The Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, where I currently learn and teach, has very little tolerance for politics. For example, the student union organization is not segmented according to political parties, which is the case in other universities in Israel. Rather, it hold ‘apolitical’ views, making the annual elections a very boring thing. Most Technion students and lecturers consider what they do a ‘pure’ thing, which is about engineering and science, and is detached from social and political considerations. In many cases, it is true, but not always.
Take the field of Information systems, for example. Let us look at a single case, which is a good example of how information systems are used to serve political ends. The biggest information systems projects currently on the go in Israel is Project Merkava (Hebrew Link). It is an implementation of a SAP-based ERP system to the needs of all government offices. The scale of the project is huge, in Israeli standards, with more than 100 million dollars in planned budget.
Merkava is managed and carried out by the Ministry of Finance, which is a very powerful bureaucracy in Israeli politics. While I have no knowledge of other countries in which the ministry of finance is responsible for the government’s information systems, an interesting question in what’s in it for the ministry? I believe that there are two aspects to it: the information and the procedure.
Whoever controls the ERP system controls the information flowing through it. Money transfers, government tenders, and government projects are all represented somehow within the ERP systems. As the processes implemented by the ERP system require financial authorization by ministry of finance officials, they can hold a fine-grained control over the execution of government regulations. Before Merkava, when the systems were fragmented, central control was much harder.
The other aspect is the procedure. Every new law, every shift in regulations, requires a modification to the ERP system. If the modification must be run through a committee chaired by the ministry of finance, then the ministry of finance acquires greater control over the decisions of other offices.
While some control over government offices is not a bad thing, the ministry of finance carries a strong neo-liberal economic ideology. They are free to hold this opinion, of course. However, I believe that the way this ideology is implemented gradually limits the commitment of the government to its citizens, without giving something back to the citizens (except tax breaks to the most wealthy, of course). The battle over the information systems is the newest frontier of this war. The problem is that only the ministry of finance is the only side who already understood that.
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