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Today the federal government, all 50 states, and virtually all city and county governments utilize computers.At the city and county levels alone, computers are used for some 450 different computer applications including paying employees, sending utility bills, analyzing demographic data, routing vehicles, and allocating manpower.1This extensive use of computers is the result of the promised payoffs from computerization.Early on, Anthony Downs argued that the final payoffs from computer use would be either technical or power related.2Technical payoffs would include such things as increased availability of information and greater efficiency in operational performance.Power payoffs would include shifts in the relative resources or influence of different groups, such as technical experts gaining increased influence over elected officials from their enhanced ability to access and use information.It is now known that major power shifts have not occurred as a result of computerization.Rather, computer use has tended to reinforce existing power relations in organizations.3But to what extent have the promised technical payoffs been realized?The literature has given a variety of answers to this question, and the answers have often been in conflict.4One scholar characterizes the current state of the literature as follows: Much of the literature still presents hearsay, speculation, opinions, or evidence gathered by parties with vested political interests.Unfortunately, carefully conducted theoretical and empirical research studies are still scarce, * Significant at the .05level or below-determined by an SPSS twosample median test which computes chi-square.The data is ordinal and the medians were calculated.
Northrop et al. (Sat,) studied this question.