As the electronic controllers and overseers of many public operations, from parking tickets and taxes to crime projections and urban planning, computers affect the daily lives of city dwellers worldwide. Conventional wisdom and management literature provide many rules of thumb for managing computing in organizations. But do these prescriptions offer good advice? Is computing in city government efficiently and effectively managed? And, more importantly, can computing be better managed in these situations? The Dynamics of Computing seeks to answer these important questions. Studying fifty-six cities in ten countries, including the United States, John Leslie King and Kenneth L. Kraemer suggest that many of the popular ideas for managing vital city computing operations are misleading, and fail to consider the complex dynamics of computer application and use.

Their analysis indicates that the management of computing is a more complicated challenge than is commonly thought, and that many of the suggested policies are associated with extensive problems in computing. The relationships between computing policies, benefits, and problems are investigated here to determine what might account for this surprising finding. The results imply that most prescriptions for computing policies rest on static models of computing activity, while computing itself is dynamic. The authors point out the significance of this "dynamic" viewpoint for developing computing policies, and offer a means of taking the dynamics of computing into account in further research prescription.

Most of the book is devoted to a study of computing use in city governments at one point in time, and concerns the relationships among organizational contexts. In the final chapter, the authors address the changes that take place over time in the use of computing in organizations. Together, these two parts form an assessment of computing in the living system of real organizations.