Lessons for Managing Information Technology in the Public Sector

Abstract

Over the past 6 years, master’s of public education students in a graduate course at California State University, Fullerton, interviewed about 460 practitioners about information technology applications and issues. Based on these interviews and the resulting papers and orals, nine lessons were gleaned. These lessons represent the wisdom of the workplace across a great variety of positions and departments. The top two lessons are that managers must support the application and their employees using it and that managers must devote more resources and ongoing thought to training. This article is also about the usefulness of the course assignment to students, professors, and practitioners.