Original scientific paper
Modernisation of the Public Administration; State, Information Society, Good Governance and Archive
Andreas Kellerhals Maeder
; Swiss Federal Archives, Bern
Abstract
Modernisation of the public administration can have different meanings. For pragmatic reasons, I focus on two main trends: New Public Management and e-government. New Public Management and e-government affect fundamentally the public administration but in different ways: The first produces economically, the latter
technically defined ergonomic and cultural changes. What is New
Public Management? New Public Management tries to adopt business management principles to the management of public affairs: it stresses elements as efficiency, performance and reduction of costs, output or outcome, customer friendliness. What is e-government? Usually e-government means the adoption of government and public administration to the so-called information society. E-government includes internal electronic information management and on-line communication and transaction with the "citizen-customers”. Information management is a traditional core business of public administrations since the beginnings of professional government. Effectiveness of the publie sector.
It is evident: Both ways of thinking can create dangers for the rule of
law and the good democratic shape of government. Acting democratically and constitutionally means not only to look at performance and output (or outcome), but also to follow specific procedural rules, which only guarantee the respect of legal rules as the ban of arbitrariness, the rule of equality of treatment etc. All administrative acting must follow these constítutionally fixed values and objectives for the government. To stress this value-orientation, above all national varieties, we refer to the concept of Good Governance. Its core values are the respect of human rights and rule of law, democracy and the principles of legitimacy, including transparency and accountability and effectiveness of the public sector. In this context, records and information management are a core element for the improvement of decision-making in government, public administration and the relations between government and its citizens. Information and
records management are the foundation any public administration
needs to provide services, to fulfil its obligations of accountability towards the citizens, their parliamentary representation and the
government and to protect the citizens rights. Efficient and transparent,
publicly accountable government and public administrations
create trust and reduce corruption. Records management and -
consequently - archives are a warranty for the rule of law and the
respect of human rights.
The Swiss experience: Within a modern and stable legal framework the federal administration has to adopt many principles of NPM. It is difficult to estimate the real consequences for records management and archiving. The need for accountability remains the same - in
contrary: the financial accountability is even more severe. The orientation on private or economic management models, however, do not underline the importance of record keeping. Records management
as management tool loses its importance, as it seems to be too
costly although all ISO Quality Management Standards ask for an
extensive documentation of business management and ISO-Standards
15489 defines what high quality records management is.
In the daily work, however, archivists and records manager have a
complex job to convince senior and junior staff to invest in records
management as they do Invest in the financial bookkeeping.
The trends in informatics too are not only favourable to record keeping and archiving. However, the development of a business and records management system and the electronic archiving (electronic preservation and access to a virtual archive) are core elements of the
governments e-government strategy. The Swiss Federal Archive cooperates with the State Archives and the ICA’s Committees on
Electronic and Other Current Records and on Information Technology
to make real progress in this field, to find practicable solutions
for any types of records, for the output of various systems in use etc.
In parallel the Swiss Federal Archive is working on its online
catalogue and how to facilitate the access to electronically available
records. Both projects are organised in a modular way to achieve
usable results and to bulid up an e-archive step by step.
Keywords
Good Governance; New Public Management; e-government; business management systems; electronic archiving; access to virtual archives
Hrčak ID:
197693
URI
Publication date:
8.11.2002.
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