The Digitalisation of African Agriculture Report 2018-2019

An inclusive, digitally-enabled agricultural transformation could help achieve meaningful livelihood improvements for Africa’s smallholder farmers and pastoralists. It could drive greater engagement in agriculture from women and youth and create employment opportunities along the value chain. At CTA we staked a claim on this power of digitalisation to more systematically transform agriculture early on. Digitalisation, focusing on not individual ICTs but the application of these technologies to entire value chains, is a theme that cuts across all of our work. In youth entrepreneurship, we are fostering a new breed of young ICT ‘agripreneurs’. In climate-smart agriculture multiple projects provide information that can help towards building resilience for smallholder farmers. And in women empowerment we are supporting digital platforms to drive greater inclusion for women entrepreneurs in agricultural value chains

ICIS 2007 Panel Report: Bridging Service Computing and Service Management: How MIS Contributes to Service Orientation

Service computing has become the new frontier of enterprise computing in the continued pursuit of organizational agility. Many major corporations are in the midst of implementing significant initiatives to re-architect their IT through service computing to help meet fast changing business requirements. As a result, many new and interesting research questions arise in this area, spanning technical, organizational, and economic issues. Currently, there is a great need for a framework for aligning the issues of technology and management in the era of service computing. This paper outlines the key points presented at the International Conference on Information Systems 2007 panel on Bridging Service Computing and Service Management. The first few sections of the paper contain viewpoints of each panelist on why and how MIS should take leadership in this research area. Then, a joint perspective on bridging service computing and service management is presented

A New Design for Open and Scalable Collaboration of Independent Databases in Digitally Connected Enterprises

“Digitally connected enterprises” refers to e-business, global supply chains, and other new business designs of the Knowledge Economy; all of which require open and scalable information supply chains across independent enterprises. Connecting proprietarily designed and controlled enterprise databases in these information supply chains is a critical success factor for them. Previous connection designs tend to rely on “hard-coded” regimes, which do not respond well to disruptions (including changes and failures), and do not afford these enterprises sufficient flexibility to join simultaneously in multiple supply chain regimes and share information for the benefit of all. The paper develops a new design: It combines matchmaking with global database query, and thereby supports the interoperation of independent databases to form on-demand information supply chains. The design provides flexible (re-)configuration to decrease the impact of disruption, and proactive control to increase collaboration and information sharing. More broadly, the papers results contribute to a new Information System design method for massively extended enterprises, and facilitate new business designs using digital connections at the level of databases

Four Patterns of Digital Innovation in Times of Crisis

Exogenous shocks, such as COVID-19, significantly change fundamental premises on which economies and individual organizations operate. The light-asset nature of digital technologies provides the potential to not only facilitate an immediate crisis response, but also to catalyze novel innovation types to address the societal and economic changes caused by exogenous shocks. As digital innovation became a relevant part of organizations’ COVID-19 responses, and given that a corresponding structured knowledge base did not exist, we found the need to better understand crisis-driven digital innovation. Drawing on prior knowledge from crisis management and organizational ambidexterity as a theoretical lens, we present four patterns of crisis-driven digital innovation, classified along two dimensions: (1) driven by a sense of urgency or ambition and (2) focusing on exploitative or explorative innovation. Based on a thorough analysis of digital innovation cases during the COVID-19 crisis, we illustrate and discuss these four patterns and their emerging properties to explain how and why they led to digital innovation in the context of the crisis. Our work contributes to the explanatory knowledge on digital innovation in times of crisis, helping researchers and practitioners to understand and develop digital innovation in response to exogenous shocks

Digital Sustainability in Information Systems Research: Conceptual Foundations and Future Directions

In this editorial, we develop the concept of digital sustainability for the IS community. By systematically reviewing the Green IT and Green IS literatures, we show that the IS field has lagged behind current discourse in practice and therefore lacks the conceptualization of the relationships between digital technologies and sustainability. Digital sustainability is defined in this editorial as the development and deployment of digital resources and artifacts toward improving the environment, society, and economic welfare. We hope that this editorial motivates IS researchers to engage in digital sustainability as an emerging research area

Towards a Service-Oriented Enterprise: The Design of a Cloud Business Integration Platform in a Medium-Sized Manufacturing Enterprise

This case study research followed the two-year transition of a medium-sized manufacturing firm towards a service-oriented enterprise. A service-oriented enterprise is an emerging architecture of the firm that leverages the paradigm of services computing to integrate the capabilities of the firm with the complementary competencies of business partners to offer customers with value-added products and services. Design science research in information systems was employed to pursue the primary design of a cloud business integration platform to enable the secondary design of multi-enterprise business processes to enable the dynamic and effective integration of business partner capabilities with those of the enterprise. The results from the study received industry acclaim for the designed solutions innovativeness and business results in the case study environment. The research makes contributions to the IT practitioner and scholarly knowledge base by providing insight into key constructs associated with service-oriented design and deployment of a cloud enterprise architecture and cloud intermediation model to achieve business results. The study demonstrated how an outside-in service-oriented architecture adoption pattern and cloud computing model enabled a medium-sized manufacturing enterprise to focus on a comprehensive approach to business partner integration and collaboration. The cloud integration platform has enabled a range of secondary designs that leveraged business services to orchestrate inter-enterprise business processes for choreography into service systems and networks for the purposes of value creation. The study results demonstrated enhanced levels of business process agility enabled by the cloud platform leading to secondary designs of transactional, differentiated, innovative, and improvisational business processes. The study provides a foundation for future scholarly research on the role of cloud integration platforms in enterprise computing and the increased importance of service-oriented secondary designs to exploit cloud platforms for sustained business performance

Effect of Digital Enablement of Business-to-Business Exchange on Customer Outcomes: The Role of Information Systems Quality and Relationship Characteristics

This study extends our understanding of how information systems impact business value creation by examining the effect of digital enablement of business-to-business exchange on customer outcomes. We shed light on the connection between information technology investment and firm performance by focusing on how information technology is used (Devaraj and Kohli 2003) in an industrial services context and by highlighting the importance of indirect effects (Mittal and Nault 2009). A conceptual model is developed that combines a customer centric perspective (Sheth et al. 2000) with elements from the information systems success framework (DeLone and McLean 1992, DeLone and McLean 2003). Mediating factors are identified in the chain of effects from information technology specific business-to-business service quality characteristics to customer outcomes. In addition, we consider two contextual factors, relationship duration and customer dependence, which are known to alter the nature of buyer-supplier relationships but which have received little attention in research on digital enablement of business-to-business exchange. An empirical test of hypothesized relationships was performed using subjective and objective archival data from business-to-business exchange relationships for a logistics services vendor. All expected main effects were confirmed. Customer satisfaction was found to be a significant mediator in the chain of effects from information technology specific business-to-business service quality characteristics to customer outcomes. In addition, logistics service quality was found to mediate the relationships between system quality and customer satisfaction and between information quality and customer satisfaction. The hypothesized moderating effects, however, were not found to be significant. Robustness of the findings was confirmed by testing model hypotheses using data from exchange relationships with customers in two different industries, manufacturing and wholesale trade. Differences in analysis results are consistent with industry differences. This study contributes to the literatures on interorganizational information systems (Rai et al. 2006) and information technology business value (Melville et al. 2004) by identifying mediating mechanisms in the chain of effects from digital enablement of exchange to customer outcomes. Explication of mediating mechanisms improves our understanding about the indirect nature of impacts from information technology. This study also contributes to the literature on information systems by extending DeLone and McLean\u27s (2003) model of information systems success to the context of business-to-business exchange relationships. In addition, this study contributes to the literature on services marketing (Zeithaml and Bitner 2003, Berry and Parasuraman 1993) by showing how system quality and information quality impact logistics service quality and customer satisfaction in a business-to-business exchange context