Local Government Use of Information Technology: The Next Decade
本文预测未来十年信息技术在地方政府中的应用，指出硬件进步虽令人兴奋，但实际采纳存在约10-15年的滞后，且主要限于大型富裕政府，小型政府采纳更慢。
Most forecasts of the near future of information technology in local governments and in other organizations rest on the assumption of continued phenomenal progress in computing hardware technology similar to that experienced over the past 20 years. Among these forecasts are predictions of the automated office, the automated factory, and even the automated city. Concentrating only on the hardware advancements, one can construct an exciting picture of the local government of the future, complete with public safety command and control systems, executive information systems, office automation systems, electronic mail, and other sophisticated applications of information technology.' Such forecasts are plausible, but there is no a priori reason to expect that they will come to pass in the near future. Among other things, there is no evidence that such visions represent real advancements over the way local governments presently do things. Few examples of these new uses of information technology have been installed in operational settings, so there is little to go on in predicting their actual consequences. Experience with advanced uses has been limited to experimentation in research laboratories and universities and in a few local governments, and even in such experimental settings, little has been published about actual impacts. The time scales of the predictions also are naive. Research indicates that new information technologies show about a 10-year lag period between introduction in local governments and acceptance and routinization in a significant population of local governments.' It is only the leading-edge, innovative local governments, which are usually the largest, wealthiest, most professional, and most technologically advanced governments that adopt within 10 years. The smaller governments (cities below 50,000 and counties below 100,000 in population) take longer to adopt-on the order of 15 years after introduction. Simple and inexpensive technologies can be adopted with ease, but information technologies are not simple technologies. For example, although introduced in the early 1950s, computing technology had been adopted by less than onequarter of the 20,000 U.S. cities and counties by 1975.3 While this lag period might grow shorter in the future due