Making the developing world a better place with high‐impact IS research

The COVID-19 pandemic demanded an immediate response from the research community, including adjustment to how researchers undertake research. As in many fields, information systems scholars attempted 'rapid response' research that addresses the immediate crisis. This paper reviews the state of the immediate research and scholarly discussion in the information systems field. Seventy-one journal papers are reviewed. The review categorises nine thematic areas and one broad area of discussion. The methods by which information systems scholars address immediate research questions are identified. The contributions are discussed, future research directions are outlined and a model is proposed that traces the pathway from initiation of research/ generation of new knowledge to practice impact. A further model is proposed to help information systems scholars clearly establish the link between the study of information systems phenomena and COVID-19.

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 76%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The pursuit of relevance and impact: A review of the immediate response of the information systems field to COVID‐19

Karanasios

2021

“…This perspective does, in our opinion, uniquely complement our discipline's current understanding of the phenomenon. By shifting the narrative away from what we perceive to be an ideology‐laden dichotomy centered around a choice of ‘centralisation vs. decentralisation’, our work may stimulate future research supporting Walsham's vision for the IS discipline to ‘making a better world with ICTs’ (Walsham, 2012, p. 89)—as exemplified through this Special Issue and beyond (Díaz Andrade et al 2019).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

“…choice of 'centralisation vs. decentralisation', our work may stimulate future research supporting Walsham's vision for the IS discipline to 'making a better world with ICTs'(Walsham, 2012, p. 89)-as exemplified through this Special Issue and beyond(Díaz Andrade et al 2019).5.2 | Implications for policy and practiceOur study provides important guidance for those pursuing ICT-enabled national development initiatives. First, we suggest ICT-enabled development initiatives should always be initiated by taking both centralisation and decentralisation as complementary strategies into consideration.…”

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confidence: 77%

Investigating information and communication technology‐enabled national development as a multi‐level social process

Ramadani

Breidbach

Kurnia

2022

Are centralised or decentralised strategies more suitable to address a developing nation's socio-economic challenges through information and communication technology (ICT)?We respond to this long-standing question by conceptualising ICT-enabled national development as a multilevel social process and by drawing on empirical findings from a natural experiment set in the context of health information system projects in Indonesia. Our study demonstrates that successful ICT-enabled national development is not contingent on pursuing one strategy or the other but on how micro-level actors interpret, and subsequently respond to, these strategies and the local changes they trigger. Our findings indicate that centralisation and decentralisation are complementary rather than competing strategies to ICTenabled national development because, if integrated into a hybrid strategy, decentralisation enables local communities to achieve national development outcomes commonly attributed to centralisation. As such, our work provides empirical evidence, explanations and new theoretical insight into the wider 'centralisation versus decentralisation' debate, while also outlining avenues for future research and guidelines for policymakers.

“…A previous special issue in this journal on 'Making the Developing World a Better Place with High-Impact IS Research' (Diaz Andrade et al, 2019) argued for a moral imperative for members of the IS community to contribute to a theoretical understanding of the role digital technologies can play in making the world a better place. In this issue, Bonina et al (2021) does an excellent job of identifying how digital platforms may link to the SDGs and so we do not repeat those arguments here.…”

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confidence: 99%

Special issue: Digital platforms for development

Nicholson

Nielsen

Sæbø

2021

Digital platforms are the hot topic in research and practice today and are now an area of multidisciplinary research in its own right, involving economics, accounting, entrepreneurship, management and beyond. It is also a core subject in Information Systems (IS), research comprising tracks in all major IS conferences and the topic of multiple special issues (e.g., Constantinides et al., 2018) with another currently ongoing in this journal focussing on "Digital Platforms and Ecosystems".The now mainstream research on digital platforms reflects the significance of the platform economy. Cusumano et al. ( 2020) points out that the top-ranked companies by market capitalization are Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google's parent company), and Amazon. Facebook, Alibaba and Tencent are not far behind. As of January 2020, these seven companies represented more than $6.3 trillion in market value, and all of them are platform-based businesses. Impressive though these figures may be on the commercial importance of digital platforms, the purpose of this special issue is to identify and foster a relatively unexplored research area concerning the nature, significance and impact of digital platforms for development. It is a response to the call from the ICT for development (ICT4D) community (e.g., Koskinen et al., 2018;Nielsen, 2017) to stimulate the development of a research agenda by inviting a variety of perspectives on digital platforms, including social, technical, economic, organisational, personal and environmental. Moreover, while existing research on digital platforms primarily focuses on the private sector, new business models and architectures in the context of the global North, we challenged the IS community to also explore non-profit platforms, platforms in the public sector and platforms in low resource and developing country settings.To proceed, contextualise and showcase the three articles in this issue, we must first get our hands around two key questions: what are digital platforms? and what is development? We leave it to the reader to explore the detailed review and definitions in this special issue, but our starting point for the first question is the definition from OECD (2019) (of 'online' platforms, a term used interchangeably with 'digital') as '… digital service that facilitates interactions between two or more distinct but interdependent sets of users (whether firms or individuals) who interact through the service via the Internet' (p. 23). This broad definition includes platforms of different types across different domains of application such as for example search engines, app stores, social media, gig work, marketplaces, dating, music, video sharing and so on. By necessity, a high-level perspective must suffice and in this issue Bonina et al. ( 2021) offer a classification into transactional, innovation and hybrid platforms. This differentiates between transactional mediated marketplaces (e.g., Uber) and platforms offering a broad audience tools to innovate (e.g., the Android platform). There are also 'hy...