CHS: Large: Collaborative Research: Achieving Development Goals with Information Technology

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This research seeks to discover the factors that can predict project success and guide decisions about funding, designing, and implementing major projects intended to use information and communication technology for socio-economic development. In the past five years, over ten billion dollars of US and international government funding have been invested in such projects, with private technology funding adding substantially to that figure. Yet, many of these projects fail. Existing theories emphasize the inability of technology designers in developed countries to understand the needs and context of users in developing countries. But that approach is at best incomplete because it focuses on the technology while ignoring the link between the technology and development outcomes. This research will go beyond a strict technology focus by exploring the interplay between technology plans and development goals. The project will be organized in a series of steps employing multiple research methodologies, that logically build on each other. Case studies of four existing information technology development projects, including interviews and extended observation, will provide a deep conceptual basis for the subsequent work. Based on analysis of the observational and interview data, a questionnaire survey will be developed and administered to about sixty other comparable projects. Following analysis of the survey, a set of ten to twelve shorter case studies will then explore a diversity of projects and their contexts, to expand the theoretical system of analysis and identify issues that were not apparent in the first four case studies. The resulting extensive, mixed-methods base of data will allow identification of the factors that shape project success or failure, as well as building and testing of emerging hypotheses so that the research team can construct strong theory. The resulting theory will provide the groundwork for future research, and enhance the existing scientific literature on this problem with the development scholarship and sensibility that currently is missing from it. This effort to better understand and predict project success and failure will have the potential to reap significant benefits for the populations that these projects target, for the nations whose development is at hand, and for the entities who provide the funding and who share the aspirations of those who seek to see life improved.