Studies of the roles of information technologies in complex formal organizations have demonstrated that one effect of the uses of these technologies is to engender changes in the ways in which these organizations operate, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Most of this work has explored information technologies in the private sector, although recently scholars have begun to look at the public sector. However, within the public sector, one organizational domain which has not yet been the focus for this type of research is local government. This paper is an initial and exploratory attempt to remedy this apparent gap in the literature. It uses a case study method to examine the responses of top managers in a large data processing operation within a large, urbanized county government to the challenges raised by their uses of sophisticated information technologies, including mainframe and personal computers, local and wide-area networks, and CASE and other development tools. The paper asserts that the traditional role of the "Data Processing Shop" in county government is undergoing a transformational reorganization which will reconfigure its structure and functions over the next decade. The impact of this trend can be seen at the most superficial level in the new ways in which these organizations label themselves; now they refer to themselves as "Departments of Information Services" that are involved in "distributed computing" and in the "sales of services, applications, and expertise to customers" both inside and outside of county government. The case reported here demonstrates that the data processing organization in local government is undergoing changes which will cause it to be fundamentally different than it was during the eighties. The managers' roles in this organization will change, as will the ways in which they manage information transfer. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implication of these trends for data processing organizations in the public sector.
