Forging Partnerships to Provide Computer Literacy in Swaziland

The challenges facing the world, especially developing countries like Swaziland, are many and varied. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) estimates that over two billion people, out of a global population of six billion, do not have access to education. The majority of these people are found in developing countries. As many as 113 million children do not attend school. More than one billion people still live on less than US$1 a day and lack access to safe drinking water. More than two billion people in the world in developing countries in particular, lack sanitation. Every year, nearly 11 million young children die before their fifth birthday, mainly from preventable illnesses. The risk of dying in childbirth in developing countries is one in 48 (UNDP, 2003). In most developing countries, especially in remote areas, the situation is exacerbated by lack of electricity.

Believe It or Not

This paper considers the development of virtual communities focusing upon virtual religion and its impact on humanity. It is important that religion is expressed communally and socially, and the Internet has provided a new community context for religiosity, linking people from geographically, socially, and culturally disparate backgrounds, facilitating interactivity as never before in an intriguing anthropological development. We find examples of “online religion” that are already occurring and see technology as playing a crucial positive role in humanity in the 21st century. While there are limitations with virtual interaction compared to face-to-face engagement, there are benefits, primarily that such technology starts to answer the deeper philosophical questions associated with technology, especially the question of how technology cannot rob people of the essence of what it is to be human. By facilitating virtual religion, technology assists the uniquely human pursuit of religiosity, and merely provides a new “meeting place” for exchange.

The Changing Demographics

As the changing demographics of the workplace influence how organizations operate, the need to reexamine relationships between these demographic variables and their effect on the organization continues. This study provides an empirical examination of the effect of two demographic variables, age and gender, and any moderating impact anxiety, enjoyment, and/or peer pressure may have on computer usage. Based on our analysis of 292 knowledge workers, we identified no significant difference between men and women and/or young and old regarding their computer usage in the workplace. Therefore, the findings from this study do not seem to support earlier research regarding age and gender, which indicated that these variables did impact computer usage. However, the moderating construct (anxiety) did appear to be significant in the employees’ computer usage.

A Two-Tier Approach to Elicit Enterprise Portal User Requirements

Organizations are increasingly turning to enterprise portals to support knowledge work. Portal deployment can be intradepartmental across several business units in one organization or even inter-organizational. Currently in the industry, most of these portals are purchased solutions (e.g., collaboration and smart enterprise suites) and many of these purchasing and selection decisions are primarily driven by the interest of a small group of stakeholders with strong influence from IT vendors. The true requirements for the portal as well as the strategy for its medium- to long-term phased deployment are, in general, poorly addressed. This, together with other reasons, has lead to many failures or to a low adoption rate of the enterprise portal by staff at various levels of an organization. Common problems that hinder portal adoption include lack of an overall governance model, mis-alignment with business processes, poor or non-existent content management (process, tools, and governance), and technical problems associated with the development and configuration of portlets. This article focuses on one critical issue that directly influences the success of an enterprise portal deployment, namely the correct elicitation of user requirements (which in turn lead to the chosen portal’s features and to the style of the portal interface). Taking into consideration the advancement and landscape of commercial portal vendors in the market, this article discusses a bottom-up approach to the identification of high-level drivers for portal usages for its users.

The Effect of Usability Guidelines on Web Site User Emotions

Two decades ago, the U.S. Air Force asked human factors experts to compile a set of guidelines for command and control software because of software usability problems. Many other government agencies and businesses followed. Now hundreds of guidelines exist. Despite all the guidelines, however, most Web sites still do not use them. One of the biggest resulting usability problems is that users cannot find the information they need. In 2001, Sanjay Koyani and James Mathews (2001), researchers for medical Web information, found, “Recent statistics show that over 60% of Web users can’t find the information they’re looking for, even though they’re viewing a site where the information exists”. In 2003, Jakob Nielsen (2003), an internationally known usability expert, reported, “On average across many test tasks, users fail 35% of the time when using Web sites.” Now in 2005, Muneo Kitajima, senior researcher with the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, speaks of the difficulties still present in locating desired information, necessitating tremendous amounts of time attempting to access data (Kitajima, Kariya, Takagi, & Zhang, to appear). This comes at great costs to academia, government, and business, due to erroneous data, lost sales, and decreased credibility of the site in the opinion of users. Since emotions play a great role in lost sales and lost credibility, the goal of this study was to explore the question, “Does the use of usability guidelines affect Web site user emotions?” The experimenter tasked participants to find information on one of two sites. The information existed on both sites; however, one site scored low on usability, and one scored high. After finding nine pieces of information, participants reported their frequency of excitement, satisfaction, fatigue, boredom, confusion, disorientation, anxiety, and frustration. Results favored the site scoring high on usability.

Hackers and Cyber Terrorists

Many aspects of our modern society now have either a direct or implicit dependence upon information technology (IT). As such, a compromise of the availability or integrity in relation to these systems (which may encompass such diverse domains as banking, government, health care, and law enforcement) could have dramatic consequences from a societal perspective.

Computer Security and Risky Computing Practices

Despite rapid technological advances in computer hardware and software, insecure behavior by individual computer users continues to be a significant source of direct cost and productivity loss. Why do individuals, many of whom are aware of the possible grave consequences of low-level insecure behaviors such as failure to backup work and disclosing passwords, continue to engage in unsafe computing practices? In this article we propose a conceptual model of this behavior as the outcome of a boundedly-rational choice process. We explore this model in a survey of undergraduate students (N = 167) at two large public universities. We asked about the frequency with which they engaged in five commonplace but unsafe computing practices, and probed their decision processes with regard to these practices. Although our respondents saw themselves as knowledgeable, competent users, and were broadly aware that serious consequences were quite likely to result, they reported frequent unsafe computing behaviors. We discuss the implications of these findings both for further research on risky computing practices and for training and enforcement policies that will be needed in the organizations these students will shortly be entering.

Exploring the Behavioral Dimension of Client/Server Technology Implementation

This paper explores the impact of human factor and organizational behavior on the outcome of information technology implementation projects. Client/server technology implementation is used as the leading case, given the fact that it is a good example of a major paradigm shift. The results draw attention to the importance of end-user interaction and the maturity level of organizations as significant factors in the success and benefits of the project. Client/server projects seem to be more successful, are executed in a more timely manner, and yield greater benefits when end users take an active participation in some of the stages, particularly during the implementation phase.

Intentions to Use Information Technologies

An integrative model explaining intentions to use an information technology is proposed. The primary objective is to obtain a clearer picture of how intentions are formed, and draws on previous research such as the Technology Acceptance Model (Davis, Bagozzi and Warshaw, 1989) and the Decomposed Theory of Planned Behavior (Taylor and Todd, 1995a). The conceptual model was tested using questionnaire responses from 189 subjects, measured at two time periods approximately two months apart. The results generally supported the hypothesized relationships, and revealed strong influences of both personal innovativeness and computer self-efficacy.

Users as Developers

We report the findings of a field study of the enactment of ICT supported knowledge work in a Human Resources contact centre, illustrating the negotiable boundary between what constitutes the developer and user. Drawing upon ideas from the social shaping of technology, we examine how discussions regarding producer-user relations require a degree of greater sophistication as we show how users develop technologies and work practices in-situ. In this case different forms of knowledge are practised to create and maintain a knowledge sharing system. We show how as staff simultaneously distance themselves from, and ally with, ICT supported encoded knowledge scripts, the system becomes materially important to the project of constructing the knowledge characteristic of professional identity. Our work implies that although much has been made of contextualising the user, as a user, further work is required to contextualise users as developers and moreover, developers as users.