Deployment of Telework in European Public Administrations

Deployment of Telework in European Public Administrations: An Overview
11
Project AD 1001, CAPE 2000 - Computer Aided Post in Europe in the year 2000.
12
Project AD 1013, RAINBOW - An Object Network for Statisticians and Administrations.
13
see Frissen, Paul (1997), p. 115.
14
ibid, p. 113.
15
Ministry of Research and Information Technology Denmark (1997).

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1.2. Socio-historical preconditions for telework in public
administrations
From an abstract, ideal and external point of view 
public administration is a system whose
supposed main destination is the production of political and administrative programs and
programmatic decisions to maintain the existence of the social system
.
At first glance one might think that communication technologies and the public administration ‘by
nature’ must be closely intertwined, as public administration's ‘primary processes always have
been the processing of information and communication.’
16
However, regardless of a lack of
standardised reliable transnational data on telework penetration in general, and before beginning
with empirical work, publications and our own experience in the field gave evidence that
compared with business organisations, Europe's public administrations have been slower and less
active in tapping ICT-based new ways of work organisation, among them telework.
A recent survey carried out in France in 1997 by Catral at the national level identified in total 55
civil servants as teleworkers.
17
The 1994 Survey of Decision Makers in Organisations (DMS)
carried out by TELDET for the five core countries shows especially low telework penetration in
French and Spanish public administrations. The discovery of 7.7% telework practitioners among
the Italian administrations is, from our point of view, amazingly high as according to our own field
experience and available literature, telework in Italy seems to be in an early stage.
18
Such figures
might lead back not only to the difficulties in defining telework, but also in standardising a
definition of a ‘public administration’. Distinguishing core administration from the wider concept
of the ‘public sector’ can be problematic when it comes to certain institutions (as the
administrative part of universities, museums, health care,...), and in different Member States
public administration differs regarding the extent and character of its tasks. The difficulties of a
quantitative comparison become obvious when considering the UK, where many public services,
including their administration, are privatised and outsourced.
Table 3: 
Telework Practice among Public Administrations in 1994 (DMS)
7