Search results

By 2016, Botswana aspires to triple its 1994 per capita income and to completely diversify its economic base. The Southern African Development Community (SADC) objectives, as spelt out in the SADC Policy document, emphasise the attainment of enhanced development and economic growth, poverty alleviation, and support of the socially disadvantaged through regional integration. Since telecommunications have long been recognised as the engine for economic growth, the aspirations of SADC and Botswana are consistent with the SADC Protocol on Transport, Communications, and Metrology, which aims at developing a reliable, efficient, vibrant, consumer‐driven telecommunications sector. We examine the focus of the World Bank and the International Telecommunications Union, in global telecommunications development. We then discuss the efforts of Botswana and other SADC states in ensuring that they take advantage of the private sector finances to build reliable, sophisticated public telecommunications networks for entry into the Global Information Infrastructure (GII).

The article explores Africa’s initiative at building a regional plan for the formulation and development of a National Information and Communication Infrastructure (NICIP) in every African state. The paper also examines the challenges and opportunities confronting Africa in its bid to launch itself into the information age. The role of information, communication and knowledge in accelerating African socio‐economic development is emphasised. The paper makes a critical examination of the globalisation of economies and argues that globalisation appears to favour the rich and not so much the poor. It challenges the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) to provide funding for the project if it is to succeed. It eventually concludes by making the observation that Africa’s Information Society Initiative (AISI) should promote Africa.

The East Africa sub‐region comprises the three states of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania which belong to the sub‐regional economic bloc, the East African Cooperation (EAC). Under the framework of EAC, the member states’ development agenda emphasizes development of infrastructure and technological capacities as critical dimensions in the realization of a single market and investment area. EAC envisions the need for sub‐regional integration in the development of information systems and information networks in all sectors of their national economies. This paper discusses Internet access in the sub‐region as an important component in the realization of the sub‐region’s vision. Problems hindering Internet access are identified and the future outlook assessed.

Rendering digital services have taken centerstage in the current ICT for development discourse. E-Government services are mostly under this discourse with the aim to provide citizen centric services in the public domain. Business and development organizations alike are also investing in developing their own digital infrastructure for rendering services to its stakeholders. This case describes scenario in which a cooperative organization wishes to use digital infrastructure and provide digital services to its farmer members. The cooperative continued investing in ICT since the last couple of decades and constantly upgraded it to ease the transaction and bring efficiency and reduce information asymmetry. This had greatly benefitted the members. However, the cooperative is aware that its communication network built on the wireless medium has its own limitations in introducing new services and integrating its databases and applications. The cooperative took note of “Digital India (DI)” initiatives to provide digital services to rural areas and build an ecosystem to empower the citizens in its governance set up. This DI policy has implicit provisions of better networking protocols with improved bandwidth. The organization has a dilemma to continue with investing its own resources or explore possibility of piggybacking on the DI initiative. The cooperative wished to examine the total cost of ownership in either case and assess the feasibility of converging with the infrastructure created by the government.

The Government Information Technology Policies are increasingly favouring citizens and in favour of shared infrastructure and services. It is worth the examination to evaluate strategies to deploy IT infrastructure and services with optimized cost and better returns in an enterprise. This is far more important for a social enterprise like AMALSAD cooperative (user-owned firm) that has deployed its own IT infrastructure and ITeS. AMALSAD cooperative deployed its IT assets long back and in the meanwhile, the Government policy is in favour of providing services over the internet.

The case serves to help students to understand the theoretical concept of Enterprise information systems infrastructure and services. It brings to the students understanding: the drivers of IT infrastructure to provide digital services; challenges that would make the social enterprise (in this case user-owned firm) to understand the opportunities and challenges of deploying the right digital infrastructure and get services on demand. The case presents the scenarios for the students to deliberate and find answers to the right approach for estimating the total cost of ownership (TCO).

The case situation presents a scenario for digital government services. Most of the customer-facing enterprises including social enterprises are also providing digital services. It is important that such services converge at an optimized TCO.

Masters in Business Administration with a concentration in Information Systems.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 7: Management Science.

Describes the vision, development, initial and ongoing funding of the Access Colorado Library and Information Network (ACLIN). ACLIN is fully accessible and free to any Colorado resident with a computer and modem. It provides access to the holdings of 175 libraries and 25 databases, including the Colorado Legislative Database. Describes the strategies used to build both public and private partnerships, obtain federal and state partnerships, and establish both a technical infrastructure and training mechanisms. Also considers ongoing policy and budgeting issues.

The purpose of this chapter is to evaluate the completeness and substantiation of the indicators of implementation of measures on information society’s formation in the conditions of information war and economic sanctions from foreign countries, and to assess the dynamics of indicators and their achievability according to the plans of state development.

The adequately selected list of target indicators will determine the future national policy regarding the process of informatization in all spheres of national economy. Moreover, the indicators set at the stage of planning of national events will signal the correspondence of the obtained result to the planned result.

The research applies the methods of graphic presentation of information, trend analysis, method of comparison, analogy, and systematization.

According to the peculiarities of the information economy’s optimization model, the main indicators of implementing of measures for the formation of information society are: index of development of information technologies; share of citizens who received state and municipal services online; share of the population that do not use the internet; level of differentiation of the subjects of the RF regarding integral indicators; share of households with access to the internet; number of highly efficient jobs according to the type of economic activities “communication.” Evaluation of implementation of these indicators and their completeness proved the necessity for reconsidering the transfer of the implemented measures and reducing the number of ineffective ones.

The viewed target indicators and evaluation of achievement of these indicators of efficiency of state management of the process of implementing the model could be the basis for future correction of the process of implementation of this program. The used method of analysis could be recommended as the methodological provision of monitoring and control over the implementation of information economy’s optimization model.

Highlights Africa’s historical glory and position in the information and communication sector against the perspective of her previous contribution to the development of the information age. Now as a net importer of information, and having lost the earlier standing, information technology is a key resource that should be maximised by the African nations in order to achieve competitiveness in the current dynamic world economy. Africa is at the crossroads with the rest of the world. It is now economically stagnant and technologically marginalised, having only 1 per cent of the Internet connectivity out of over 50 million intended worldwide users. There is one telephone for every 200 people, only 2 per cent of the world telephone connections. The current situation is analysed by means of a literature review which identifies the fundamental issues and difficulties facing African countries in the age of the information society. The participatory roles Africa needs to play as her contribution to the creation of a global information society are highlighted in the discussion.

This article describes the ICT scene in Ghana from 1996 to 2004. The emphasis is on the benefits that distance learners in Ghana will derive from an ICT‐enhanced distance education. The article also draws attention to the efforts made by various governments of Ghana and some agencies to solve the major problems facing ICT‐driven distance education in Ghana. The attention of Distance education providers are made aware of the minor but disruptive operational hindrances to the use of ICT. Some suggestions are made as to how academic libraries in Ghana can assist distance learners now.

As a continually growing financial service of electronic commerce, Internet banking requires the development and implementation of a sound security procedure. This involves designing effective methods via which users can be authenticated in a remote environment. Specifically for Internet banking there is a real need for a way uniquely to identify and authenticate users without the possibility of their authenticity being cloned. Some technologies in use have been presented for meeting the security requirements for national, regional and global Internet banking assurance. However, there has been little research conducted particularly on the creation of secure and trusted pathways. Concentrates on presenting a security framework for Internet banking based on discovering and defining these pathways in terms of adequate authentication mechanisms. Proposes a framework concerning how to identify security requirements for Internet banking such that the transactions being conducted are secured within their respective environments.

To improve organizational performance and sustain a competitive advantage many Australian businesses have begun to embrace e‐commerce. For example, businesses from the automotive, banking, insurance and retail industries have been able to leverage the benefits of information and communication technologies. Yet, those from the construction industry have been slow, perhaps even reluctant, to implement information and communication technologies to support ecommerce. Thus, this paper aims to determine the barriers that small‐medium sized contractors are experiencing when confronted with the need to implement e‐commerce to sustain their competitiveness. Unstructured interviews were undertaken with managers from 20 small‐medium sized contractors from the State of Victoria in Australia, which had annual turnovers ranging from $1‐50 million. The financial, organizational, technical and human barriers that were identified from findings are presented and discussed. The paper concludes by proposing strategies that small‐medium sized contractors may adopt if they to leverage the benefits of e‐commerce.