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Public ICT innovations: a strategic ambiguity perspective
journal contribution
posted on 2015-03-26, 14:26 authored by M.N. RavishankarPublic Information and Communications Technology (ICT) innovations are seen as having
the potential to usher in a new era of technology-enabled models of governance in emerging
economies. While it may be desirable for the implementation of such innovations to be
underpinned by precise planning, structure and clarity, policy implementers in emerging
economies are confronted instead by situations where ambiguous goals and means are
standard. This paper considers high levels of ambiguity as a relatively enduring and intrinsic
aspect of public ICT innovations in emerging economies. Drawing on an ethnographic study
of Bangalore one, an innovative public ICT project implemented in Bangalore, India, the
paper examines how strategic ambiguity is deployed by key public actors to chart the
course of the implementation process and to steer it towards reasonable outcomes.
Theoretically, the paper suggests that although strategic ambiguity is a precarious and
unsettling condition in general, it can work effectively in contexts that are reasonably tolerant
of ambiguous norms. The findings of the study also present arguments for why evaluation
mechanisms need to be fundamentally reframed in order to assess the extent of
implementation success of public ICT innovations in emerging economies.
History
School
- Business and Economics
Department
- Business
Published in
JOURNAL OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGYVolume
28Issue
4Pages
316 - 332 (17)Citation
RAVISHANKAR, M.N., 2013. Public ICT innovations: a strategic ambiguity perspective. Journal of Information Technology, 28 (4), pp. 316 - 332.Publisher
© Palgrave MacmillanVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2013Notes
This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in the Journal of Information Technology . The definitive publisher-authenticated version, RAVISHANKAR, M.N., 2013. Public ICT innovations: a strategic ambiguity perspective. Journal of Information Technology, 28 (4), pp. 316 - 332, is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/jit.2013.18ISSN
0268-3962Publisher version
Language
- en