Towards an operations-oriented approach to information systems design in public organizations

Public organizations have adopted over the years a management-oriented approach to information systems design, focused on providing input to administrators, in particular those located in the central office. What is needed, instead, is an operations-oriented approach, which would result in an information system that could support the activities of the operating staff and meet the need of central office administrators. The impact of today’s and tomorrow’s computer technology on such an approach is also examined, especially with regard to software development and maintenance, data and information distribution, data and information integration, and an adaptive distributed database management system (ADDBMS) environment.