COMMINITY INFORMATICS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES 1 COMMUNITY INFORMATICS IN

comminity informatics in developing countries 1 community informatics in developing countries prof. paul licker, ph. d. department

COMMINITY INFORMATICS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES 1
COMMUNITY INFORMATICS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
Prof. Paul Licker, Ph. D.
Department of Information Systems
---------------------------------
University of Cape Town
Abstract. This keynote lecture intends to explore the intersection of
three concepts: community, informatics, and developing countries. The
paper mentions what, if anything, these concepts have to do with one
another and why the intersection is of interest. It then goes on to
develop some of the challenges that can provoke discussion in a forum
such as this. It ends end with some wild-eyed recommendations about
community informatics as a general model of the adoption and use of
information technology, especially in developing countries.
The purpose of this paper is explore the intersection of three
concepts: community, informatics, and developing countries. We’ll see
what, if anything, these concepts have to do with one another, why the
intersection is of interest, talk about what is going on, and mention
some of the challenges that can provoke discussion in a forum such as
this. I’ll end with some wild-eyed recommendations that our august
participants can “unpack” while I watch, sort of like intellectual
drawing and quartering. While I can hardly claim to be an expert on
community informatics in developing countries, I have explored most of
the sub-intersections in recent years and find the concept rewarding
intellectually while remaining a practical challenge.
1. The Basic Concepts
=====================
First, the major components (Figure 1). Here are some commonsense
definitions
Community: A group of people who associate somehow with one another
Informatics: The development, adoption, use and management of ICTs
(Information and Communication Technology)
Developing country: A geopolitical region that doesn’t quite measure
up to some arbitrary standard.
Community Roles and Uses for Informatics





The notion of Community in Developing Countries
Informatics in Developing Countries
Figure 1. Intersection of Concepts
Now I want you to note quite carefully that these concepts are not
particularly new. We’ve had communities forever it seems. Information
and its processing have been important aspects of civilization for the
same period. And all countries have been developing countries at some
point in their histories, sometimes several times. For instance,
consider Iran (ancient Persia), Egypt, and China. Development paths
have been different (but has this difference been due to intrinsic –
country – or extrinsic – contextual – factors?). There are also some
folk beliefs or syllogisms about development and how the world is
divided into different classes of “development”. One of these beliefs
is that “We are civilized, and others are barbarians.” Another is a
cluster of beliefs that our path towards development is imposable on
others, that we should do the imposing and we are the best to decide
how to impose it. A third syllogism is that our kind and degree of
development is the “best”, the “best possible” or “God-given”, unique,
and determined.
Here, the term “development” is used in its most inclusive sense:
economics, culture, religion, society, education. There are also
intellectual theories about development, sitting poles apart, that
might be labeled Marxist approaches and the New World Economic Order.
Two interesting phenomena are now working to negate established
theories of development. First, ICTs are making it almost impossible
to speak about countries as entities any longer. Of course, in many
cases, perhaps most, a “country” is a fiction of nineteenth century
post-Waterloo politics, especially in Africa. Most of the country-like
entities with which we are familiar with cities or collections of
cities, held together by a variety of interests, mostly commercial or
political/military -- a kind of commerce -- or religious -- yet
another kind of commerce, of course. ICTs are bringing about
multinational, multi-interest identifications, communities of interest
that are both transcending as well as transecting traditional national
interests. This is well known and well researched.
What must be taken into account is the vast web of people and talent
that is making the concept of nation almost useless or at least
operationally difficult. Those who “count” – and later I’ll speak
about “marginalisation” -- are voting with their electronic feet
working here and there, bringing up children hither and yon, investing
the fruits of their labors in this and that. The idea of a nation
developing uniformly is kaput! Just as the HIV virus was (and probably
still is) hollowing out the demographic/reproductive centre of East
Africa, the economic liberalisation of the flow of capital mediated
and energized by the Internet is bringing about a hollowing out of the
human resource/skill transfer centre of much of the developing world.
It’s not a brain drain; it’s a brain transfer.
And the effect of this is to alter, probably forever, what anyone can
mean by “nation”. For the first time, outside conditions of empire, a
great many, maybe the majority, of people that influence thinking in
the world, the knowledge workers, the productive professionals, know
one another, are in continuous contact, exchange vital, interesting
information with one another. When there is empire there’s a brain
drain from the periphery to the center, at least during the heyday of
the Empire. Consider Rome, Britain, France, the Soviet Union. Those in
the know already know one another. But there is no geopolitical empire
now; it resides in the Internet. I know, and affiliate with, far more
people I have never met than those whom I see daily, because I
transact with them over meaningful issues daily on the Internet.
Similarly the idea of community is mutating considerably and I’m not
just referring to electronic communities. One of the really annoying
and most interesting traits of people in informatics is how they are
all smarty pants who know everything and think that they’ve invented
new concepts when the electronic form is just a minor variation on an
important and powerful human concept. The term “Community” has been
around for aeons; both testaments of the Bible refer to communities in
it’s non-proximal sense. Computer scientists didn’t invent that. And
others continue to reinvent this sense.
Consider a recent protest march organised by the University of Cape
Town Muslim Students Association to protest the treatment of
Palestinians by Israelis (presumably Israeli soldiers). What was
interesting was their choice of focus for their anger. That was the
Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies. Now fifteen microseconds of neuronic
exercise will tell you that this makes as much sense as picketing a
mosque to protest the behaviour of Indonesian soldiers in East Timor.
But that’s not the point; people make mistakes like this. It’s the
pattern of mistakes that is interesting. First of all, there couldn’t
have been more than a rew Palestinians in the group of probably a
hundred students. But the crowd formed a community for a while,
despite the fact that most Muslim students at UCT are descendants of
Indonesian (incorrectly called Malay) slaves brought over in the 17th
century to the Dutch colony and not the least bit related by blood,
culture, ancestry or even closely similar religious practice to the
Palestinians, half of whom are Christians, and all of whom are Semites
closely related to the Jews of Israel. And even more interesting is
the “induction of community” on the part of the protestors onto the
mass of UCT Jewish scholars at the Kaplan Centre who, after all, are
not Israelis, don’t live in Israel, maybe don’t even support Israel
politically or economically, and in some cases would be treated as
second-class citizens were they to wake up in Israel tomorrow.
Never mind all those problems with “community”. Here are two created
communities, both mediated by an idea. No ICTs are involved, no
community informatics; it’s just plain old politics as the sage would
say, but there aren’t real communities here. They coalesce around
issues. But isn’t that what it’s always been about anyway? Now, hold
that thought in mind: community as a social manifestation of the
“issue” construct. We’ll return to that later in the context of
“developing country”.
I don’t want to spend time deconstructing “informatics”, because
others have done a better job than I. But I do want to point out that
there are at least three separate and only partially intersecting
concepts here that need to be battled out. The first is the technology
itself. The second is the use of the technology. The third is the
socially constructed idea of informatics as a discipline.
Technology exists independent of its users, no doubt. But it’s not
much fun in that state. However, most of us from first-world
environments have bought so heavily into the idea of technological
determinism that we’ve stopped being able to see technology as just a
lifeless thing. We’ve reified the idea of tool to that of shaper of
the tool user. That’s not quite right, of course; there are Luddites
among us who keep us sharp, on our toes, and in analysis. But
technological determinism1 runs strong in developing countries. A
recent form (the “super-strong” form, perhaps) is that we must have
technology and increasing and increasingly powerful kinds and amounts
of it in order to get and stay developed.
Another interesting idea is technological fatalism2, the idea that
technology is unstoppable. If technology makes things happen,
inexorably, and these things are shaping us, then our own evolution is
in the hands of something, perhaps created initially (and
irrelevantly) by us, but now with its own agenda. This is the stuff of
nightmare.
More compelling is the idea of technology being a latent skill that
takes form in the hands (eyes, brain -- less frequently, body) of the
user. Technology is emergent. You have to mix in user motivation,
skill, and experience in order to get anything. According to this
tradition, to understand anything about the technology you have to
understand the users and pretty much everything about them. There’s no
such thing as bad technology, only bad users. After all, Adam and Eve
were punished, not the apple (in fact, I think apples were rewarded
with the special skill to keep doctors, but not Ph. D.s, away). Our
feelings about technology use are closely aligned to our values
concerning our environments and the human role. To many of the
Woodstock generation, dickering with the information environment seems
cleaner and more environmentally friendly than dickering with our
physical, social or chemical environments. Western religion has always
preached that humanity has been given stewardship over the physical
environment; God has hegemony over our informational (soul, psyche)
environment, so we approach Godliness through using information
technology. Milgram’s (1974) research in the 1960s showed that these
feelings are entirely transferable to the lives of those under our
control and it remains to be seen whether or not we succeed in this
third attempt to become gods3 (after the apple and the tower of
Babel).
Finally, one interesting concept is that of the field of informatics
itself. Notwithstanding the cosmetic shift of names for data
processing to electronic data processing to information services to
information technology and so forth, there has been a movement towards
increasing intellectualisation of what we do. Originally we
manipulated numbers, either numbers representing missile trajectories
or accounting figure in the earliest days. More recently we’ve moved
up the management chain (to MIS to DSS, to GDSS, to ESS and EIS, to
SIS4) and out to wider societal arenas (to BIS, to CIS and BCIS5, to
informatics, to social informatics and a variety of computational
fields such as computational linguistics, computational biology, soon
computational missionary informatics—you heard it first here!).
But in biology, the true sign of maturity is sexual maturity. Whereas
20 years ago when I reentered this field from communication I taught
about our “reference disciplines” (computer science and psychology,
for examples), now we have spawned our own daughter disciplines. There
is no limit to the power of metaphor and the term “discipline” or
“field” brings with it a panoply of goods and advantages that “job”
didn’t. Not only is the term “informatics” sexy and slick, it also
conjures up a variety of powerful, intuitive images (to inform, to
automate, to study, to direct). One could be without soap for a while,
but now in business and increasingly in government one can’t be
without one’s informatics, can one? For a field without unified
theory, grand goals, or its own intellectual history, informatics has
achieved quite a cachet. Psychology took 100 years, as did management
studies itself. Maybe this is another sign of the speeding up of the
intellectual clock. And speaking of the clock, it’s time to move on to
what the concepts of informatics, community and development have to do
with one another.
2. What these concepts have to do with one another
==================================================
Community Informatics: “A technology strategy or discipline that
focuses on the use of Information Technology by territorial
communities” (Romm & Taylor, 2000).
Developing Country Informatics: The use of ICTs in developing
countries.
Developing Country Community: A group of people in a third-world
country, probably related geographically but far more likely related
ethnically or by interest, class, caste or historical or physical
accident
These definitions inherit problems from their elements but they will
form the bulk of what I’m going to be challenging you with today. I’m
going to use the ARI (Romm &Taylor, 2000) model to illustrate the
problematics and derive challenges for you. And I’ll recommend at the
end that we have a long, long way to go before community informatics
in developing countries means anything practical. A few things are
obvious about these intersections.
First, communities have always been held together by informatics. As I
mentioned before (and Webster backs me up on this), it is commonality
of interests rather than propinquity that defines a community. A
community is the physical, sometimes (often, really) geographical
instances of interest (again, often physical). Hence one should expect
communities to act in ways that interest dictates. For example,
interest depends on information, information flows and precision.
Without information, interest is vague, whimsical, uncontrolled. With
unreliable information, an interest is dispositional, more like an
opinion or attitude than belief. Cement the information with precision
and validity of content, guarantee of access, and predictability of
delivery (i.e., all those things that “informatics” promise) and
you’ve got manageable interest.
If the interest is geographically confined, you have the classical
community, but if the interest is neither geographically,
geopolitically, or geosynchronically confined, then you’ve got a
virtual community. And because people can hold many, often conflicting
interests, people can belong to many and conflicting
informationally-mediated communities. In fact, the very same people
can belong to manifold communities partitioned in a variety of ways by
issue (see the star in Figure 2). In this example you can see how
interests, perhaps mediated by information, dictate multi-layered,
overlapping, mutually antagonistic and even schizoid communities.
Unfortunately, “Developing country informatics” is a very small set.
I’ll return to this later, because of the odd state of “development
path” theory vis-à-vis informatics.
The final intersection is developing country community. Now here’s a
problem. Because we think of countries like Gabon or Mozambique as
“developing” we lose sight of the fact that in fact they have been
developing for centuries. Our myopic focus on economic or
democratic-political development leaves us blind to the fact that
social and political development has been going on relentlessly in
developing countries forever. In fact these countries are as
“developed” in any real sense (outside “political” development) of the
word as any so-called “developed” country. Hence the idea of
community, while thought of as something trendy to be interested in in
North America and Europe, is just as developed, complex,
sophisticated, tied into the social fabric, functional, useful,
interesting, fascinating and valuable as any idea we may have.

A



D


E
C
B

Figure 2. How Interests (and Information) Determine Communities
and Community Conflict
As I’ve traveled around Africa – and I am by no means an experienced
traveler; others have more stories to tell – I’ve been impressed with
how complex the notion of community is among my informants. OK, there
may have been something lost in the translation and perhaps there’s a
bit of what psychologists call “experimenter expectancy” going on, but
surely, for example, the idea that a man I met in Tanzania supports
distant relatives (and we’re not talking small donations, we’re
talking 50% of his salary) because he was supported as a youngster is
as delightful an idea of community as any coming from the community
development literature.
So communities in developing countries must be regarded as every bit
as complex, sophisticated and interesting as those in the developed
world. In fact, one might say that communities in Africa, for example,
are probably more highly developed in some senses than those in
America, since people do look out for those in their communities
without prodding, public information campaigns or public guilt. What
they do to their neighbours of other ethnic groups is another story.
Perhaps our only advantage in the first world in terms of community is
the papering over of tribalism. Of course, don’t say that to an
Afrikaner in South Africa or a Canadian of Ukranian descent.
3. Why the Intersection is of Interest
======================================
Now that we’ve covered the two-way intersections, let’s look at the
three-way intersection: community informatics in the Developing World.
What can this concept mean?
One thing the joint concept means is that ideas of community
development either are completely generalisable across all development
milieu or, in fact, are sensitive to levels of development. In other
words, why would we expect the three-way intersection to be any more
restrictive than the two-way one? The common arguments are these:
Access: In the third world, there is uneven and far lower density of
access to the technology
Infrastructure: Also, the hardware, software, and netware
infrastructure is lacking, inadequate, unreliable, too expensive,
etc.; the banking infrastructure isn’t there, the legislative
infrastructure isn’t there, etc.
Knowledge: Human resources are not available to train, maintain, and
develop uses of community informatics to their full potential
I put these up as straw persons in order to have you ask the question:
maybe “it ain’t necessarily so.” Perhaps even if there were access,
infrastructure and knowledge, there still wouldn’t be appropriate uses
of informatics for community creation and development in the
developing world. Or you could see it another way: what is the minimum
access/infrastructure/knowledge portfolio (s) necessary to reach a
certain level of community informatics?
This latter question is approached, albeit obliquely in the Romm &
Taylor (2000) ARI model (Figure 3). As with many other informatics
questions, causality and necessity are often conflated. The ARI model
speaks of sufficient conditions in a virtuous cycle that builds
community informatics (measured presumably through the integration or
aggregation phase) by creating supply for the demand. The model is
useful because it spells out exogenous influences that shape action
(supply), reaction (demand) and integration (aggregation) or provide a
context. Clearly these contextual influences are appropriate to speak
of in a developing countries context. In addition, it indicates
endogenous characteristics of communities that might explain
differences in adoption of CI, such as culture, politics, or
individual motivation. There is even room there for what has been
called, in typical 1950s sexist fashion, the “great man theory” of
leadership, but which has now been refashioned into the “IS Champion”
idea.
One of the most charming aspects of the ARI model is its insistence
that demand precede supply. Or more precisely “demand related
activities should take precedence.” This is charming because it
recognises that the way communities adopt technology might be
different from baseball fields and soap. That group IS adoption,
especially groups of untutored individuals with raging but unformed
and uninformed needs might not act as a traditional market and
“demand” what they are being supplied. More to the point, communities
in developing countries might indeed have very sophisticated needs
that are simply being unmet by the relatively simple technological
solutions in search of problems.
Consider E-commerce, for example. When I proposed to a journal editor
that we do a special issue on E-commerce in Africa, he retorted with a
comment similar to Gertrude Stein’s description of Oakland, California
(“There’s no there, there”): “What E-commerce?” I have to agree.
E-commerce as we see it is really an emanation and creature of North
American business at this time. In a variety of ways, E-commerce meets
a significant proportion of commerce needs now in North America (and
probably Europe and maybe elsewhere). Ditto for community informatics,
especially in rural Canada (there’s LOTS of there, there) and
Australia.
But that is a really simple-minded way of viewing E-commerce and
Africa. Think for a moment about Africa. It’s been there a long time.
Commerce has been there a long time, longer than in America. Business
culture, the movement of goods, supplier-buyer relationships,
competitive and cooperative business modes: these are all there in
abundance and in complexity and sophistication. Why hasn’t E-commerce
caught on yet in Africa? And don’t say it’s access, infrastructure and
knowledge. These are necessary conditions, but we actually don’t know
in what proportions and what portfolios work and what doesn’t work.
What’s sufficient?
Clearly there’s a need to conduct business but not in the North
American mode. If we assume for the moment that the big three (access,
infrastructure and knowledge) are actually there in places or will be
soon enough, what are the forces that will make E-commerce successful
in Africa? Demand. The need to conduct business electronically. The
need to have verifiable transactions with reliable content. The need
for speed to beat the competition. The need for unfalsifiable audit
trails. Not the ability to access these, but the need. And how will we
find out the need? By studying African business, not by forcing what
goes on in Africa into an American or British or Australian mode.


Endogenous Input
================
Technical
Development
Environment
Resources
Government
Era, Time, Fashion

Exogenous Input
===============
(Comm’y
Characteristics)
Motivation
Politics
Culture
History
Task


Measures of “Success” Output
============================
Adoption of CI, Use of CI, Variety of CI, Integration of CI, etc.
Figure 3. ARI Model (after Romm & Taylor, 2000)
So the ARI model is a more general model of all communities. It’s
cybernetic, goal-oriented, knowledge based and takes into account more
of what it means to be active in a community of others pursuing
similar (if conflicting) goals than the common business model. We need
to expand our repertoire of models, taking into account that
communities are issue based rather than merely geographical, that they
are multilayer, that communities run on conflict as well as
cooperation. When this is done, intellectual models such as ARI will
help us understand all aspects of informatics in a community
environment, even E-commerce.
4. The Challenges to CI, You, and This Session
==============================================
Now I’ve rambled through many fields of play and I’d like to bring
them together with a single example of what interests me and my
colleagues and students. Back in Cape Town, I run a taught doctoral
program which is unique in Africa, probably in the world. We’ve
brought together a multidisciplinary team of Associates (i.e., people
formerly known as “students”) to examine the appropriateness of the
applicability of information systems6 to national development goals.
In today’s forum, it might be best to say that we’re concerned with
business community informatics in developing country mileux.
Our first research project is funded by the International Development
Research Council and most of us are looking at some aspect of the
question of whether or not E-commerce is going to marginalise some or
all Africans, and if so, how, and how to avoid this or prepare for the
fallout. Elsewhere (Licker, 2000a, b, 1999, 1998a, b, c; Licker &
Motts, 2000) I’ve addressed the problematic concept of
marginalisation, so I won’t review that here. But for this group, I
can rephrase our research interest at looking at why and how
E-commerce will succeed or fail to advance (business) community
interests in Africa.
In order to do this we are adopting two novel approaches, looking at
e-commerce models as:
*
as models for community rather than as ways of doing business only
and
*
as models of development rather than merely as ways of making
money
You see, if we are to avoid marginalisation of any particular group in
Africa, we’ve got to see how that group can be kept “in” in some
sense. There are two ways of being “in” and one of them, assimilation,
has already been demonstrated to work rather effectively in America –
we don’t need to go there; it’s not so interesting. The other way of
being “in” is “integration” at the community model level, taking the
needs of community (in our case, business community) groups into
account through the power of informatics. So we’re interested in the
community aspects of business (such as the ways e-commerce can build
markets to satisfy the needs to sell products) and the development
aspects of e-commerce (such as the ways e-commerce can create equity
markets for micro-entrepreneurs and micro-investors). Our projects
examine e-commerce as a vehicle for education in entrepreneurship,
e-commerce readiness as a component of e-commerce success, and
distinctly African business modes as expressed in the language of
e-commerce. Much of this work is conceptual; we are only just
beginning to collect data. Our efforts have borne fruit so far in a
successful lecture series available on the web soon, a number of
working papers, and several almost-ready doctoral proposals.
So my challenges to you are the same as I throw at my doctoral
Associates. What is there about technology, specifically information
technology, that can help us understand business, commerce, community
in the developing world? How can a community’s appropriation of a
technology be advanced or hindered by information technology as it
pursues development goals? Which development goals are antithetical to
specific information technologies or uses of information technology?
What are the hidden cultural, political and economic assumptions
behind any particular appropriation of any particular information
technology? What is our role as developers of individuals (i.e.,
lecturers and professors) with regard to this technology? Whose
interests (i.e., which communities) are being furthered by specific
uses of specific information technology or all information technology?
How are specific models of development across a broad spectrum
impacted by the new kinds of technology available? And finally, who is
the developing country here? And where is it? And when?
5. Summary
This ramble across the dictionary began with independent ideas of
informatics, community and developing countries and has ended with a
call to adopt a community informatics approach to all employment of
IT, including the newest IT fad, E-commerce. I’ve spelled out an
ambitious research program we’re undertaking through our doctoral
program in Information Systems and National Development at the
University of Cape Town. This program seeks to explore the concept of
marginalisation in order to prevent “decommunitisation” of various
people, groups, and institutions with respect to E-commerce. I invite
you to participate with us, to enrich our business models with
community development models and to provide a broader menu of choices
for development of all sort.
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge the financial support of the
International Development Research Centre (the Johannesburg office of
this Canadian organization based in Ottawa and one of the most
important and visible organizations supporting research into
development and technology, among other topics, most notably through
its Acacia project) and the Associates of our doctoral program for
their kind comments and suggestions concerning this paper. Thanks also
to my life partner Susannah for her incomparable help in editing and
sensemaking.
References
Licker, P.: 2000a, Will E-Commerce marginalize South Africans?
Proceedings, South African Institute of Computer Scientists and
Information Technologists annual conference, Cape Town, November 2000
(electronic proceedings).
Licker, P.: 2000b, New Business Models for E-Commerce. Panel
Presentation, Proceedings, First Annual Global Information Technology
Management Conference, Memphis, TN USA, 11-13 June 2000, pp 280-281.
Licker, P. and Motts, N.: 2000, Extending the Benefits of E-Commerce
in Africa: Exploratory Phase. Proceedings, Global Information
Technology Management conference, Memphis, Tenn., June 2000.
Licker, P.: 1999, Information Systems and National Development:
Research Frameworks. Proceedings, First International BITWorld
Conference, Cape Town, 1-2 July 1999.
Licker, P: 1998a, A Framework for Information Systems and National
Development Research. Proceedings, Annual Research and Development
Symposium, South African Institute for Computer Scientists and
Information Technologists, Cape Town, 23-24 November 1998, pp. 79-88.
Licker, P.: 1998b, Information Systems and National Development.
Inaugural Lecture, 28 April, 1998, University of Cape Town
Licker, P.: 1998c, Information Technology and National Development:
Enlarging the Opportunity by Enlarging the Workspace. Proceedings 1998
ACM SIGCPR Conference, Boston, MA, March 26-28, 1998, pp. 82-85.
Milgram, S.: 1974, Obedience to Authority. New York: Harper and Row.
Romm, C. and Taylor, W.: 2000, Thinking Strategically about Community
Informatics: The Ation, Reaction, Inetgration (ARI) Model. Proceedings,
PACIS, Hong Kong, June 2000.
1 There are two forms. The strong form says that technology determines
non-technological outcomes. The weak form avers that technology is
necessary for progress. The press is the primary booster for the
strong form and various governments and NGOs and universities push the
weak form. Normally we’d distrust any salesman who says “You just
gotta have it”, but for some reason, we buy the line, with hook and
sinker.
2 There are also two forms here. One, the weak form, is that
technology is going to happen, so lie back and enjoy it. The strong
form is that technology is going to happen all by itself, so lie back
and be frightened. Clearly these two views have strong roots in
European culture, the first appealing to our need to worship and the
second to our fear of the deus ex machina, the god that doesn’t need
our worshiping!
3 Robert Milgram used a clever ruse to induce normal, middle-class
people to “kill” others under instruction from people who merely
appeared to be scientists. Space doesn’t permit going over the
research design, but Milgram showed unequivocally that given the right
circumstances, people would voluntarily give up important
decision-making rights (he termed this the “agentic shift”) to those
who appeared to have the right kind of authority. Although he didn’t
use computerized equipment, the appearance of technology clearly
enhanced the apparent “validity” of a situation in which volunteer
subjects were induced to deliver apparently lethal voltages to others.
Milgram was seriously censured for his deceptive research, but his
lesson lives on in the excuses people make for their behaviour because
of computer “failure” or other computer-originated activities.
4 “MIS” is “management information systems”, the use of information
systems to aid management especially in decision making. “DSS” is
“Decision Support Sysetms”, the use of computers and the like to aid
decision making per se. “GDSS” is “Group Decision Support Systems”,
the application of information systems to group decision making
processes. “ESS” is “Executive Support Systems”, aiding executives in
their work of developing and executing strategy. “EIS” means
“Executive Information Systems” and is mostly synonymous with ESS.
Finally “SIS” is “Strategic Information Systems” or the use of
information systems in strategic fashion, for example, to increase
competitiveness”.
5 “BIS” is “Business Information Systems”, “CIS” is “Computer
Information Systems” and “BCIS” is the hybrid “Business Computer
Information Systems.” They essentially mean the same thing, but
serious fights break out when that assertion is made among academics!
6 I completely give up in trying to distinguish “information systems”
and “information technology.” The latter usually refers to the boxes
and wires and programs, the things; the former often refers to systems
or organisms that accomplish non-electronic goals in larger milieux
and includes people, organisations, etc. Most of my colleagues admit
that it’s often useful to blur this distinction, as do almost all
textbooks, consultants, and professors. The only people who still seem
to care are NGOs who cannot afford whole systems and must make do with
the boxes and wires!