Understanding Technology Changes for ICT4D Projects through Modelling

Abstract

ICT4D involves the study of design and development of ICT technology to the community. Based on our experience, most of the ICT4D projects are happening in one off solution. The projects will deliver with off the shelf products or services and hand over to the community upon the deployment and training. There is neither plan nor development to deal with changes. Hence, it may lead to the failure and unsustainable projects. We believe that dealing with technology changes is essential for sustaining the ICT4D projects. However, how to handle the changes in technology on ICT projects? This paper introduces a preliminary study on technique to handle the changes of technology through modelling. From the modelling, it showcases how the requirements have led to the technology change and how the business models affect the decision in designing the technology or solution for ICT4D projects. We adopt actor network theory to study the technology changes on ICT4D projects. We extend the actor network theory with networked actor modelling to study the actors’ needs and the impact of cost (e.g. business models) to deal with the technology adoption, translation and development for ICT4D projects. The agent oriented modelling is introduced as the modelling process for actor network theory. The agent modelling consists of models based on the integration of agent models and e3Value model. In order to evaluate the work, we demonstrate how the model can understand the technology changes (e.g. adoption and adaptation) for an electronic health record system (EHR).