Birth of a Failure: Consequences of Framing ICT Projects for the Centralization of Inter-Departmental Relations

AuthorRob Hoppe,Annalisa Pelizza
Published date01 January 2018
Date01 January 2018
DOI10.1177/0095399715598343
Subject MatterArticles
/tmp/tmp-17IPct648k4dDz/input 598343AASXXX10.1177/0095399715598343Administration & SocietyPelizza and Hoppe
research-article2015
Article
Administration & Society
2018, Vol. 50(1) 101 –130
Birth of a Failure:
© The Author(s) 2015
DOI: 10.1177/0095399715598343
Consequences of
journals.sagepub.com/home/aas
Framing ICT Projects
for the Centralization
of Inter-Departmental
Relations
Annalisa Pelizza1 and Rob Hoppe1
Abstract
Government information system failures are filling not only newspapers
but also parliamentary and administrative reports. This article deals with a
case in which information and communication technologies (ICT)–related
failure claimed by the media influenced the parliamentary agenda, and
intra-governmental relations. Drawing on a narrative analysis of a Dutch
parliamentary commission’s hearings, it argues that the way the issue
was initially framed by the media and then adopted, un-problematized, by
Parliament steered the direction of action toward specific administrative
solutions, thus shaping the landscape of possible organizational alliances.
The article recommends a proactive role of parliaments in framing

ICT projects.
Keywords
information system, failure, frame, public administration, media, information
infrastructure
1University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
Corresponding Author:
Annalisa Pelizza, Department of Science, Technology and Policy Studies, University of Twente,
P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands.
Email: a.pelizza@utwente.nl

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Administration & Society 50(1)
Digital government faces a paradox. On one hand, e-government programs
still conceive of the informatization of administrative procedures as a driver
for rationalization, innovation, and economic growth. On the other hand, fail-
ure rates in public administration’s digital infrastructure development repre-
sent examples of irrational investments in the eyes of both the media and
citizens.
Traditionally, e-government studies and practitioners have tended to see in
information and communication technologies (ICT) the embodiment of
Weber’s promises of bureaucracy as an organizational form rooted in standard-
ized legal-rational authority (Weber, 1980). “In the second half of the 20th cen-
tury information technologies have been regarded much as Weber’s conception
of bureaucracy was regarded in the first half—that is, a rationalising force in
government” (Margetts, 2003, p. 4). For this reason, e-government has been
associated with “modernisation,” “efficiency improvement,” “procedural
streamlining,” and “simplification” as forms of rational standardization.
However, public and media debates increasingly depict the informatiza-
tion of the public sector as a never-ending, complex, expensive, and uncertain
process, and ICT1 expenditures are often seen as an unjustified “waste” of
public money. With the recent economic crisis shrinking resources for public
services such as healthcare and education, the invisibility of information
infrastructure (Aurigi, 2008; DeNardis, 2012) has become a hindrance in jus-
tifying increasing expenditure on ICT. Therefore, criticisms of the gap
between high investment and the (claimed) lack of benefits have flourished
on expert blogs (Ballard, 2013; Bloch, Blumberg, & Laartz, 2012; Veldwijk,
2013), as well as in the more traditional media (Bos, 2014; Stokmans, 2014a;
Tromp, 2013).
How has it happened that technologies that promised so much came to be
framed in such a dystopian way?
Failures are a long-standing concern in the information system literature
(Jiang & Klein, 1999; Lyytinen & Hirschheim, 1987; Sauer, 1997). However,
whereas in the private sector ICT failures are usually regarded as unavoidable
by-products of innovation, when it comes to taxpayer-funded projects, fail-
ures are often accompanied by public criticism and high visibility in the
media. In some cases, debates can migrate into the political domain, be the
subject of parliamentary debate, and even trigger consequences in the organi-
zation of the administration.
The case of the London Ambulance Service (LAS) is a well-known exam-
ple in this regard (Beynon-Davies, 1995, 1999; Finkelstein & Dowell, 1996).
In 1992, the newly developed LAS Computer-Aided Dispatch system
(LASCAD) failed, leading newspapers to report that between 20 and 30
patients probably died as a direct consequence of the breakdown (Watts &

Pelizza and Hoppe
103
MacKinnon, 1992). Following this claim, not only was a parliamentary pub-
lic inquiry launched, but also the chief executive was forced to resign
(MacKinnon & Goodwin, 1992).
More recently, in the United Kingdom the Child Support Agency system,
the Passport Agency system, the tax credit system, the Rural Payments
Agency system (Syal, 2013), and the National Health Survey (NHS) patient
record system (Curtis, 2011; Syal, 2013) have made newspapers headlines
and professional blogs (Ballard, 2013) as examples of major failures. These
and other cases were investigated not only by the National Audit Office but
also by parliamentary commissions, such as the Public Administration Select
Committee (PASC; 2011).
The Netherlands is another country in which several parliamentary working
groups and commissions have been set up to address claims of failure origi-
nally reported by the media. This country shows interesting peculiarites. First,
ICT failures have been dealt with by many political initiatives, some of which
were launched ad hoc. Unlike in the United Kingdom (where the PASC is a
permanent parliamentary committee that conducts inquiries about a broad
range of problems, not only failures nor information systems), in the Netherlands
temporary commissions and working groups were established with the specific
purpose of addressing ICT failures. Second, it may happen that media-triggered
claims do not stop at the political discursive level, but come to affect the orga-
nization of administrative inter-departmental relations.
This was demonstrated in the workings of a recent (2012-2014) Dutch
temporary parliamentary commission on failures in governmental ICT pro-
grams. This commission was established to investigate claims of huge “wast-
ing” of public money as initially reported by newspapers. Newspapers
identified failures as a government-wide problem and attributed those to
technical causes alone. By adopting this formulation without further prob-
lematization, the Parliament de facto reinforced and legitimated it. This
seamless adoption eventually turned out to have consequences not only for
the political debate on ICT failures but also for the operational organization
of inter-departmental relations.
Using this case as evidence, this article on one hand attempts to extend the
concept of framing as a model of the relationship between government and
the media to the field of government infrastructural failures. While agenda
setting and other approaches that are specifically focused on infrastructural
failures stress the role of media in putting a specific issue under the spotlight
of the political agenda, other scholarly perspectives also highlight the impor-
tance of how such issues are constructed. The cascading activation model, for
instance, assumes that interpretive frames “leak” from the higher level of
government down to parliamentary and expert elites, then to the media and

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Administration & Society 50(1)
their frames and—finally—trickle down to public opinion (Entman, 2004).
However, when their content resonates with “cultural congruence,” specific
frames can become influential enough to feed back from the lower to the
higher levels (Entman, 2003).
We suggest that the discussion on which one (media or politics) exerts more
influence over the other can turn out to be not so much a binary argument (i.e.,
does politics influence media or vice versa), but rather a function of the alliances
facilitated or hampered in a specific time period by a specific frame. Analyzing
the success of a specific frame as a function of its content, this article shows how
situated representations of actors and causes can trigger path dependencies that
shape the landscape of possible alliances and inevitable deadlocks.
On the other hand, this inextricability of content and context does not only
affect the political debate on ICT failures. Once the Parliament adopts a specific
frame as dominant, this latter can acquire some power to enforce changes in the
operational organization of inter-governmental relations. Whereas literature has
amply addressed the relationship between media debates and policy processes
(Kingdon, 1995; Rochefort & Cobb, 1994), the extent to which the inner work-
ings of the administrative organization are affected by public debates is an
under-investigated field of inquiry, to which this article attempts to contribute.
The following section presents the main theoretical frames on media and
government on which this work is built. In particular, it compares phronetic
planning research and cascading activation as far as the direction of influence
and attitude toward frame content are concerned. In Section Method, method-
ological choices are accounted for, as far as both data collection and data
analysis are concerned. In that section, we also briefly introduce a specific
understanding of failures as unstabilized assemblages, drawn from the
Science and Technology Studies (STS) research field that underpins this
research. In Section Results, a case study is described narratively, resulting
from the...

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