Judy Backhouse

United Nations University (UNU) | UNU · UNU-EGOV

Four thrusts were identified as important for South Africa to optimally benefit from information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the future. In identifying these thrusts, the team that participated in the Foresight Exercise recognised two lines of thought. On the one hand, South Africa needs to address a backlog in the use of ICTs that res...

Urban scholarship and practices surrounding 'smart' cities address the growing datafication of urban life and governance, a process that has mixed outcomes, particularly for African cities. For this reason, this paper offers a systematic review of literature on smart cities in the South African Development Community (SADC) countries, with a focus o...

Developing skills for smart cities need not happen only through formal educational programs. This chapter describes an initiative in Oman to develop a group of smart city ambassadors who are expert in some aspect of smart cities and to use these ambassadors to share knowledge with other stakeholders and contribute their expertise to smart city proj...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine the state of research into knowledge management within local government in developing countries, to identify themes that have been studied and to identify important gaps in the literature that can inform a research agenda going forward. Design/methodology/approach A structured literature review metho...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine the state of research into knowledge management within local government in developing countries, to identify themes that have been studied and to identify important gaps in the literature that can inform a research agenda going forward. Design/methodology/approach A structured literature review meth...

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to examine the state of research into knowledge management within local government in developing countries, to identify themes that have been studied and to identify important gaps in the literature that can inform a research agenda going forward. Design/methodology/approach – A structured literature review me...

This paper presents a process for selecting the most appropriate standard indicators for the Smart City Pilot being implemented in Knowledge Oasis Muscat (KOM) in the Sultanate of Oman, by the Information Technology Authority (ITA) in cooperation with the Public Establishment for Industrial Estate (Madayn). The indicators were selected by reviewing...

As the idea of a smart city has developed over the past few decades and become commonplace, so the urge to decide which cities are smarter or smartest, and the need to measure progress of cities towards increasing smartness have emerged. Measuring the functioning of cities is complex given that they consist of many intersecting systems. Many differ...

This paper presents preliminary results of a review of tools that claim to measure aspects of the state of a city, related to the smart, sustainable city concept. Using academic literature as well as online searches, over 50 tools were identified, including standards, indices and models, that each measure a range of city attributes. So far, detaile...

Information and communications technologies (ICTs) promise development gains, yet the complexity and opacity of the relationships between ICT initiative and development effect makes it difficult to identify these development gains or to theorize connections. This case study does both. First, it identifies the connections between the roll-out of fre...

“Efforts to improve digital inclusion would be greatly helped if there were a clear and agreed set of metrics to monitor it.” -- United Nations Secretary General’s High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation In response to the call put out by the United Nations in The Age of Digital Interdependence, the objective of this report is to present a compreh...

Digital transformation that promotes inclusive socio-economic transformation of societies into smart societies is often confronted by socio-economic, political and regulative challenges that have compromised the governance of smart societies. This calls for governments to respond with appropriate mechanisms for strengthening “smart governance.” Sma...

South Africa has adopted digital transformation as one of its strategies for promoting inclusive growth. This is a case study of South Africa, a developing country that has embraced the digital transformation agenda to promote the transformation of government, business and society among other things. Using institutional theory as our theoretical le...

In a connected and smart society, digital transformation has become one of the key strategies governments are adopting to promote inclusive growth. The 4 th industrial revolution, a digital driven revolution has brought with it many opportunities but developing countries continue to lag behind due to various challenges explored in this study. This...

Young people are important to cities, bringing skills and energy and contributing to economic activity. New technologies have led to the idea of a smart city as a framework for city management. Smart cities are developed from the top-down through government programmes, but also from the bottom-up by residents as technologies facilitate participatio...

Advances in technology and increasing data volumes have led to new tools and techniques to exploit data and improve decision-making. Terms used to refer to these tools and techniques include big data (BD), business intelligence (BI) and business analytics (BA). Definitions of these terms are not agreed on. In particular, the terms are used as subse...

Broadband has been recognised as an enabling technology in connecting government and citizens in transitioning towards a smart society. However, governments, especially in developing countries, continue to face challenges in their bid to connect citizens. This study provides an understanding of how institutional pressures have influenced policy imp...

E-government in developing countries has attracted the attention of researchers and e-government practioners due to its perceived benefit in improving the quality of life of citizens. E-government integration, interoperability and information sharing has been identified as an enabler for transforming governments into smart governments that are resp...

Technology enabled government promises to deliver better services and hence facilitate better lives for citizens. However such e-government cannot be implemented without trust between government and citizens and between government departments. Concerns over information security and privacy have become a contentious issue for governments and stand i...

This paper examines conversations among doctoral students about their supervision experiences. It is a foray into their spare time, when they reflect through conversations, on encounters with their supervisors. While these conversations are usually stimulated by gossip around lifestyles, entertainment and frustration, they represent useful generati...

A first-year undergraduate course in Information Systems in a South African university includes an opportunity for students to reflect on their own use of information and personal information systems. Their reflections provide data about the technologies and tools that they use to find and manage everyday life information, as well as academic infor...

Models of doctoral education in Africa remained similar to those in European universities, well into the 2000s. However, there has been an increasing realisation that such programmes are ill-suited for the African realities. With recent efforts to revitalise higher education in Africa, considerable attention has been placed on the need to explore m...

The concept of a "Smart City" has been approached from different perspectives by researchers from different field in recent years. In the process, various characteristics of "smartness" have been proposed and explored. while there are elements in common, the different ways of understanding the term "Smart City" revel different assumptions about cit...

What makes lecturers in higher education use emerging technologies in their teaching? From the literature we know that lecturers make use of teaching and learning technologies in response to top-down initiatives, and that some also initiate bottom-up experiments with their own teaching practice, driven by both pragmatic and pedagogical concerns. Th...

In the South African context, three doctoral discourses are heard, each with their own assumptions about the purpose of doctoral education and the kinds of people who undertake doctoral study, and with their own implications for the practice of doctoral education. Two of the three discourses are familiar and well documented in the local and interna...

This article examines the practices, norms and values that constrain or enable successful participation of undergraduate students at a South African university undergoing a radical change. We look at four constructs about the resources that Wits students draw on when they negotiate their integration into the Wits culture of academic performance. Th...

One view of the PhD student is that of the independent scholar, with the thesis being an original work that contributes to the body of knowledge. National plans make much of the notion that graduating doctoral students will increase the degree of innovation in the country and make new ideas available for economic benefit. At the same time, the proc...

Melbourne-based Monash University opened a campus in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2001. The student body on the South African campus is drawn from across Africa. This makes for classes where most students do not speak English as a first language, but where English is often the only common language in the class. Students also have varied experience...

Software development projects are usually carried out in teams with analysts and designers having to work together towards a common solution. In order to succeed in this environment graduates need to be able to listen to users and to each other, to express their ideas to users and colleagues, to defend their designs, debate design decisions and rea...

A theory of e-countable compactness and e-Lindelöfness which are weaker than the concepts of countable compactness and Lindelöfness respectively is developed. Amongst other results we show that an e-countably compact space is pseudocompact, and an example of a space which is pseudocompact but not e-countably compact with respect to any dense set is...

Monash South Africa came into being in 2001 as part of the Monash strategy to create an international university. It's easy to map out strategy, but the creation of international teaching programs takes place in conversations and exchanges between individual academics working together on the teaching of individual course units. Our ability to creat...

Supervisors in the same discipline and within the same department exhibit a range of views on what is expected of PhD students. These include different views about the nature and scope of the research proposal, the structure and style of the thesis and the role of the supervisor in the PhD process. Trying to interpret, understand and accommodate su...

This paper presents the unanticipated detours encountered in the data collection phase of a South African community informatics study. The study set out to observe the impact of a small group of learners acting as change-agents within their community, and informally sharing their ICT knowledge within an impoverished urban community (Zandspruit, out...