Business & Software System Project Research
Context Cultural Communication & Computing Research Institute, Sheffield Hallam University includes internationally recognised researchers in Art & Design, Communications Studies and Computing. It’s a leading UK centre for design research (rated 5 within the 2001 RAE). Environmental surroundings encourage novel interdisciplinary collaboration with recent projects examining: interactive mediaeval poetry, technology in social action organisations, digital jewellery, medical prosthetics (now getting used in NASA’s robotics programme), smart media for e-Inclusion and electronic paper-prototyping. It really works with national and international partners in addition to local government and voluntary sector groups on e-Inclusion issues.
University of Oxford has strengths across many regions of engineering and social and natural science. The Department of International Development (Queen Elizabeth House) supplies a focus for that University’s research and teaching on development studies. Among the world’s leading research centres on development studies, its objective would be to conduct higher level research which advances knowledge of the complex economic, social and political processes of alternation in countries within the poorer areas of the world and also to educate students to know these processes inside a multi-disciplinary perspective. Research at QEH concerns International and National Economic Development; Human Development, Gender and also the Environment; and States, Markets and Politics: Africa & South Asia.
Overseas Development Institute (ODI) is Britain’s leading independent think-tank on international development and humanitarian issues. Its mission would be to inspire and inform policy and exercise which result in the reduction of poverty, the alleviation of suffering and also the achievement of sustainable livelihoods in developing countries. ODI practical knowledge of partnering with NGOs and government in India on development research. Additionally, the study and Policy in Development Group (RAPID) recently completed work linking ICTs to livelihood methods to development (for that Food and Agriculture from the United Nations and also the UK Department for International Development). Relevant institutional resources include Prof. John Farrington, that has led major studies on livelihoods, municipality reform, public investment and repair delivery in India, and Robert Chapman, that has key experience of policy research in ICT for development including field research in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka around the ‘hub and spoke’ e-village model and biovillage concept pioneered through the M.S.Swaminathan Research Foundation and sector inexpensive ICT solution providers in Bangalore, Karnataka.
Rural e-finance: Participatory co-design of Sustainable Software and Business Systems
Case for Support Aims and objectives This project will explore how techniques in the fields of participatory style of Information & Communications Technologies (ICT), agile ICT development and participatory rural appraisal could be combined to aid the (locally based) growth and development of sustainable software and business systems to be used by networks of rural village co-operatives. Our objectives to do this aim are: To unify & relate methods from rural development, sustainable business modelling, and ICT design; To comprehend the specific needs and problems of rural cooperatives and just how these can be met through ICTs; To find methods for undertaking ICT for Development that bring about building innovation capacity in beneficiary communities; To create innovative sustainable business models for ICT supported services delivery and knowledge inequality reduction in disadvantaged communities; To disseminate the techniques and findings to academic and practitioner communities To explore the transfer of lessons learnt in one community to others (e.g. India to China).
Background rationale
A sizable body of labor emphasises the need to empower host communities of economic development projects to create and control those projects (Chambers, 1991, Anderson et al., 1999, ActionAid, 2005). Many development projects recently are making utilization of ICT as part of their plan (ITID, 2003 – . However, relations between these techniques and participatory methods employed for ICT design (Greenbaum & Kyng, 1991; Schuler & Namioka, 1993), or emerging practices for example agile methods (Boehm, 2002; Beck et al., 2001) and extreme programming (Beck, 1999), haven’t been explored. Regardless of the similarities in perspective between participatory ICT design within the developed world and also the requirements of international development projects, there’s also important specificities in applying participatory methods to development. Some factors in software development include: Collaborative design activities should be sensitive to our prime costs of face-to-face working between developed and developing countries, but additionally to the limitations of accessible communications networks, which limit the frequent review practices which are common in agile methods. Establishing effective partnership employed in development projects could be very difficult, requiring significant cycles, because of the enormous disparities in perceived status between host communities and designers. Developing world projects involve cultural and language barriers, for extreme compared to those encountered in projects within the developed world. The institutional arrangements and historical context that surround international development can certainly distort project priorities and lead to inappropriate decisions. Thus, ICT design for development raises specific challenges to existing software development methods. By investigating these challenges inside a practical action research setting, this project will identify means of use in design for development, but could also provide insights and new methods for working that may add value to software practice within the developed world.
You will find additional problems that must be considered when utilizing participatory design of ICT systems in economic development, instead of simply to meet the requirements of a (financially secure) customer: In economic development projects a vital goal would be to enhance the long-term capability of host communities following the project ends. This isn’t built into existing software design methods and requires new thinking. Using ICT in development requires analysis of sustainability at multiple levels: technical, financial, human and organisational.
Thus, participants must widen the analysis and design space to take into account: local economic conditions, infrastructure for example power supply and tech support team, political structures, and savings (World Bank, 2002; Dossani et al., 2005). The setting with this project may be the development of software and business systems to aid micro-finance cooperatives in rural India. Cooperatives play a vital role in sustainable development because they guarantee local participation (Uphoff, 1992). In developing countries, specifically in Asia, many cooperatives exist offering services in agriculture, banking, credit, fishing and housing. In India in 1999, for example, there were approximately 503,962 cooperatives, with a membership well over 200 million people (NCUI, 1999). ICTs can enable cooperatives to grow their subscriber base, extend their hands into underserved areas minimizing transaction costs (WRI, 2004). Nevertheless, digital Divide necessitates new types of access to this content and services available. (Rao, 2004).
There are lots of projects that attempted to use ICT to aid rural communities and co-operatives, but not many are making the impact they could due to their small scale and insufficient sustainable business models. Sustainability is a long-standing issue in ICT for development projects (World Bank, 2002), and also the development of sustainable business models has increasingly belong to spotlight (Rout, 2002; Kumar, 2004; Singh, 2003; John, 2004). However, there is little change evidence concerning the sustainability of communitydriven approaches. The controversy on the roles of private and public sectors in ICT supported development plans continues to be on-going (World Bank, 2002). The role of social entrepreneurship in bridging digital divide also awaits exploration, although policy makers and politicians have become increasingly conscious of the potential of such models. All of this leaves major gap in literature and ‘best practices’ identification. This project is novel in combining the participatory style of ICT systems with designing sustainable business models. By addressing these inter-dependent dimensions, the project will bring about software and economic development methods both in the developing and also the developed world.
Delivering multiple services to ‘remote service delivery points’ To check our methods we shall undertake an action research study with Saral Services (an NGO dealing with Indian microfinance co-ops) along with a network of co-operatives in India (to become identified together with Saral). The project will design and prototype a cutting-edge model for service delivery allowing co-ops in a single village (collaborating with co-operative banks or any other institutions) to provide services to users situated in other villages remote in the co-op centre. This structure is problematic in rural India due to: the limited communications infrastructure; the limited literacy skills of numerous intended beneficiaries; and also the difficulty of developing appropriate authentication and accountability mechanisms to safeguard both parties to financial transactions.
The idea demonstrator will utilise existing tools (e.g. cell phones or other devices that are offered / affordable within the target market) to supply the technical platform for that ‘remote service delivery points’ (RSDPs) that people envisage. Figure 1 shows a potential structure for that system. “A successful innovation demands a cutting-edge business model a minimum of as much as it takes an innovative product offering” (Chesbrough, 2003). The company plan provides a outcomes of technology innovations and economic and social outcomes.
Innovative ICT-supported service delivery system, by small rural organisations particularly, demands stronger support from a suitable sustainable business design to maintain its financial and institutional sustainability. Poor ICT for Rise in the rural communities of developing countries, there has been considerable projects operated by self-help groups, cooperatives and entrepreneurs. Sustainability of those projects, however, remains a central issue that requires further exploration. Within this project, we shall demonstrate the feasibility from the concept by: identifying factors and practices that support / inhibit innovation in designing, implementing and taking advantage of ICT in the context of systems rise in developing countries; developing new methods to participatory ICT design that can take into account: the issues of employed in developing countries, the requirement for sustainable business models and also the goal of promoting long-term innovation capability; testing these approaches by utilizing them in a case-study by which we create a demonstrator system which allows one financial service (e.g.loans) to become delivered with a co-op to one group of rural villages using available communications technologies; and developing business models that demonstrate how this type of service model (probably based on multiple services) can be created sustainable taking into consideration the costs and capabilities from the proposed technical infrastructure.
Research design and techniques
The research plan mixes overview of existing literature, evaluation of past collaboration models, growth and development of new proposals and reflective action research. We shall review existing projects to recognize key success factors in ICT projects in rural co-operatives/ Extra funds for fieldwork concerning this may be obtained by ODI. We shall publish outcomes of this work being an ODI Working Paper. The work will be led by ODI. We shall use ethnography and contextual enquiry (led through the post-doc at SHU) to understand more about differences between your Indian and planet software development contexts. This activity will assist you to build relationships over the team and between your team and beneficiary communities.
We shall conduct a multi-disciplinary overview of existing relevant research and projects examining: participatory methods in ICT design; participatory methods in development; sustainable business models for services delivery in collective enterprises and SMEs; and native economic development. We shall select methods and methods from the existing literature, adapting them in reaction to our analysis of context, and evolve new techniques as necessary. The post-doc at SHU will lead the work, adapting techniques to take into account outputs form WP The output is a draft methods handbook. The post-doc at Oxford will analyse the present business types of ICT-supported service delivery in small enterprises, critical factors affecting successful ICT applications in micro-finance, and existing organisational infrastructure and ICT in rural communities. Emphasis is going to be placed on incentive scheme design, ownership, governance and organisational structure of rural cooperatives in India and elsewhere (e.g. China). Thus we’ll identify and set of best business practices for integrating ICT in micro-finance. We shall use and refine the techniques developed in WP 4 using action research to build up designs and prototypes for remote financial service delivery by rural co-ops.
The designs will require into account existing, easily available hardware and systems, and also the findings from business modelling in WP Based on operate in WP 6 and 7 we shall create a sustainable business design to facilitate the sustainable deployment from the software system developed in WP5 in a province. Special emphasis is going to be placed on comparing the role of social vs. private entrepreneurship, incentive design through ownership and governance arrangement, comparing the standard close business design vs. a wide open business model, and also the role of multinational enterprises (MNEs). Special attention is going to be placed on the complex social and economic settings in rural India. The possibility to generalise the brand new business model to some wider ecogeographical context (e.g. China) is going to be explored.
We shall develop the prototype and deploy it to show the feasibility of the medium for delivering one financial service (e.g. loans) to users remote in the co-op centre, connected using simple and easy affordable communication technologies (e.g. cell phones and similar devices) and therefore are sustainable within this context. The techniques handbook is going to be reviewed within the light of field experiences. We shall try to extend the project, to be able to evaluate the scalability and transferability from the methods to larger systems in Indian microfinance as well as in other countries. We shall engage directly with partners for example ActionAid, VSO, the Indian ‘Coops 2020’ group and NGOs with interests in participatory methods and ICT in development. Timing of the package permits us to establish clear progress before seeking further funding. Paul Matthews at ODI will lead the work. We shall conserve a regular overview of the project.
Additionally, we plan specific review activities at key stages. In months Ten to twelve we shall devise an assessment framework for assessing the impact from the project. In months 16 – 18 we shall agree an interior participatory evaluation scheme for assessing local usefulness of project outputs using the beneficiary communities. We shall make use of this framework in Months 26 – 28 to judge the demonstration system. Dr Wills will undertake the technical evaluation from the demonstrator in context in months 28 – 30. Paul Matthews will lead evaluation from the overall impact from the scheme. Dr Dearden will behave as Project Leader. Project management software will be co-ordinated with a steering group comprising Dr Dearden, Dr Fu, Paul Matthews, and representatives from the sub-contracting partners (Subodh Gupta from Saral services & Dr Sebastian Wills).
Dr Dearden will lead the literature review, participatory methods development and technical design and development (WP 2, 3, 4, 6 & . Dr Fu will lead the company modelling (WP 5 & . Mr Matthews will lead analysis of previous projects, preparing and evaluation (WP 1, 9 & 10). They will meet on-line at least one time every 8 weeks, and face-to-face at least two times per year. They will also use the wider BGDD sandpit network for informal overview of work on regularly.
Outputs and Deliverables
Literature review; Existing Projects review; Methods description & papers; Needs analysis statement; Design concepts documents & related papers; Prototype designs; Concept demonstrator in one co-op; Sustainable business design & related papers; Demonstrator evaluation reports & related papers; Methods Evaluation report & related papers; Methods Handbook; Project report.
Adventure, novelty and timeliness The proposed scientific studies are novel and timely in attempting participatory co-design of software and business models inside a developing world setting, taking into consideration modern software development approaches for example agile methods. It’s adventurous in requiring multi-disciplinary input which range from business modelling, through software development practice to participatory design methods.
Research Impact and Relevance to Beneficiaries
The important thing beneficiaries of the work are: Indian Microfinance co-operatives who definitely are provided with new tools and business models to aid their extension and development; Third world systems development organisations who’ll gain new methods and insights for participatory co-design of systems; Researchers and practitioners in participatory means of ICT design (in the developing and planet) who will gain innovative participatory methods; Researchers and practitioners running a business planning for social entrepreneurship who’ll benefit from start up business models coded in the context of the project; Policy makers funding ICT related economic development projects. Project impact is going to be enhanced by close co-operation with Indian research institutes, e.g. IIIT (Hyderabad), Indian Institute of Science (ISC, Bangalore), Institute of Development and Research in Banking Technology (IDRBT), IIT Kharagpur, and major players within the Indian Microfinance sector, BASIX, Indian Institute of Management in Armahdabad). Saral already has built working relationships with all of these organisations.
