Economics in Information Technology. Хрестоматия для студентов бакалавров направлений «Бизнес-информатика», «Прикладная информатика»

Worse is the more recent experience of “FOMO” – the fear of missing out – where we feel anxious and insecure that if we’re not sufficiently connected and up-to-date then others may get ahead, or that socially we may miss out.

Employers can play upon such fears. For example, Amazon’s internal phonebook instructs colleagues on how to send anonymous feedback on colleagues, such as perceived

“inflexibility” or “complaining about minor tasks”. When enough staff experience these effects and feel that work tasks should be immediately attended to just because they’re available through a smartphone, an institutionalised work culture develops where technostress is the norm rather than something to be avoided. It’s worth noting here that research links technostress with reduced satisfaction, productivity and innovation – and so offsets many of technology’s purported benefits.

Technology is what we make of it

So what do organisations do about this dark side to the technology with which they equip their staff? They can use it to serve a command and control work culture if that what they want to create. Such technocratic cultures are easily brought about today, and far more powerful and insidious than Jeremy

Bentham’s Panopticon.

Or companies can go to the other extreme, such as preventing access to email servers outside working hours which robs the firm and their employees to some extent of the benefits of technology altogether. Neither is entirely desirable.

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However, we’re beginning to see some examples of thoughtfulness and deliberation in the way organisations deal with technostress. For instance, in the UK Vodafone provides awareness programs to employees on the potential dangers of not knowing when to shut off from work while working from home.

Or, research which shows that our interaction with technology depends very much on the individual and their situation, which indicates a need to take into account the varying nature of organisations and staff when trying to set out policies that could help change the way we use technology for the better. In any case, at a very minimum an awareness of this dark side is an important first step.

From steam engines to railroads and to factories of mass production, technology has been the primary structuring force in our economic enterprise. The tussle between whether technology works for us or the other way around is not new; what we are seeing today is this tussle played out at scale and speed. What we need to ensure is that it is we who use our technology, rather than allowing it to use us.

How the internet is failing to drive economic development where promised

https://theconversation.com (December 23, 2016)

With almost half the world’s population now online, attempts to spread the internet continue unabated. The likes of Facebook

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and Google offer data services for “free”, while satellites, drones, and balloons are used to cover those places that traditional technologies have not been able to reach.

Underlying this agenda is a rationale that the spread of the internet leads directly to economic growth and development. It may be unsurprising to hear such an argument from Silicon Valley types. After all, they profit from the spread of this technology and it’s their mission to “make the world more open and connected”. Simply put, the logic is that the internet is a democratising force, benefiting everyone, everywhere, in every way.

Very similar ideas are also pervasive in international development circles, especially where Africa is concerned. Go to any high-level meeting where the powerful convene, such as the World Economic Forum or the World Summit on the Information Society, and you will come across similar narratives. They tout the potential of technology, or specifically the internet, to fuel development and alleviate poverty.

Academics, however, increasingly scoff at this idea of technological determinism – the belief or assumption that technology unilaterally drives and shapes our social world. Rather, they emphasise the intricate back and forth between human action, societies and technologies like the internet.

What should we make of this huge divide in thinking? Can we safely assume that the internet has a positive impact on development in every case, for every place on earth?

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An astonishing gap

In a forthcoming paper, our research group at the Oxford Internet Institute attempts to address these questions. We wanted to make a direct comparison between the discourse propagated by powerful actors in international development and the available evidence base. Africa became our scope because the continent was said to have been swept by a “digital renaissance” or “information revolution”, leapfrogging the industrial revolution of the Global North.

We analysed the ICT policies of six African nations and 13 widely noted reports by businesses, development organisations and consultancies. Development has many dimensions, so we limited our analysis to the internet’s impact on economic growth and inequality.

It might not come as a surprise to informed readers that we found visions proposed by governments and development groups to be overselling the internet’s positive effects.

However, even we were astonished by just how wide the gap turned out to be.

Reports and policies argued that the “Internet [was] a tremendous, undisputed force for economic growth and social change.” Academic studies, meanwhile, concluded that the internet’s impact on development was uncertain and varied, with lower effects in the Global South than in the North.

Misguided efforts

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We were also surprised at just how sweeping and even careless some of the claims were. Several reports used simplistic methods to assess “impact” or “effects”, while advertising their results as definitive. In another example, a report even misquoted a source to support its argument that the internet was lowering global inequality. This claim actually ran exactly counter to the findings of rigorous studies.

The results of our analysis showed that African governments, international organisations and consultancies nurture grand visions about the impact of internet connectivity. The internet is seen to be a positive, inclusive and transformative engine for development.

Yet, these claims are made irrespective of lacking or contrary evidence. So there is a palpable risk that inclusive “digital development” becomes merely a mirage, leading policy and practice to waste time and resources on misguided efforts.

We are not arguing that the internet is unimportant for development. Instead, we encourage a more nuanced view that acknowledges that the diffusion of internet connectivity comes with risks and unintended consequences. While value creation is globalised, value extraction often remains concentrated in the Global North.

More broadly, information technologies can exacerbate divides within societies. It would be irresponsible and naïve if we continued pretending that more internet connectivity would simply lead to better development for everyone, everywhere.

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An encouraging sign that such an acknowledgement is possible within international development was the World Bank’s recent

World Development Report. It basically admitted that digital development has remained elusive for many “digital have-nots” in the Global South.

Encouragingly, this report was the result of productive discussion between academia and practitioners. If we are to steer the impact of the internet in the direction that works for the world’s poor and powerless, many more open conversations between digital development believers and sceptics will have to follow.

The Information Industry Is At A Fork In The Digital Road

The Economist (Oct 26, 2014)

Poor performance foreshadows the industry's restructuring

IMAGINE that Apple had folded in the mid-1990s, as some predicted at the time. Perhaps music downloads would still be a hassle, smartphones a novelty and tablet computers two inches thick. But one thing would certainly be different: the information-technology industry would now lack a leading light.

Thanks to record sales of its recently upgraded iPhones, on October 20th Apple surprised analysts by revealing excellent quarterly results. It was almost alone among the big technology firms in doing so. Most others reporting in recent weeks seem to be in something of a funk: profits have fallen at Google as

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well as IBM, SAP and VMWare. Does this mark the start of a downturn for the tech industry?

In some cases the reasons are specific to the companies. IBM seems to have done more financial engineering than the real kind in recent years. Since 2000 it has spent over $100 billion on buying back its own shares. It has shed less-profitable assets but now lacks a big fast-growing business to drive growth (its bet on artificial intelligence, called Watson, has yet to take off, for instance). The earnings of VMWare, a company that makes corporate software, dropped because of charges related to a recent acquisition.

The gloomy economic climate is also playing a role. The strong dollar does not help: it shrinks the foreign revenues of American IT firms. Companies tend to cut spending on IT when times are tough. Ginni Rometty, IBM's chief executive, noted there had been a "marked slowdown in September in client buying behaviour."

Some firms are having to grapple with shifts that are affecting the whole industry. One is cloud computing, geek-speak for digital services delivered over the internet. SAP, another corporate-software company, is seeing more of its business moving into the cloud, for instance. That requires big investments in data centres and yields lower margins, at least for the time being.

Another trend is that consumers are spending more time on mobile devices. This, among other things, has hit Google, which is selling more advertisements on smaller screens, where

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rates are lower, whereas growth in more lucrative ones on bigger devices has slowed.

For other firms this shift has been good news: Yahoo, a struggling online conglomerate, joined Apple in exceeding analysts' expectations in large part because of a notable increase in mobile-advertising sales, which accounted for 17% of its revenue of $1.1 billion in the past quarter.

More fundamentally, however, the IT industry is rapidly maturing, with overall annual revenue growth reaching only 3%, says Sebastian DiGrande of Boston Consulting Group. Although some parts, such as cloud computing and all things mobile, are expanding rapidly, the biggest sectors, including most hardware, business software and IT services, are growing slowly or even shrinking And these are dominated by big technology firms such as HP and IBM.

This "bifurcation", in the words of Mr DiGrande, will lead to a big restructuring of the industry. HP's recent decision to break itself up was merely the opening shot. Like HP, some firms are trying to become more focused.

Others will shed businesses that have become commoditised; along with its quarterly results, IBM announced that it will pay Globalfoundries, a contract chipmaker, to take its semiconductor business off its hands. Others will try to buy firms in fast-growing sectors; last month SAP bought Concur, which offers web-based travel and expense-management software, for $8.3 billion.

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The recent disappointing results are another harbinger of an unbundling and rebuilding of the IT industry. How the sector's new landscape will look at the end of the process is hard to tell. Who would have imagined that Apple and IBM, once bitter enemies, would one day form an alliance, as they did recently to develop mobile applications for Apple's iPhones and iPads?

If that pair can work together almost anything seems possible.

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