Mobile ICT and Knowledge Sharing in Underserved Communities

Organizing principles, exchange relationships, and technology affordance of underserved communities in emerging markets are different from privileged communities, which have been the focus in traditional information systems literature. This paper investigates mobile ICT and knowledge sharing in a rural farming community in India. Our qualitative field study reveals that value creating and value claiming norms are key enablers of knowledge sharing in underserved communities. The findings also identify the communication mechanisms and challenges of mobile ICT innovations that foster knowledge sharing among dispersed underserved communities. We discuss the implications for theory and suggest a practical guide to enhance knowledge sharing in underserved communities

Task-Technology Fit for Low-Literate Consumers: Implications for IS Innovations in the Developing Regions

More consumers in developing regions are using information systems (IS) to facilitate their work and increase productivity. This may imply that more low-literate populations in society are becoming the next billion IS consumers. Yet, how to adapt past IS literature in high-literate context to guide IS designs for low-literate consumers remains a gap. The current study, therefore, aims to apply and extend task-technology fit framework to investigate how IS can be designed to meet the needs and mitigate the constraints of low-literate consumers. Due to the novelty and complexity of the foci phenomenon, a mixed-method approach was adopted to gain in-depth understanding of the proposed research framework. The current paper is a research in progress that aims to make several major theoretical and practical contributions to the social innovation and IS design fields

Dual Role of ICT Interventions for Semi-Literate Rural Communities: A Social Capital Perspective

Prior research has proposed ICT as an intervention for behavior change but it has primarily focused on literate communities. These techniques, however effective fail to prove their metal when it comes to semi-literate rural communities. Because ICT has played an important role in enabling positive change in developing regions we believe they can be contextualized for semi-literate communities as well. In this paper, we use a social capital perspective to focus on India’s farming communities that have comfortable access to mobile ICTs but have not been fully served. We explore some of the inherent challenges in adopting ICTs in a particular belt of villages in Maharashtra (India). Although our results are preliminary they highlight the importance of contextualizing ICTs specifically for semi-literate communities so that they can be better adopted

FROM ISOLATION TO COLLABORATION - HOW THE INCREASING DIFFUSION OF MOBILE DEVICES HAS CHANGED PRACTICES OF KNOWLEDGE SHARING IN NON-OFFICE SETTINGS

The increasing diffusion of mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets has not only revolutionized how people communicate with each other, but has also changed work practices and the way employ-ees share knowledge. Knowledge management studies have to date mainly focused on office settings but paid little attention to non-office workplace settings. However, the use of mobile devices also changes the way employees can be supported and support each other in non-office settings and thus create new application areas for knowledge management. In this research, we applied a three step qualitative inquiry with 36 experts in the construction sector to investigate how the increasing diffu-sion of mobile devices has affected existing work practices that are associated with knowledge sharing in non-office settings. We found that the use of mobile devices helped to transform isolated work prac-tices into collaborative work practices, thereby reducing the spatial, temporal, contextual, and social barriers to knowledge sharing. As such, an increase in connectivity can be seen as an indicator for potential development of increased collaboration across work sites. We conclude the paper with a dis-cussion of implications for organizations concerning the support of knowledge sharing in such settings and an outlook on future work

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Mobile ICT and knowledge sharing in underserved communities

18th Americas Conference on Information Systems 2012, AMCIS 201221170-117