Los sistemas de información y la evaluación de gestión pública en Colombia

Abstract

This article presents a theoretical review of the various trends that have emerged in the conception of organizational and general systems theories and the manner in which these have been applied for the compression and reorganizing of public management in developing countries such as Colombia. The basic premise that this article analyses is the conception of the organization as an open system and the influences that are generated to evaluate and control its management in addition to the systems that make up that macrosytem called the organization, with special emphasis on public institutions. Furthermore, organizational subsystems such as Management Information and Accounting Systems are specifically defined and classified as basic tools for the decision taking processes. There is an analysis of the various phases experienced in government institutions as to information systems design and how they report, for control and follow-up purposes, to specialized entities such as the General National Controllership (Contraloría General de la Nación), controllerships, citizen’s oversight organizations (veedurías). In the conclusions and recommendations section, there is a call to citizens to actively participate through the citizen’s oversight organizations in a movement to watch over all government entities with the objective of, once again, taking advantage of these tools to help public managers to improve their results and citizens’ quality of life.