Governing Magazine/May 1988

FEATURE: COMPUTERS (MANAGEMENT)

THE COMPUTER REVOLUTION: MICROCHIPPING AWAY AT THE LIMITS OF
GOVERNMENT

Once used only for repetitive functions, computers now are starting to
change the way state and local governments deliver services.

By Rob Gurwitt

For years, Dakota County, Minnesota, ran its home health care program
out of a small room in the basement of the county mental health
center.
 Hundreds of colored magnets -- red and green, blue, purple and white
-- clung to dark green boards that took up all of three walls,
displaying the schedules for public-health workers sent out to care
for elderly and homebound clients each week. ``When you first saw it,
it looked like a huge tennis ladder,'' says Donna Zimmerman, a public-
health nursing supervisor. ``It used to panic the nursing staff if
anybody walked by and thumped those magnets off.''
 Clumsiness, however, is no longer an occupational handicap in Dakota
County. The complicated job of scheduling 60 aides and nurses is now
done on a new $30,000 computer system.
 It has made a tremendous difference, says Zimmerman, who oversaw the
system's installation. Dakota County, which stretches from aging
suburbs just south of Minneapolis and St. Paul to farm land at its
outer edges, is the state's fastest-growing county, with a swelling
caseload for home health workers. Schedulers ``had to stare at the
board all day'' to find openings in a nurse's or aide's schedule or to
figure out how to deal with sudden cancellations, she says. Now, with
the computer able to do those things, ``it's definitely saving time.
If there's a family out there needing help, we're able to get out
there quickly.''
 Next to such big-ticket items as computer systems that help urban
planners envision how a proposed development will affect the community
around it or that allow finance departments to find and crack down on
tax cheats, scheduling home health workers faster seems a small
advance, far from the cutting edge of computer technology. But its
value lies in the approach that produced it: In its quiet way, the
scheduling system is making Dakota County's services more accessible
to its citizens. It is evidence that state and local governments are
discovering how to use computers as tools to better people's lives.
 That is not as common as it might seem. Internal political pressures
have historically funneled computers to managers and departments a
step removed from the direct delivery of services -- accounting and
administration chief among them. And in their enchantment with the
microchip, state and local executives are often sidetracked by the
technology itself.
 ``I can't tell you how many state and local governments will look at
the [newest technology] and try to buy it -- the fastest chip, the
most expansive hardware, the most capacity-filled disk drives,'' says
Costis Toregas, president of Public Technology Inc., a non-profit arm
of the International City Management Association and the National
League of Cities that helps local governments make better use of new
technology. ``But that's not the business they're in. They're in the
business to provide services -- to send paramedics, to provide social
workers.''
 How well they do that, say Toregas and others, is the measure that
should count if state and local governments are to be judged on how
they use the enormous amount of money they pour into computing -- as
much as $6 billion a year for municipalities alone by 1990, according
to one study. ``Computers are sure nice; they're clean, and they
work,'' says Ken Laudon, an information systems specialist at New York
University's Graduate School of Business. ``But in what sense has life
improved at the local level because of them?...If Johnnie still can't
read, the incidence of crime is rising, and the streets are as dirty
as they have always been, [then] what has it bought us?''
 By that yardstick, state and local governments have chalked up at
best a mixed record. Computer systems can only reflect the priorities
and abilities of the officials who buy or design them and of the
people who use them. As Laudon says, ``My students have been using
word processors for the last 10 years, but their term papers haven't
gotten any better.''
 But some towns, cities and counties are getting more proficient at
using information technology creatively. In a number of places across
the country, top administrators and street-level bureaucrats are
searching for ways to use computers to attack crime, economic
deterioration, poverty and other pressing social ills. And in a few
areas, the groundwork they laid in earlier years is allowing them to
develop information networks within and between government
jurisdictions that could yield dramatic leaps in their ability to
create a better life for their constituents.

When he was mayor of New York City in the 1960s, John V. Lindsay
wanted nothing to do with computers. ``Every time I hear the word
`computer,' the next phrase is, `three million dollars and three
years,' '' Lindsay would say, according to Jerry Mechling, a former
aide who is now program director of the  Strategic Computing in the
Public Sector program at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of
Government.
 Lindsay was not alone. Unsure of how much they could trust the new
machines and daunted by their cost, state and local decision makers
around the country were notoriously slow to turn to computers.
 Times, however, have changed.
 According to a study by a team of scholars at the University of
California at Irvine -- who produced the $6 billion figure for
municipal computer spending -- some 50 percent of cities with
populations of more than 10,000 were using computers in 1975. By 1990,
that figure will likely have risen to 99 percent.
 And as the computer industry has developed more-sophisticated
personal computers and software packages accessible to the average
municipal or state employee, workers' comfort with the technology's
use in their offices has grown. ``The computer used to be the beast in
the basement. You couldn't talk English to it; you had to talk to it
through a programmer,'' says Bill Holland, an aide to one-time Boston
Mayor Kevin White and now a sales executive with Prime Computer Inc.
``Now a guy can sit at his desk and fiddle around with Lotus 1-2-3.''
 Partly as a result, computer technology has spread throughout the
ranks of government workers. In 1975, the Irvine team -- called the
Urban Information Systems Group and led by Kenneth L. Kraemer -- found
that cities had an average of nine computer terminals, or one for
every 400 employees. A decade later, the average had increased to 111
terminals, providing one for every 40 workers. The group anticipates
that, by 1990, there will be a computer terminal for every four
municipal employees.
 At the same time, the range of activities for which computers are
being used has grown at an astounding pace. Once used almost solely
for automating highly repetitive functions such as bill paying and
processing taxes, computers now preside over everything from tracking
child support collections and jail bookings to keeping an eye on where
hazardous wastes are stored. In a growing number of cities, computer-
assisted dispatch systems are helping police cruisers, ambulances and
fire trucks reach the scenes of emergencies faster, and so-called
``geographic information systems'' are collecting information about
the physical and demographic layout of entire cities and counties.
 For all the new uses to which computers are being put, however, it is
unclear whether they have added more than incrementally to how well
towns, cities, counties and states serve the people who live within
their bounds.
 Developments such as Dakota County's home health scheduling system
have been a long time coming, in large part because over the years the
bulk of investment in computing has been channeled in directions other
than the direct provision of services. ``Computerization is by and
large serving the interests of the bureaucracy, particularly the
interests of political and administrative elites who feel a need to
control the bureaucracy and to control spending,'' says Kraemer.
 His studies have found that finance and administration departments --
which often have the most internal political clout -- are the most
heavily computerized around the country. Next in line comes law
enforcement. In the early 1970s, police departments were among the
first municipal offices to computerize, usually with financial help
from the federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration; in many
cities and counties, their continued access to the funds to update and
expand equipment is ensured by voters' backing for spending on law and
order.
 ``The managers with the strongest external constituencies and
strongest internal support tend to be the ones who get technology
first,'' says Mechling. ``Budget directors and police departments are
the overwhelming locus of investment in computers.''
 As automation ``nears saturation'' in finance and administration,
Kraemer says, more attention and resources are going to public works,
utilities, planning, engineering and other community development
activities. In some cities, residents can now call a computer after
office hours to book public facilities or schedule a round of golf on
a municipal course. And in some cities, municipally owned utilities
have put in a customer information system that allows agents to answer
customers' questions about their bills faster than in the past.
 Social services, on the other hand, still are lagging behind, at
least at the local level. To a degree, that is a result of the nature
of the business. ``The tendency is to spend money on [clients']
immediate needs, because human services are people-oriented. So you
don't typically see large capital expenditures,'' says Larry Dwyer, an
executive assistant with the Boston Housing Authority.
 But political priorities, too, play a role. For administrators
pressed to squeeze the most out of limited budgets, it may make no
sense to spend money on computer services to help those on the
economic and social margins, especially when they bring no financial
or political rewards. ``Those are social problems, and there are very
few people who really care about them except the social welfare
people,'' says Kraemer.

The focus of computerization efforts over the past decade has been a
product of the climate in which state and local governments have found
themselves. The fiscal crunch has pushed solutions to thorny quality-
of-life problems into the shadow of more glaring preoccupations such
as bringing in revenue, finding cost savings and promoting efficiency.
 In many towns, cities and counties, a department that wants to spend
money to beef up revenues is almost guaranteed the funds. Says George
Hanbury, the city manager of Portsmouth, Virginia, ``My biggest
priority is where I'm going to be able to make money and in what areas
I can make money quicker.'' Not only has Portsmouth sunk money into
finding new ways to track down delinquent taxpayers, but it has also
set about using computers to find the most efficient routes for fire
and garbage trucks in order to cut down on their use of gasoline.
 A number of cities have moved well beyond automating the tax rolls in
their search for more income. In Huntsville, Alabama, billing for
city-run parking garages is now computerized. Users buy a monthly
ticket; if they don't pay up, the gate doesn't open the next time they
try to use it. Under the old system, residents bought a magnetic card,
but there was no way to track its use. ``Before, we had businesses
that would buy one card and lose it five times, and then everyone in
the office had a card,'' says David Buckelew, Huntsville's data-
processing director. Now, once a card is reported lost, says Buckelew,
``it's gone; they can't use it again.'' Since the system went in, the
city estimates, parking revenues have risen about 25 percent.
 The flip side of the same coin has been the use of computers and
office automation to accomplish more business with the same number of
people. Since 1978 and the passage of Proposition 13, ``the reality in
California cities is you've had to accommodate growth without more
staff,'' says Jack Crist, assistant city manager in Sacramento. ``The
only way to do that was to automate a lot of functions that previously
had been done manually.''
 Many administrators see achieving efficiency as an important part of
serving their public, and automation as the way to do it. ``If you
become more efficient, it will improve public service,'' says Jim
Ringe, Colorado Springs' community development director. ``You can't
become more efficient and not be able to serve the public.''
 In fact, automation of direct services to citizens in the name of
efficiency has led in some cases to clear improvements in the quality
of the services offered. In a number of cities around the country, for
example, the building inspection process is being computerized. In
Dallas, rather than calling an office that is open only from 9 to 5 to
schedule an inspection, contractors can now call the building
inspection office at any time of the day or night. The phone is
answered by a microcomputer with a voice response system, which asks
them to key in information about the building on a Touchtone phone; it
then gives them a time for an inspection. At the inspection office,
that information is then fed automatically to a mainframe, which goes
on to arrange inspectors' daily schedules and routes.
 Dallas' system cost the city about $15,000 and replaced six clerks
who each were paid at least that much a year. And the inspection
department's round-the-clock accessibility is proving popular among
contractors and developers. ``Now, if a developer finishes up work at
midnight and wants an inspector there as soon as possible, he can call
instead of waiting until the next morning,'' says David Morgan,
Dallas' data-processing director.
 Efforts to streamline government functions can also run hand in hand
with improving public safety. In Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the
city is using a computer to realign its police beats. ``We're using it
to analyze amounts of data that to do manually would have been
impossible,'' says Sam Owen, the city's data-processing director. ``We
know the numbers of [emergency] calls and types of calls by geographic
area, and things like the time of day and day of the week when those
calls occurred.'' The result, Owen says, will be a more efficient
distribution of police that puts them where they tend to be needed.

As helpful as computer applications like those may be in raising new
revenue, boosting efficiency or making citizens a little safer, it is
worth asking whether simply finding cheaper or faster ways of doing
what governments already do is enough to expect from $6 billion or
more a year.
 To NYU's Laudon, the answer is no. ``You can't really say that life
at the local level has pepped up since they put these huge computers
in,'' he says. ``People are just grinding out the applications that
are already there, and there's not much that's new and exciting.'' The
problem, Laudon argues, is that people have not used the new
technologies available to them to rethink what services they should be
delivering and how to deliver them. If computers are really to pay
off, he and others insist, they must spur policy makers and managers
in new directions.
 ``The best analogy,'' Laudon says, ``is to remember that the first
cars were called horseless carriages, and in fact they looked a lot
like carriages, except they were steered by these sort of tillers.
Well, to some extent, what we have here is a lot of horseless
carriages with tillers dangling off them.'' There are signs, however,
that the transition from horseless carriage to Porsche has started,
though it may not have developed much beyond the Model T stage.
 One celebrated example is an experiment going on in Ramsey County,
Minnesota, home of the state capital, St. Paul. There, the county
welfare office is issuing bank cards to welfare recipients, who then
can use them at automated teller machines around the county to draw
out cash against their public-assistance accounts.
 The system was developed not out of some grand vision of a smoother
welfare delivery system but because the county ran out of banks
willing to take its welfare account; declining interest rates made
holding onto the account less attractive, especially in light of the
disruptions banks felt were caused by the monthly parade of low-income
check cashers.
 ``It was a very practical business decision,'' says Warren Schaber,
chairman of the county board. ``We were forced to find some way for
people on public assistance to cash their checks.''
 Human services workers are touting several benefits, most notably a
dramatic drop in reports of lost or stolen welfare checks. ``Clients
are no longer required to cash a check at the beginning of the month
and then maintain their cash somewhere for the duration of the
month,'' says Wahlberg.
 Ramsey County notwithstanding, there has not been an explosion of
fresh and creative thinking about how to apply computerization to
communities' knottier social and economic problems. Harvard's Jerry
Mechling agrees with Laudon that ``the majority of resources are still
invested to automate existing routines.''
 But where local and county governments are finding creative new uses
for computers, in many cases it is by expanding those existing
systems. Dramatic innovations, in other words, may ultimately be a
matter of evolution, of building on the more mundane groundwork that
has already been laid.
 In Colorado, job-training programs in most of the state's major
cities and counties have for the past decade been linked through a
central computer. The system was started in order to let local
officials and the state keep track of participants, and later was
expanded to pick up financial record-keeping functions and equipment
inventories. Recently, it began to serve as a central job bank,
allowing social service personnel to match job openings to clients'
backgrounds and qualifications. And that, says Mike Sinclair,
assistant director of Colorado Springs' industrial-training office,
will eventually allow his and other departments to set up terminals in
supermarkets or other public places so that job seekers can look up
multicity listings on their own, and employers, if they want, can
enter new openings and search through resume files.
 The key to that kind of evolution has been the spread of knowledge
about computing away from a central data-processing ``priesthood,'' as
Mechling calls it, and into the hands of policy makers, managers and
employees directly involved with serving the public. They ``have
figured out how to manage technology as a result of access to the
microcomputer,'' says Prime Computer's Bill Holland, ``and now people
are starting to realize that they can change the way they do
business.''
 Mechling agrees. ``As the technology got cheaper, it reached the
point where individual departments and then individual people could
apply the technology to what they saw as important,'' he says.
 That has had a number of results. One is a dramatic -- and crucial --
change in the way new computer systems or applications are developed.
``In the old days, users pretty much had to take what they were given.
The technicians went off in the corner, designed the system, brought
it up and said, `Here it is,''' says Winston-Salem's Sam Owen. ``Now,
the design of the system has to be a team effort, and the continuing
operation of the system should be a team effort.''
 Along with gaining greater control over what they use computers for,
in some places policy makers are beginning to think in strategic terms
about using computers, trying to find ways to fit them into their
overall policy agenda. The key is not state-of-the-art technology but
learning to link computers' capabilities with general goals.
 In Miami Beach for the past few years, the city's management team has
tried to use computers as a tool for turning around a declining
economic base. The technical effort, says Irvine's Ken Kraemer, who is
studying it, ``is not real sophisticated; it's not Star Wars. But this
is a group of top managers who are all committed to making this
turnaround happen.''
 What the city is trying to do, says Assistant City Manager Carla
Bernabei Talarico, is ``to become a convention and visitor community
as well as develop a residential living community for the downtown
area.'' It is using a new computer-aided dispatch system to cut down
on police response times, and is developing a system that will allow
planners to study the economic and physical impacts of new buildings.
In its effort to attract more upscale residents to its downtown, the
city also has developed a base of data on its buildings using
information from the police, fire, code enforcement and building
inspection departments. ``When we see that a building has numerous
calls of service from the police, as well as building code violations
and fire violations, we can end up closing it down,'' says Talarico.
The city then sends in a team to help poorer tenants relocate,
sometimes using city or federal funds, and the building is renovated
or torn down, opening the way to new development.

Miami Beach's ability to draw together information from a host of
different departments and use it to help carry out policy suggests
that in the end, computers' most significant contribution may be the
chance they give managers to rethink how information is shared among
different departments and even across political boundaries.
 Ramsey County Board Chairman Warren Schaber puts it this way: ``A
person who is in the corrections system is probably also in human
services. That person may need help from counseling or mental illness
or drug dependency programs, and they all need to share their data on
him. We shouldn't have him be processed by the corrections department,
then being sent to another area of county operations. Expanding the
model we have will help us do a better job of taking care of someone
who gets into our system.''
 Says Mechling, ``It's collective behavior, not individual change,
that's the source of the big hits. Many people now see that while 80
percent of what they do is their own personal work, much of what they
need access to in order to [do] it is still shared in the organization
at large. There's a recognition that there are large, organization-
wide and cross-organizational systems to be built.''
 Charles Anderson, the former city manager of Dallas and now director
of its regional transit authority, considers the kind of integration
that computers have made possible to be essential. Five years ago, his
city began to develop and integrate the various data bases that serve
municipal government, tying together crime, water, sewage, zoning,
environmental and tax information for each of the city's parcels of
property, for example. ``The more information we have about what's
happening within the corporate limits of the city that relates to
property and the persons living there, the more helpful we'll be as
municipal administrators,'' says Anderson.
 Police can use tax and utility billing records, for example, in their
attempts to follow up clues to crimes; officials in charge of street,
sewer and lighting repairs can make sure that they are fixing the
areas that need help most and can coordinate crews so as to minimize
the disruption they cause.
 But networks also hold the potential for carrying governments even
further, into areas they have not gone before. While Schaber's plans
for a human services network in Ramsey County, for example, are mostly
a gleam in his eye, neighboring Dakota County has embarked on a
project with far-reaching potential both for county government and for
its most needy citizens. As the first step in a privately funded
effort to find ways of helping poor citizens become financially self-
sufficient, the county is working with nine private service agencies
to set up a computerized network, using the county's mainframe, that
will help assess the needs of people they're trying to help and plan
how to meet them. It will also provide information on what services
are available in the county.
 At its simplest level, the network is designed to make it possible
for people who need social services to find out from any public or
private agency the full range of services available. Under the
current, more fragmented way of doing things, says Tracy Page, a human
services specialist in the data-processing department, ``you're lucky
if you run into the right person, someone who sees this all as a
system of interconnecting things. But if you hit a green person or an
ignorant one, who's just thinking of their own little agency's
services, then you're not getting what you truly should be.''
 In a more technologically complicated effort, the project will also
put on line a system that compares information about a social service
applicant with eligibility criteria for the various public and private
programs offered in the county, giving service workers advice on what
services the person might apply for. It will also allow agencies to
share some information about the people who use their services in
order to coordinate case planning.
 Where such a network will ultimately lead is uncertain. But that it
will make a difference, Page argues, is undeniable -- not so much
because of what the computers do but because of what people who use
them to interact do with them. ``Things just start happening and going
forward once you're connected to each other,'' he says.
 There is no question that it can be politically difficult to get
different agencies, each with its own way of doing things and own
interests at heart, to cooperate in working out ways of sharing
information. And that is true whether they are public and private
social service agencies or, say, public departments involved in land-
use questions.
 San Diego is trying to develop a geographical information system but
with the added headache of making it available to both the city and
the county. Although it is being brought together in pieces, the
Regional Urban Information System ultimately will link 28 departments.
``Hopefully,'' says Lari Sheehan, the county's deputy chief
administrative officer, ``we'll have better information for making
land-use decisions and decisions regarding county facilities' capacity
and location.''
 ``In San Diego, the issue of growth management and growth control is
probably the number one planning issue,'' says Bill Bamberger, the
RUIS administrator. ``To accomplish that, the planners need a lot more
information than they've had in the past. They need to keep their
finger on the pulse of growth, which is difficult unless you have an
automated system with a lot of analytical capabilities and
flexibility.''
 In the process of putting together the first stage of the system, a
building inspection system that will also help the county assessor,
planners and utilities divisions keep track of growth, RUIS developers
ran into some stumbling blocks. The city and county, for example, had
different notions of how to set up inspection districts for assigning
inspectors to new buildings; in order for the system to work, they had
to compromise. ``Initially, there seemed to be a barricade between the
two groups,'' says Bamberger. ``Eventually, though, the institutional
barriers broke down. Each learned something from the other that was
better than their own way.''
 Developing the ability to pull together information about every
detail of a city's or county's economic and social life and arrange it
in helpful ways is likely to become ever more important to
administrators, simply because computers make it possible. Where that
will ultimately lead San Diego, Miami Beach and other cities and
counties that are embarking on similar paths is uncertain. Political
obstacles may get in the way of tearing down departmental walls;
pressure to keep budgets tight may lead top managers to concentrate on
using their new networks simply to cut costs while maintaining service
levels. ``We don't know if city government will be better when we get
done,'' says Dallas' David Morgan. ``We're operating on the premise
that initial results are good.''
 Certainly, the outlook for the structure of city and county
governments is potentially far-reaching. ``I'm convinced,'' says
Anderson, ``that most future organizational designs will flow around
information requirements more than hierarchy and formal organizational
structure. The extensive interrelationships between departments that
use similar information will over time really govern the
organizational structure.'' Rather than simply being the sum of its
generally independent parts, a city's service structure may ultimately
become a more sharply focused and tightly knit web.
 But the value in collecting information in more-efficient ways lies
not in the collection itself but in what is done with it afterward.
``You don't just use information; you use it to get something done,''
says Toregas.
 As policy makers and administrators get a firmer handle on ways to
use computers to advance their goals, they will come to bear a heavier
responsibility for seeing that the results both justify the expense
and lead somewhere other than to the collection of purposeless reams
of sophisticated data. If they can use computer technology ``to become
more humane, to be able to zero in on real problems and deliver
services in a more compassionate way,'' Toregas suggests, it will have
been worth it.


A CHANGE IN THE WAY COUNTIES DO BUSINESS

When a new computer system goes in, more is at stake than who pays for
it. What some local officials are coming to appreciate is that who
controls it can be far more vital.
 In several states, federal pressure to develop centralized systems
for monitoring welfare disbursements is leading local officials to
worry that the new state-run systems will not only usurp their
territory but also harm their ability to tailor services to their
citizens' needs.
 The federal initiative, backed by a carrot of up to 90 percent
reimbursement for the systems, is based on the reasoning that central
data banks able to cross-reference wage and earnings data, as well as
other biographical information about prospective or current welfare
recipients, can help states cut down on welfare fraud.
 In state-run welfare systems, the federal initiative has caused
little turmoil. But in the 11 states where counties have total or
partial responsibility for determining eligibility and overseeing
disbursement of benefits, the story may turn out differently. In
Minnesota, for example, the state is setting up a system that will
keep information on all welfare clients in the state, check
applications against federal and state rules and regulations governing
eligibility for benefits, and be able to comb tax records and other
assistance programs to make sure a person is not getting more than he
or she is entitled to.
 Much of that is what counties do right now. The problem is, they also
do more. A number of counties in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, for
example, index all aid programs by the client's name and address --
not only welfare and food stamps but also county-run efforts such as
job training, veterans' services, family counseling, and drug and
alcohol rehabilitation. So even though the various programs are
administered by different agencies, a county can get a complete
picture of a client's needs.
 That ability, some county officials worry, is now threatened. If the
state takes charge of the system for welfare and food stamps, they
argue, then a county may no longer be able to integrate that
information with its own records, and so lose its ability to put
together a full portrait of a client and fully meet his or her needs.
``We can pull it all together locally, but they can't at the state
level. We don't know how we're going to protect the integration we've
achieved,'' says Tracy Page, a social services and data-processing
specialist for Dakota County, just outside the Twin Cities.
 Even more fundamentally, county officials argue, state control over
how the system operates will force county social service workers who
use it to respond to federal and state guidelines, possibly at the
cost of local control over administering the programs. The federal
guidelines that go along with funding for the state systems ``get into
details like case assignments and [scheduling] control over workers.''
 But John Petraborg, assistant commissioner for family support
programs in Minnesota's Department of Human Services, says the state
has little choice. ``The [Reagan administration's] emphasis on
accountability in welfare programs has meant prescriptive regulations
and a strong emphasis on quality control and sanctions,'' he explains.
``We're using the computer system as a way to exist in this
environment. It will change the nature of the relationship between us
and the counties, but we have a strong commitment to use the counties
to help us define what the system will do and the nature of that
change.'' --R.G.


WHERE TO GET HELP USING YOUR COMPUTER

Planning for computerization is a relatively recent notion. But a
growing school of thought argues that for computers to live up to
their potential, states and localities must look carefully at how they
use information to deliver services or run the government, and then
decide how computers can have the greatest impact.
 ``We master plan for land, we master plan for water, we master plan
for health,'' says Costis Toregas, president of Public Technology Inc.
``Why not master plan for information?''
 Toregas' group, which was set up by the International City Management
Association and the National League of Cities, is one place to which a
number of cities and towns have turned for help in doing that. PTI
brings policy makers together with technical and operational workers
and managers and sits them down with PTI experts to study their
jurisdiction's organizational, personnel, information, equipment and
software needs, and how to go about procuring the last two.
 PTI has 157 members who pay from $3,000 to $54,500 annually to
belong, depending on population. The organization provides consulting
services on technological issues and guides dealing with
computerization and information planning.
 A program run by Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government
studies how to use computers to go ``beyond incremental
improvements.'' It focuses on changing the way governments relate to
citizens, how computers can help redistribute information and how
organizational changes might help boost performance. The program,
Strategic Computing in the Public Sector, holds conferences twice
yearly. Annual memberships, which entitle the member organizations to
all research reports and attendance for up to four participants at
each of the two yearly workshops, cost $7,500 for public
organizations. The cost of individual events varies.
 One place to turn for help with technical problems, such as finding
the best software to guide a fire department faced with a blaze
involving hazardous materials or automating a library's functions, is
Government Management Information Sciences. A bit like a large ``user
support group'' for local and state governments, GMIS has 308 members,
made up of towns, cities, counties and a handful of states and
individual state departments.
 ``There's hardly a function that you can imagine that someone hasn't
already taken the time to sit down and do something about,'' says Jack
Humphries, GMIS' executive secretary. The organization puts out a
yearly survey of members listing computer applications and which
jurisdictions have them. Membership ranges from $25 to $100 a year,
depending on the organization's yearly data-processing budget.
 For state governments, the National Association of State Information
Systems, an affiliate of the Council of State Governments, provides
similar services. All 50 states belong to the association, and its
services are available to any state official who needs them. --R.G.

 Public Technology Inc., 1301 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C.
20004. Phone (202) 626-2400.
 Strategic Computing in the Public Sector, John F. Kennedy School of
Government, 53 Church St., Cambridge, Mass.  Phone (617) 495-3036.
 Government Management Information Sciences, P.O. Box 926, Wichita
Falls, Texas 76307. Phone (817) 692-3707.
 National Association of State Information Systems,  P.O. Box 11910,
Iron Works Pike, Lexington, Ky. 40578. Phone (606) 252-2291.

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