What is it about?
One organisation is not always more appropriate or more effective than maintaining the same job with two separate organisations. While various organisations dealing with land and property have merged their work flows and databases for example, the roles and mandates of different organisations remain different. To convert such mandates into one overarching one remains difficult in practice for various reasons. One of the most crucial reasons is installed practices and professional networks which prevent actual merging.
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Why is it important?
In many E-Government and Digtial Government discourses integration, standardization and unification are promoted. However, in practice this may not always be a next logical step when aimning to improve services or practices. Instead, mergers need to be rooted in personal long-standing collaboration practices. Furthermore, individual staff members may only be willing to engage in the operational aspects of mergers if it significantly makes their own tasks simpler and the quality of their work better appreciated by external customers.
Perspectives
The various cases in the domain of land administraiton provide a good insight in the practice of intense and long-standing organisational collaboration practices. Looking at these cases from various angles over a longer time reveals how and why structures, behavior and views chrystallize gradually, and not by degree. It also shows that in practice people tend to preserve identify and variety in how they work despite influential calls for uniformity and standardization of work processes. .
Professor Walter Timo de Vries
Technical University of Munich
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Living apart together, Transforming Government People Process and Policy, October 2015, Emerald,
DOI: 10.1108/tg-09-2014-0040.
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