  Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has practically penetrated
into all spheres of life. Therefore a closer look at the impact of ICT in
public financial management and performance is highly justified. Public finance
is defined as a field of economics concerned with paying for collective or
governmental activities, and with the administration and design of those
activities. Activities will be viewed as services or more precisely as public
services. We believe that there is need to consider performance from the
perspective of effective performance and the perceived performance. In fact the
real or effective performance might not correspond to the perceived
performance. A service can be considered from the perspective of the
decision-maker, who in our case could be a government or a collectivity. ICT
can be employed in the three phases that concern the decision-maker: design,
implementation and evaluation. The beneficiaries of a service can employ ICT in
any of the three phases - awareness, exploitation and assessment - for
guarantying a high level of efficiency. Each phase in the environment of a
service will be presented as well as illustrations of how ICT can be employed
in order to improve the end-result of each one of them. We believe that a high
efficiency of each phase will produce a high global efficiency. It should be
noted however that the effectiveness of any system is highly dependent on the
human engagement in the system. Therefore, the impact of ICT in public
financial management will be felt only if the decision-makers and the end-users
of the services engage themselves in the success of the system. Instead of
giving a catalog of services, the focus has been on the model (or methodology)
to adopt in designing services for which ICT could enhance the implementation.
