دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی مفهموم پیوند بین سیستم های اطلاعاتی و انعطاف پذیری - وایلی 2018

Abstract

Resilience—the ability of systems to cope with external shocks and trends—is a topic of increasing interest to research and practice. That growing interest is reflected within information systems (IS), but a structured review of IS literature shows a number of knowledge gaps around the conceptual and empirical application of resilience. This paper investigates what the subdiscipline of information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) can contribute; finding that it offers the IS discipline fresh insights that can be built into a new framework of resilience, and an arena within which this new framework can appropriately be field tested. Application of the resilience framework was undertaken through interviews and a survey in an urban community in Costa Rica; benchmarking both community resilience and “e‐ resilience” (understood here as the contribution of ICTs to community resilience), and developing from these a set of action priorities. The paper reflects on what can be learned generally from this conceptualisation and operationalisation of resilience. It also reflects on what ICTs contribute to resilience in developing countries and on what this ICT4D‐based research specifically contributes to the identified IS knowledge gaps. This includes identification of a future research agenda on information systems and resilience.

6 | CONCLUSIONS

During the course of the 21st century, so far, there has been dramatic growth in the diffusion of ICTs in the countries of the global South (World Bank, 2016). Simultaneously, there has been growth in the importance of resilience to those same countries (World Bank, 2013). Yet, to date, there has been little connection in theory or practice between these two trends. Work undertaken within the NICCD project has sought to make that connection, starting with a conceptualisation of resilience that integrates ideas and schema from a range of resilience literature to produce a single, comprehensive “RABIT” framework. In line with the requirements of an international development context, and guided by the ICT4D literature on resilience, the framework adopts a longer‐term frame for resilience than found in most of the IS literature and specifically incorporates elements relevant to an adaptational and developmental perspective.

This framework was then operationalised in a developing country setting with a field application in an urban community. This provided a proof‐of‐concept for the RABIT resilience framework. It proved to be workable in the sense that data could meaningfully be gathered to instantiate the attributes/mechanisms of resilience. And it had some demonstrable validity in gathering data about phenomena that impinge on the ability of the community to maintain functioning in the face of external stressors (eg, to resist potentially damaging climate events), recover functioning when damaged (eg, through the actions of the emergency services during such events), and to some degree adapting to longer‐term trends (eg, in supporting actions to address future change). The framework proved workable in benchmarking community resilience.