Information Technology for Development: Opportunities and Future Directions - by Sajda Qureshi

SYNOPSIS
Information Technology for Development (ITD) is the implementation and evaluation of Information Technology infrastructures to stimulate economic, social and human development. The word Development continues to be used to describe a number of ways in which people living in communities with limited resources and in often impoverished conditions attempt to make better lives for themselves. A recent world bank report found that the number of people living under a dollar and twenty five cents a day is 1.4 billion (New York Times August 27, 2008). Poverty has decreased in some countries such as China from 835 million in 1981 to 207 million in 2005. We know that China is becoming a strong economy leading the development of IPv6. At the same time, poverty has increased in countries such as India from 420 million in 1981 to 455 million people in 2005 while attracting outsourcing projects from Western countries during that time period. These numbers hardly reflect the changes countries have been going through when their people implement and use Information Technology infrastructures to promote their businesses. The question that this raises is how do we know that improvements in people’s lives are taking place? What are the ways in which these improvements can be assessed? How do we assess the effects of Information and Communication Technologies on the lives of people ? Under what conditions do Information and Communication Technologies bring about development?

There is evidence to suggest that use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) can play an important role on the growth of small businesses, their communities and regions. In this sense, it can be employed to bring about increased competitiveness if it enables businesses to create new jobs, increase productivity and sales through access to new markets and administrative efficiencies. These outcomes can be seen through measurable improvements in the lives of people living with limited resources to sustain themselves. My research investigates how Information and Communication Technologies may bring about Development. In order to investigate this relationship, I draw upon three perspectives in development: Economic, Social and Human. I bring these three perspectives together into a theoretical model of Information Technology for Development which is used to inform further research, practical applications and assessment in this area.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Sajda Qureshi is Associate Professor at the Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Department at the College of Information Science and Technology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She holds a Ph.D. in Information Systems from the London School of Economics and Political Science at the University of London the United Kingdom. She has been coordinator of the Commonwealth Network of Information Technology for Development. She was at the Department of Decision and Information Sciences at the Faculty of Management at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

She has lectured at the MIS Department of the University of Arizona in the USA and has been involved in various consultancy projects in Italy and the UK. She has over 60 publications in journals such as Group Decision and Negotiation, Information Infrastructure and Policy and Communications of the ACM, books published by Prentice Hall, Springer-Verlag, Chapman and Hall and North-Holland and conferences such as the International Conference in Information Systems and the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences.

She has performed editorial work for Journals such as DataBase for Advances in Information Systems and conferences such as the International Conference for Information Systems (ICIS), and the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS). She is the editor-in-chief of “Information Technology Development”, one of the leading journals in the field. Her research interests include the use of electronic communication technologies to support coordination and decision- making processes within international networks and network organizations.