Information technology and restructuring in public organisations: Does adoption of information technology affect organisational structures, communications, and decision making?” Research and Theory

/ / has been argued that the adoption and use of information technology (IT) in organizations affects its structure. Few studies extend this analysis to examine whether such restructuring, if it in fact occurs, improves the performance of the organization. It is even more rare for these assertions to be examined in the context of public organizations. We use data from a survey of program managers who work in county-level public agencies to explore whether restructuring occurs after information technology imple-mentation; whether such restructuring affects the performance of these agencies; and what the nature is of the relationship between structure, performance, and managers ' attitudes toward IT. We find that IT adoption has little impact on an agency's structure, and restructuring has only very minimal effects on performance. FT adoption, however, has a direct effect on performance. Mana-gers ' support for IT has some direct influence on organizational performance after IT implementation, but both restructuring and changes that occur in performance as a result of FT implementa-tion have an effect on managers ' support for IT. The relationship between organizational structure and infor-mation technology (IT) has long been of interest to researchers. Opinions vary as to how IT affects organizational structure. It is often supposed that IT creates a flatter organizational profile by reducing the number of managers in an organization and that it may also affect decision making by increasing the number of decision makers through improved communication channels. It has also been suggested that flatter organizational structures are J-PART 10(2000):4:801-830 not actually caused by the use of IT; rather, IT facilitates suc