bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Investigating the Impact of ICT Investments on Human Development
Authors: Bankole Felix O. , Shirazi Farid , Brown Irwin 
Published: December 2017

AbstractIn the last two decades, the worldwide information and communication technology (ICT) market has been growing at a rapid rate. This has led to a global net increase in ICT investments and usage. International organizations, ICT vendors and policy makers have been investigating whether such large investments are worthwhile. The results regarding this issue are inconclusive, for this research area is fraught with complexity, and existing empirical work is limited. This study investigates the impact of ICT investments on human development. Of particular interest are the relationships between different dimensions of ICT investment and the components of human development. ICT investments can be thought of as having four dimensions – hardware, software, internal spending and telecommunication investment, while typical human development indicators are standard of living (GDP per capita), education (literacy and school enrolments) and health (life expectancy). If these variables are not modelled correctly, their effect on each other can be either under‐ or overestimated. In this article, the line of enquiry from a study by Kim et al. (2008) is extended to investigate the relationship between the four aspects of ICT investments and the three key components of human development. The empirical analysis shows that the four dimensions of ICT investment have an impact in various ways on the components of human development, and that these impacts are different, in high income, mid income and low income countries. Based on these findings, this study suggests theoretical propositions to explain the impact of ICT investments on human development.
Telecentre Replication Initiative in Borneo Malaysia: The CoERI Experience
Authors: Yeo Alvin W. , Hazis Faisal S. , Zaman Tariq , Songan Peter , Hamid Khairuddin Ab. 
Published: December 2017

AbstractThere are many bridging‐the‐digital‐divide initiatives implemented by various government agencies and non‐governmental organisations throughout the world. Numerous studies have been conducted to identify the critical success factors in providing remote and rural communities equitable access to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Malaysia has its fair share of successes and failures in such initiatives. One such initiative, the eBario Project, which provided ICTs to the rural and remote community in Bario, Borneo Malaysia, has been in operation over the last decade. The project was undertaken by the Centre of Excellence for Rural Informatics (CoERI), Institute of Social Informatics and Technological Innovations, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS) with active participation of the local community in Bario. Critical success factors of the eBario Project include the close cooperation between the project initiator and the local community, strong support from the local champions, focus on actual needs and socio‐economic goals of the community, and deployment of appropriate technologies to the remote community. Given its relative success, the eBario project has been replicated to four other rural and remote communities in Borneo Malaysia. This paper highlights the approach used in implementing telecentres within these communities and some of the lessons learnt during the replication process. The CoERI Experience provides a useful guide to policy makers, project implementers and researchers who intend to deploy telecentres in rural communities at a larger scale.
Ethics of Participation: Research or Reporting?
Authors: Dodson Leslie , Sterling S. Revi 
Published: December 2017

AbstractThe diverse assemblage of those involved in Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICTD) efforts exposes inherent tensions between fields and perspectives. While debates between researcher and practitioner "intent" are starting to surface, these conversations primarily pertain to the methods and strategies in common and in question between technologists and social scientists. This paper discusses the differing ethics between the academic researcher, the practitioner, and the journalist – which efforts work in support of each other, and where are they at variance? When the journalist is also the researcher, a phenomenon occurring more frequently (especially in academic ICTD efforts), what position does this hybrid entity assume when conducting fieldwork? The authors, an ICTD professor and a professional journalist pursuing a Ph.D. in ICTD, are interested in exploring issues of representation, identity and responsibility in ICTD initiatives through the lens of Development Informatics in order to study the opportunities and challenges inherent when the traditions and perspectives of different academic and vocational fields merge, requiring those from different backgrounds to mediate and negotiate their involvement strategies with target communities. This paper endeavors to provide a “blueprint" for others in ICTD coming from a variety of backgrounds and methodologies, and to begin a larger discussion that can grow to incorporate the positions of additional journalists, researchers, and the combination, from both Northern and Southern standpoints.
Barriers in Accessing Agricultural Information in Tanzania with a Gender Perspective: The Case Study of Small‐Scale Sugar Cane Growers in Kilombero District
Authors: Siyao Peter O. 
Published: December 2017

AbstractThis paper aims at investigating the Barriers in Accessing Agricultural Information in Tanzania with a Gender Perspective: The Case Study of Small‐Scale Sugar Cane Growers in Kilombero District. The study was carried out in three purposefully selected villages and five institutions in Kilombero District, Morogoro Region. The study used a sample size of 83 respondents. Both qualitative and quantitative research approaches were used. Data were collected by using documentary review, interviews through structured questionnaires, face‐to‐face interviews, focus group discussions and personal observations. Quantitative data were analysed by using SPSS and Microsoft Excel Spread Sheet, while qualitative data were analysed using content analysis procedure. The results of the study revealed that lack of access to the current, relevant and appropriate agricultural information in the rural areas has led to the stagnation of growth of sugar cane produced by small‐scale growers. The study findings also revealed that the barriers to accessing agricultural information in the study area are associated with the lack of means and facilities by which information can be easily accessed. It is therefore recommended that means and facilities by which growers can access agricultural information are put in place, rural women empowerment and involvement in the decision‐making process at all stages, and the provision of agricultural information to rural farmers should be gender sensitive.
Public Access Computing in South Africa: Old Lessons and New Challenges
Authors: Gomez Ricardo , Pather Shaun , Dosono Bryan 
Published: December 2017

AbstractThe public access computing (PAC) ecosystem in South Africa includes public libraries, telecenters, and cybercafés. These PAC venues offer marginalized and underserved populations opportunities to use computers and the Internet to meet their information needs. Based primarily on interviews with telecenters and cybercafé staff, and on focus group workshops with telecenter and cybercafé users, we assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of telecenters and cybercafés and their contribution to community development. Government‐sponsored telecenters continue to exhibit the same problems reported a decade ago, and libraries are slow in offering technological services. However, cybercafés set up through entrepreneurial initiatives fulfill an increasingly important niche and introduce a strategic business model for entrepreneurs in disadvantaged communities. Learning from the experience of cybercafés can be an effective way to overcome the shortcomings of telecenter experiences of the last decade in South Africa. New business models in the PAC ecosystem, such as the entrepreneur model, need to be rooted within a developmental agenda in order to ensure that ICT facilitate meaningful outcomes amongst needy communities and that a local context for the social appropriation and effective use of ICTs prevails.
Success Factors for ERP Implementation in Large Organizations: The Case of Egypt
Authors: Abdelghaffar Hany 
Published: December 2017

AbstractMany researches are conducted to identify CSFs for ERP implementation in developed countries with focus on the organizational factors only. However, there is a lack of researches that identified how environmental factors affect the success of ERP systems in developing countries. This research investigates how environmental and organizational factors affect the success of ERP implementation in developing countries with focus on the organizations working in Egypt. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches are used to collect data from IT managers. Findings show that national factors such as economic growth, government regulations and ICT infrastructure should be considered in addition to organizational factors to have a significant impact for the success of ERP implementation.
Mobilizing Culture for E‐Business in Developing Countries: An Actor Network Theory Account
Authors: Effah John 
Published: December 2017

AbstractThe purpose of this study is to understand how developing country cultures can be mobilized for e‐business. Within the developing country e‐business literature, culture has been highlighted as a barrier. Less is however known about culture as an enabler. Despite calls for cultural fit, empirical evidence on how to achieve the fit remains limited. This study follows actor‐network theory (ANT) as a lens and interpretive case study as a methodology to understand how funeral culture in the developing country context of Ghana was mobilized for an e‐business venture. The findings demonstrate an enabling perspective of developing country culture, complementing the dominant constraining view in the literature. The paper argues that although e‐business emerged from the developed world, it could be malleable to varied contexts. The paper encourages developing country entrepreneurs and researchers to seek ways to align e‐business to local contexts.
The Livelihood Outcomes of ICT Use in Microenterprises: The Case of South Africa
Authors: Makoza Frank , Chigona Wallace 
Published: December 2017

AbstractThis study is premised on the understanding that microenterprises play an important role in the socio‐economic development of developing countries. Using the case of South Africa, this paper reports on a study of the impact of using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) on the livelihoods of microenterprises in a developing country context. The study used qualitative data gathered through in‐depth interviews, observations, documentary review and field notes. The findings of the study confirm that ICT use has a positive impact on the livelihoods of microenterprises. However, it was noted that ICT use in microenterprises is often curtailed by challenges beyond access and ownership of ICT. Chief among the challenges is the lack of awareness of ICT use in business activities. The study also investigated whether embedding ICT support within a business support programme would improve the chances and quality of appropriation. It was noted that the strategy did not always yield positive outcomes.
Towards an Organisational Readiness Framework for Emerging Technologies: An Investigation of Antecedents for South African Organisations’ Readiness for Server Virtualisation
Authors: Ogunyemi Abiodun A. , Johnston Kevin A. 
Published: December 2017

AbstractThe lack of unifying frameworks to investigate emerging technologies and changing practices in organisations remains a major challenge to the Information Systems body of knowledge. This study developed and validated a new conceptual readiness framework NOIIE (an acronym for National e‐readiness, Organisational preparedness, Industrial relationships, Internal resistance and External influence), for investigating organisational readiness for emerging technologies and applications. Server virtualisation was used as a pilot technology to investigate the antecedents for the readiness of 83 South African organisations for emerging technologies through a quantitative approach and an online survey. The readiness of South African organisations for server virtualisation was impressive, as 73% of organisations surveyed had implemented server virtualisation to one extent or another. The NOIIE framework was validated, as national e‐readiness, organisational preparedness and industrial relationships were found to be highly significant and positive contributors to organisational readiness for adopting server virtualisation in South African organisations. The NOIIE framework could be further developed and used to investigate other emerging technologies in organisations in developing countries.
E‐Government Service Quality: A Qualitative Evaluation in the Case of Saudi Arabia
Authors: Alanezi Mohammed Ateeq , Mahmood Ahmad Kamil , Basri Shuib 
Published: December 2017

AbstractGovernment website services comprise awareness programs for their citizens and others, information distribution, and perhaps data collection, online enquiries, and submissions for regulatory or funding purposes. Quality of service is fundamental to public acceptance and use of e‐government websites, although this aspect is frequently overlooked during the design and implementation stages of online public services. Besides transparency, ease of navigation and comprehensive information, these websites require adequate monitoring resources, including targets for responses and reports. The intention of this study is to contribute to the development of e‐government services, and to raise awareness of user attitudes to public websites among researchers, government administrators and service providers, especially in the context of Saudi Arabia. This study explores dimensions that contribute to e‐government service quality, or have the capacity to detract from website support. A qualitative approach through individual interviews was taken that explored four categories of service quality: the system function category included ease of use, and system availability; and the content category included three dimensions: format, information, and personalization. Further, the procedural category comprised privacy and security, credibility, interactivity, and processing time; the citizen support category included responsiveness and contact dimensions. Development of an appropriate quantitative model and instrument is planned to facilitate research into the relationships among the e‐government service quality dimensions and user satisfaction and user trust. Further, it is planned to research various environments and contexts to provide cross‐cultural comparisons to understand e‐government's user behaviors.
A Software Capability Maturity Adoption Model for Small and Medium Enterprises in Developing Countries
Authors: Kituyi Geoffrey M. , Amulen Christine 
Published: December 2017

AbstractControlling and improving the processes used to develop software has been proposed as a primary remedy to the problems of schedule, over budget and non conformity to requirements in software development. Consequently the software development community has adopted several Software Process Improvement approaches such as the Software Capability Maturity Model published by the SEI as a criterion to evaluate and improve software process maturity. The premise of the Software Capability Maturity Model is that a mature development process will deliver products on time, within budget, requirements and of high quality. Research carried out in developed countries to evaluate the effectiveness of such programmes has confirmed that Software Process Improvement can contribute to the production of high quality software. However, this phenomenon has been less studied in smaller enterprises such as those in Uganda and other developing countries. This study examined the effectiveness of the Software Capability Maturity Model for use in small software developing enterprises and established that the model was difficult to implement in such organizations. Many of its constructs were irrelevant. An adoption model for software capability maturity was designed based on only those factors and constructs of the Software Capability Maturity Model that were found to be relevant to Small and Medium Enterprises. The new model was tested using case study and expert judgment methods. The experts and software developers indicated that the proposed model is more applicable in Small and Medium Enterprises operating in resource constrained countries such as Uganda.
The Contribution of Process, People and Perception to Information Systems Quality and Success: A Jamaican Study
Authors: Chevers Delroy A. , Duggan Evan W. , Moore Stanford 
Published: December 2017

AbstractDespite various studies and several IT innovative interventions, the information systems (IS) community continues to experience low quality and unsuccessful software systems. Persistent IS failures have plagued large and small organizations throughout the globe; however, smaller firms in developing countries such as those in the English‐speaking Caribbean and Jamaica, in particular, do not have the capacity to absorb the losses that result from the delivery of ineffective and low quality systems. This research effort is a continuation of our quest to provide some solutions to these problems – particularly in Jamaican organizations – by developing a research model that integrates the literature from a variety of sources to empirically explore the impact of process, people and perception on IS quality and success. The setting is Jamaica; however, we believe that the insights obtained would be relevant to developing countries in other contexts. The results of the study indicate significant relationships between (1) developer knowledge and IS quality, (2) perceived usefulness and IS success, and (3) IS quality and IS success. Our findings should be interesting to IS practitioners and we offer the proposed research model to IS scholars to promote further research into IS quality and success in small businesses in developing countries.
Complementarity or Substitutability Between the Different Modes of Internet Access: A Property Rights‐Based Analysis on Cybercafés Offerings with Data from Cameroon
Authors: Piaptie Georges Bertrand Tamokwe 
Published: December 2017

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to see whether the preservation of cybercafés’ internet access offering could efficiently withstand the generalization of other internet access modes. To do this, we use the economic theory of Property Rights to show that, considering internet access as an economic good, it is possible to distinguish three internet access modes: the rental internet access mode, the usufruct internet access mode and the full ownership internet access mode. On this basis, the preservation of cybercafés’ activities depends inter alia on the hypothesis of an absence of substitutability between the rental access mode they offered and the two other access modes. This hypothesis is tested using a probit model on data from a survey carried out in three towns of Cameroon. The findings show there is room for substitutability between the cybercafés’ offering and the alternative internet access modes. The no substitutability hypothesis is then disproved. We conclude that cybercafés’ owners should contemplate further diversification strategies.
Investigation of the Radio Frequency Identification Assimilation Process in China: A Stage‐based Model Perspective
Authors: Jie Wei , Seedorf Stefan , Lowry Paul Benjamin 
Published: December 2017

AbstractRFID (Radio frequency identification) is an emerging technology that attracts much attention of supply chain participants recently. However, most Chinese supply chain participants just adopt this innovation without making further steps to fully utilize its benefits. Extant IS research on this technology only focuses on factors that impact its organizational adoption. According to assimilation theory, most information technologies exhibit an ‘assimilation gap’ which means widespread usage tends to lag behind their adoption. However, a technology can only achieve its greatest benefits through full‐scale deeper diffusion into the organization's daily operations besides physical adoption. Drawing upon TOE framework, we propose a stage‐based model to investigate factors that influence the assimilation of RFID into an organization in China. Moreover, we investigate these factors' changing effect across different assimilation stages in the Chinese context that is addressed little in the existing literature.
Participatory Mapping with Indigenous Communities for Conservation: Challenges and Lessons from Suriname
Authors: Ramirez‐Gomez Sara O. I. , Brown Greg , Fat Annette Tjon Sie 
Published: December 2017

AbstractThe indigenous peoples of Southern Suriname depend on landscape services provided by intact, functioning ecosystems, but their use and reliance on natural landscapes is not well understood. In 2011, Conservation International Suriname (CIS) engaged in a participatory GIS (PGIS) mapping project to identify ecosystem services with the Trio and Wayana indigenous peoples living in five villages in Southern Suriname. The PGIS project involved a highly remote and inaccessible region, multiple indigenous peoples, villages with different perceptions and experiences with outsiders, and a multitude of regional development pressures. We describe the PGIS project from inception to mapping to communication of the results to the participants with a particular focus on the challenges and lessons learned from PGIS project implementation. Key challenges included decoupling the PGIS process from explicit CIS conservation objectives, engaging reluctant villages in the project, and managing participant expectations about project outcomes. Lessons learned from the challenges included the need to first build trust through effective communication, selecting initial project locations with the greatest likelihood of success, and to manage expectations by disclosing project limitations with the indigenous communities and external parties.
A Framework for the Adoption of Electronic Customer Relationship Management Information Systems in Uganda
Authors: Olupot Charles , Mayoka Kituyi G. 
Published: December 2017

AbstractThis study proposes a framework for the adoption of Electronic Customer Relationship Management (e‐CRM) information systems in Uganda. Both qualitative and quantitative research methods were used. Primary data were gathered from Small and Medium Enterprises located in 30 districts of Uganda. A self‐administered questionnaire was the main data collection tool. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze data and refine the requirements for adoption of e‐CRM information systems. The findings indicate that for successful adoption of e‐CRM information systems, there should be user sensitization, training and infrastructure. There is also need for top management support and an e‐CRM policy to guide usage. The most important features of e‐CRM information systems were identified as the ability to ensure customer privacy, presence of a Frequently Asked Questions tool, and high speed. The proposed framework was developed based on Thong (1999) Technology Organizational Environmental Management (TOEM), with refined requirements from primary data. The developed framework was validated using a case study. Validation results indicate that the framework is applicable and can help improve the adoption of e‐CRM information systems in Uganda.