Social services, social work, and information management: some European perspectives

Social services are entering the information society. Over the past decades, information technology applications have slowly permeated service agencies. Although originally the domain of administrative and management staff, now core operational staff are also confronted with making increased use of technology. The way information management in human services is shaped is not only dependent upon technology, but increasingly seems to result from an interaction between social policy developments and information technology opportunities. Similarly, social policy developments are shaped by the existing information manage ment infrastructure. One of the purposes of this paper is to explore-taking social services and social work as the exemplar, and mainly drawing upon experiences from the UK and the Netherlands-the relationship between new technology and the policy environment. We also reflect on whether or not this relationship is more complex than indicated by globalization and related post-fordist theories.