Réformer l’administration publique au moyen d’un instrument informatique. Le cas du logiciel Sigipes au Cameroun

For more than thirty years, IT management tools have been central to modernisation
projects of the public administration. This research analyses the appropriateness of these type of project with a focus on Cameroon. The country has started this initiative without involving international institutions. In 2000, the public administration acquired the Sigipes, a new computer tool to process the career files of public agents. It has been designed by Cameroonian engineers to switch from manual processing which was slow, error-prone and vulnerable to a more automated and modern management of human resources. It aimed at providing the State with a tool to control staffing and its wage bill. Twenty years later, although this reform was well implemented, the results expected have not yet been reached. Based on qualitative research carried out in the ministries in Yaoundé, this thesis seeks to account for this poor record by looking back at the social life of this 2.0 reform, from its development to its appropriation by civil servants. The research highlights its design, the way it was negotiated and circumvented by different categories of stakeholders within the State : the experts and senior civil servants who presided over its adoption, the agents in charge of processing career acts in the ministries, and the civil servants-users who come to the capital to check on the processing of their files. This ’bottom-up’ approach helps to shed light on the scope and limits of this type of reform, and the transformations of the State that it brings about.