ABSTRACT
Any consumer of newspapers, television, even of government documentation would know more about the potential for information technology in government than the reality. The most futurist developments are the most newsworthy. In America and in Britain publications called Government Computer News and Government Computing pump out stories of the latest developments and profiles of entrepreneurial systems managers. It would be difficult to guess from either publication that the UK Foreign Office and Treasury still use telegrams; that in 1995 there were few linkages by electronic mail across UK departments; or that in 1997 the US Internal Revenue Service was still served by some of the crumbling systems developed in the 1960s. The aim of this chapter, therefore, is to chart the actual, rather than potential, information technology developments within the two governments up until the 1990s. Widespread usage of the term ‘computer revolution’ has obscured the extent to which actual change has been and continues to be incremental, with implementation of only a fraction of the potential changes now possible due to technological advance.
