No abstract

Information is lifeblood of tourism business, thus, effective efforts to empower members of rural communities to benefit sustainably from tourism industry should involve information management, inter alia. The paper details a case study conducted in Lushoto District, Tanzania where members of Friends of Usambara group participated in a process of empowering by uplifting their information management skills. The skills included information system analysis and development, computing as well as web developing. The case study employed a Community Informatics approach which is the application of information and communications technologies (ICTs) to enable community processes such as local economic development. Since such processes are complex and adaptive, the paper demonstrates application of one of Soft Operation Research (SOR) methods, namely, Soft System Methodology (SSM) in trying to empower members of community solve their economic challenges. Using some of SSM tools, participants in the case study were able to structure problem situation, create rich pictures, name relevant systems, define human activity systems, create stakeholders diagrams, analyse information and redesign information collection tools, and learn web authoring. These activities empowered the participants to undertake rural tourism business more effectively.

Implementation processes of systems in organizations follow different strategies and one of these strategies is to understand the uncertainties associated with the integration of the new system into an existing system environment so as to limit any challenges that may arise during the system implementation. Systems are implemented to address specific organizational needs, that is, activities the organization engages in. This paper explores organization information processing theory (OIPT) and activity theory in enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems implementation. A framework for the ERP implementation has been developed from a conceptual model on the interaction of organizational culture and structure. The modified model incorporates the activity theory and the OIPT and provides a formal way of bringing on board various interplaying variables in the system implementation process, more so for ERP systems.

Organizations (private, public), large and small, are increasingly facing more challenges due scarcity of resources, short delivery time requirement, frequent emergence of new technologies, demand for wide variety of competencies, and limited availability of experts with required skills. Coping with these constraints requires continuous innovation in deployment of emerging technologies and management. However, due to their small size, lack of competitive capital and inability to acquire complex opportunities, majority of SMEs and non state actors (NSA) find it difficult to cope with this needed speed of change. It is even more challenging in developing economy such as in Tanzania larger foreign companies and international NSAs outcompete local ones. Instead SMEs and local NSAs seek other new approaches to remain competitive and in their operations. A strategy by these agents is collaboration within the networks of organizations by using ICTs. However, both research and practice has shown that dynamic time/cost-effective and fluid creation of temporary collaborative networks requires the preexistence of the long term strategic alliances. This paper aims at analyzing the current practices of collaborative networks in developing economies with exemplification of Tanzanian cases. It then addresses some challenges for configuring effective collaborative networks towards enhancing collaborative capital of SMEs in developing economies. The paper is based on a premise that once SMEs and NSAs collaborate successfully their efficiency will improve and the one of the outcomes would be to improve socioeconomic status of a number of stakeholders in developing countries. Thus the paper contributes to the understanding of the challenges related to the establishment of collaborative networks of organizations in developing economies and proposes a customizable model for establishing those networks.