Guidelines for developing agricultural information portals in the Southern African Development Community Region (SADC)

The Internet and the Web have become a source of agricultural information for many people, including researchers working in agricultural research organizations. According to Besemer, Addison and Ferguson (2003:2), the Web has changed the information landscape in the field of agriculture and natural resources. The relatively small investment required to set up a Web site enables a great many institutions to become instant information providers

Information environment of teleworkers in South Africa

The information economy, brought about inter alia by advances in ICT, has led to significant changes in the work environment. Employees are expected to be office workers who are not only computer literate, but information literate as well. The high demand for flexibility has led to a trend that allows workers to perform their duties in locations outside of their traditional workspace. This trend has been named teleworking or telecommuting. This article is based on an investigation of the potential similarities and differences between the information environment of the professional office worker and that of the teleworker

Knowledge sharing via enterprise intranets – asking the right questions.

The corporate intranet is a common feature of both public and private sector enterprises today. It has been found that once the infrastructure and architecture are in place, the real challenge for enterprises is to get users to contribute their own knowledge willingly and to use that of others. The culture of the enterprise needs to promote it. To stay competitive, enterprises need relevant and current knowledge from a variety of sources to allow them to innovate and create new knowledge and consequently new products or solutions for their clients. The enterprise intranet could be the ideal tool to make this possible. For effective knowledge sharing to take place, a knowledge sharing culture and proper knowledge sharing tools and facilities are required