Information Infrastructure Growth: Installers as Frontier Objects
Øystein Skadsem - Master 2008
This thesis aims at improving our understanding and management of Information Infrastructure Growth. An open source Health Information System and its constituting participants, users and projects is proposed as a specific example for researching methods and tools for stimulating this growth. The main focus will be on the aspects of installation and upgrade routines/procedures, bearing in mind the open source nature of the project and how this both limits and improves upon the available choices for said tools.
Research has been done as an action research project in two parts. The first was a local effort in a state capital in India including development and implementation of installation and upgrade routines for the HIS in question. The second part was further research and refinement of this work for the global HIS project, i.e. the local solution scaled up to a generic solution for the project.
The thesis will also discuss how technical solutions interplay with social issues and local capacity, most importantly how simplicity and usability can play an important role in empowering less technically skilled users, incidentally having the potential to reduce the level of capacity building or training needed for each user. Examples here include how simple tools can move the boundaries of the implementation of an Information System, as less knowledgeable users gain the ability to push the system to new locations, effectively growing the installed base of the II. The expansion to new user groups is similarly affected, as such tools can lower the bar of acceptance for new users previously unfamiliar with the IS. An easy and error-free installation is essential for the important first impression, and in this type of system, the ability to easily roll out in a large scale is a crucial selling point in demonstrations for health officials and large interest organizations alike. Additionally, geographical distance between the potential users and the people with the knowledge needed to set up the IS, becomes much less relevant when the difference between the groups is marginalized.