its workforce. Garrett (2009) suggests that claims that technology has reduced the discretion able to be exercised by frontline practitioners are contestable, as practitioners will never be completely ‘hemmed in’ by information systems. The perspective presented in this article, based on the following observations, is less optimistic, considering very recent developments that have been imported from the commercial sector.

For example, during recent presentations by vendors of IS to staff at a non-government organisation, the IS either already contained or could ‘add on’ functionality that enables the tracking both of practitioners and of agency cars throughout the day. As a practitioner reaches a service user’s home, they tap a button on their mobile telephone, which immediately informs their line manager that they have arrived. Both the arrival and the time are recorded automatically by the IS. Checking through satellite tracking automatically confirms that the practitioner has reached the service user’s home and has not just pressed the button. The practitioner then presses another button on leaving the service user’s home. Cars being used by practitioners can also be tracked and mileage claims checked. The drive for organisational efficiency is supposedly enhanced by the ability to check how time is allocated and whether, for example, the most direct route between two destinations is being used.

Managers were impressed by these surveillance functions and added further justification for their use in terms of enhancing worker safety. There appeared to be no consideration of the effect that increased surveillance might have on the behaviour of practitioners. As Henman (2004: 176) argues: ‘[e]xternal discipline becomes self-discipline. Subjects govern themselves’. Therefore, workers who are subjected to constant surveillance and (if necessary) discipline, may eventually ‘freely choose’ to complete tasks in a certain way within a certain time frame, conducting themselves in a manner that just so happens to comply with managerial demands and ideals. At a superficial level, getting workers to do their jobs in an organisationally sanctioned way may be a reasonable goal for managers, but high levels of compliance may undermine the initiative required of practitioners to respond to the changing and sometimes unpredictable needs of service users. In the real world, high levels of compliance, suddenly made quantifiable by IS, may be impossible to attain, leading to concern that IS might subsequently be used to build evidence of ‘poor’ performance against a practitioner who has fallen out of favour. Staff morale may also be adversely affected as the implementation of such surveillance might imply a lack of trust by managers in practitioners.

As Ritzer (1996) describes, Weber was concerned that as bureaucracy, as a rational approach to the organisation of work, developed and work became increasingly prescribed, compartmentalised and specialised, people would be trapped in an ‘iron cage’ of rationality, where the need for conformity suppressed their need to engage in the human trait of wanting to use their knowledge, skills and ingenuity. Recent forms of IS that incorporate the means to monitor every movement made by social workers have moved the experience of work further toward Weber’s dystopian vision, to the extent that practitioners may now find themselves in an ‘electronic cage’ of NPM rationality. Specifically, as Wastell et al. (2010) describe, practitioners have become entrapped in an ‘iron cage of performance management’. The increased ability of managers to surveil and control work processes may appear to increase their power in relation to that of practitioners. However, as some participants have described, it also increases the expectation that they will manage these processes in a particular way, thereby reducing their discretion. Managers may therefore find themselves trapped in the same electronic cage.

Having explored some of the detail about how NPM logics have manifested in designs of IS, the meaning of these observations in relation to designing IS for the future is considered in the next section.

The future design of IS

As has been demonstrated in the previous section, NPM has driven the design of current forms of IS and its logic has become the ‘embodied structures’ that shape priorities and consequently action in human service organisations. The problems that have been noted with IS resonate with those that have been identified with the NPM approach to the management and organisation of social services. An NPM approach to human service organisations is possible without IS, but IS have promoted and escalated its application, especially in relation to the NPM definitions of notions such as audit, transparency and accountability, control and surveillance. IS have thereby created an electronic ‘yoke’ (White et al., 2010) to constrain and control social work practice. Consequently there is a dependent relationship between current designs of IS and NPM and it is to be expected that any changes to the design of IS will meet with resistance.

For example, a common problem in human service organisations, as mentioned above, is that practitioners spend a disproportionate amount of their time servicing IS rather than service users. More streamlined IS can be designed, which contain fewer fields and so demand less data input by practitioners, and which encourage practitioners to record information pertinent to a professional analysis of service user need (a return to the ‘narrative’) (Aas, 2004) or the ‘social’ rather than the ‘informational’ (Parton, 2008). However, such an IS, which allows greater discretion about how practitioners record information would contradict the logics of NPM. The form of such information, perhaps constructed as a narrative, would restrict the utility of the IS to audit service activity in quantitative ways, which might be construed as an erosion of accountability. Similarly, less input of auditable data would reduce transparency and make surveillance and control more difficult. As Lorenz (2012) suggests, the appropriation of words such as accountability and transparency by NPM and the consequent change to their everyday meanings has elevated them above challenge. To suggest any development that might make public services and practitioners appear to be less accountable or transparent therefore amounts to a form of heresy. However, given that NPM logics are the embodied structures in current forms of IS, any initiative to change and improve them must involve some act of heresy.

The need to resist NPM and more broadly, neoliberalism, by social workers, both collectively and individually, has been acknowledged (Rogowski, 2011), but the response has been limited. Wallace and Pease (2011), in their review of literature, provide little evidence of actual resistance to neoliberalism and NPM. Findley and McCormack (2005, as cited in Wallace and Pease, 2011) and Baines (2006, as cited in Wallace and Pease) suggest that social workers lack insight into how processes of globalisation impact on daily practices. The analysis provided in this article will, it is hoped, provide some insight into this process with respect to the design of IS, and thereby empower practitioners to identify and challenge the logics of NPM.

White (2009, cited in Wallace and Pease, 2011: 139) suggests that there are ‘spaces for resistance’ whereby neoliberalism can be challenged, namely professional discretion, exercised as ‘acts of rebellion by individual workers who challenge and reinterpret managerialist discourses and procedures’. From the analysis provided in this article, a new space for such resistance emerges, namely in the redesign of IS for the future. As they become increasingly involved in participatory design processes, as noted above, practitioners are well placed to challenge the processes by which NPM logics become embedded in IS. Resistance, though, is not sufficient in itself, as there must also be some vision of what might be possible (Noble and Henrickson, 2011). With respect to the future design of IS, as has been argued previously (for example, Munro, 2004; Hollnagel and Woods, 2005) but which deserves continuing emphasis, the vision should be to create IS that amplify the abilities of frontline practitioners, particularly in dealing with complexity. Another part of the vision is the role that new forms of IS may play in empowering service users (Parrott and Madoc-Jones, 2008). Internet-based IS and the functionality for interaction offered by Web 2.0 may facilitate participatory approaches to social work and social care practice by allowing services users to access their case files in IS and even contribute to them (Tregeagle et al., 2011; Gillingham, 2015b), which is an option being considered by some agencies in Australia (Grundy and Grundy, 2013). Future research will reveal how this repositioning of service users as both consumers and, to some extent, producers, or prosumers (Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010), might affect power relations between social workers and service users. However, according to the recent parliamentary Inquiry into the State of Social Work Report (APPG, 2013), it appears that little progress has been made in England and Wales toward actualising these visions, with social workers echoing the same concerns about IS that they did to the Social Work Taskforce in 2009 (Gibb, 2009).

Clearly more research is required that explores the needs of practitioners and matches them to emerging forms of technology before visions of how IS might be designed for the future can be fully realised. Such research, though, has to be complemented by participatory approaches to design, in order that it is social workers who determine whether a particular form of IS might assist them, according to their organisational, contextual and individual needs (see also White et al., 2010). Since one size cannot fit all, it would be unwise to suggest specific forms for future IS, but some strategies, which shape the process of how IS can be designed, have emerged from the research so far. These strategies will go some way toward empowering social workers in participatory design processes to challenge the negative influences of NPM and design IS that enhance their practice. Firstly, there are potential ‘pitfalls’ that social workers must avoid, which are covered in more detail elsewhere (see Gillingham, 2015a). Briefly, there is a tendency to overcomplicate tasks by the introduction of IS functionality to areas of service activity that previously did not require it, for example, handovers between residential and day centre staff. There are of course areas where the automation of tasks, such as rostering, may be very useful. The key point is that social workers need to approach the adoption of IS functionality critically rather than accept the proposition that all technological developments are progressive. Similarly the substance of claims to increase organisational efficiency and solve organisational problems through the implementation of IS needs to be questioned (Gillingham, 2015c). From the evaluations conducted so far of IS, as mentioned in the introduction, there is no evidence that organisational efficiency, however defined, has been improved by the implementation of IS. Indeed, from the observations in this research, such claims are presented by the proponents of electronic technology as self-evident, with little, if any, evidence or explanation. To use the same example as above, electronic rostering systems may make allocating staff to tasks easier, but they cannot solve organisational problems of staff recruitment and retention. Secondly, given the problem of the time that social workers now spend servicing IS, careful consideration needs to be given to the information that an IS will capture and how it is categorised (Gillingham, 2015d). Deciding what information needs to be recorded, how, by whom and why is a complicated exercise, one that is best completed before entering a participatory design process so that a clear strategy for information management which accords with the professional needs of social workers, rather than those of administrators, can be presented. As has been demonstrated, re-aligning IS to meet the information needs of practitioners, though it might involve some compromise, does not have to be at the expense of or in conflict with the needs of managers (Gillingham, 2015e).

Conclusion

This article has demonstrated how the logics of NPM have become embedded in the design of current forms of IS, and why this has led to some of the serious problems that have been identified in England and Wales and in Australia. It has been argued that IS have promulgated the application of an NPM approach to the provision of public social services and further that part of redesigning IS that amplify, rather than hinder, the abilities of frontline practitioners, will involve challenging the logics of NPM. It has been proposed that insights from the proffered analysis and the suggested practical strategies can be used by social work and social care practitioners to resist NPM in what has been identified as a possible space for resistance, namely participatory processes to redesign IS for the future.

In the presentation of this analysis, it must be acknowledged that it has been deliberately selective and has sought to simplify in the abstract what is, in reality, a complex matter. For example, in suggesting that participatory design processes are a new space for social work and social care practitioners to resist NPM, no account has been taken of the disparities of power between practitioners and managers, nor of the distorting effects of the commercial interests of IS providers on these processes. However, the analysis, despite its limitations, does provide a new perspective on how the redesign of IS may be approached by social workers.

Footnotes

Funding

This research was supported by a Discovery Early Career Research Award (DE13010004) from the Australian Research Council.

Author biographies

Philip Gillingham spent sixteen years as a social worker and manager in child welfare services in England and Australia, before becoming a lecturer in social work. He is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland, having received a Discovery Early Career Research Award from the Australian Research Council. For recent publications see .

Timothy Graham is currently a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Queensland and a Research Assistant at Australian National University. He is a qualified social worker and has worked in local government. For recent publications see

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