Technology policy in Turkish public administration: Evaluation in terms of development plans

Technology, which started to accelerate in the second half of20th century and increased the pace of development in the 21st century, has paved the way for many new inventions and discoveries that individuals and the whole society benefit from. Although both the private sector and the public administration meet at common points from time to time, they place technology in important positions in line with their fields and goals. The public administration prioritizes the public interest in the services it provides and tries to minimize all the measurable and unmeasurable costs of these services in a way that will also benefit the public. In the public administration discipline, the citizen-state relationship in the context of public services is an important topic in all paradigms. Technology comes to the fore as a frequently used tool in public administration in order to improve the methods of providing public services, increase efficiency and citizen satisfaction, or reduce the burden on public administration. All kinds of decisions, from the selection to the development of the tools to be used in a large mechanism such as public administration, are taken by creating public policies. Therefore, short, medium or long-term policy documents are being prepared. In this thesis, the development process of the policies regarding the use of technology in Turkish Public Administration is discussed within the framework of development plans. However, considering the state of technological development, this examined process was limited to the post-1980 period. In accordance with this date, the last 8 of the 11 development plans prepared since the transition to the planned period in the Republic of Turkey have been the main sources to obtain data to be used in the study. Evaluating the way in which the technological transformation in public administration is handled in the development plans will be useful to reveal how successful it is in reaching the goals set, to understand the value of the development plans in this sense and to contribute to the preparation of the next policy documents. In this study, the literature on the accepted public administration paradigms in the post-1980 period was reviewed, the place of technology in these paradigms was examined, the data obtained in the development plans were evaluated with the content analysis technique and the results were visualized and the findings were explained.