The JMSB’s Chitu Okoli believes improving internet access for less developed nations will increase their economic opportunities
Chitu Okoli, an assistant professor of Decision Sciences and Management Information Systems, wants to help bridge the digital divide between industrialized and less-developed nations by making the internet a more universally accessible business tool. This divide has been especially wide in sub-Saharan African nations, such as Ethiopia, Ghana and Sierra Leone. Until recently, these countries lacked the telecommunications infrastructures and many of the financial foundations—including personal credit cards, loans and electronic transactions—that western nations take for granted.
The JMSB’s Chitu Okoli, at left, with family members in Lagos in 2005. Okoli was in Nigeria for an international conference on information technology in less developed countries. His research examines the relationship between e-commerce and socio-economic factors.
If information is, indeed, power, access to information technology is power-plus. Okoli, a native of Nigeria, underlines the relationship between socio-economic factors and e-commerce, such as stock trading using the internet and making electronic payments. “Sub-Saharan countries can gain the most benefit in actually changing people’s lives, in giving them new economic opportunities to help themselves. And economically, information technology is one of the best ways to do so, notably through the use of e-business,” Okoli says.
Okoli arrived at Concordia in fall 2003 after earning a PhD in Business Administration (Information Systems and Decision Sciences) from Louisiana State University (LSU). His interest in information systems in developing countries was cemented as a grad student at LSU, where he met Victor Mbarika, a renowned researcher on the subject.
One area Okoli has researched is the interplay between a nation’s culture and its adoption of new information technologies. Academics often use two attributes to measure how well a nation will adopt new technologies: power distance, which measures respect for authority; and risk tolerance, which is the degree to which individuals accept or avoid risk.
Contradictorily, Okoli found that while in sub-Saharan Africa there is a higher risk tolerance and stronger degree of respect for authority than in western nations, the effect of these attitudes on technology adoption is irrelevant. “Such cultural factors do not keep these nations from adopting new technologies. Although more risk averse than many westerners, once they have a working model, they are willing to adopt it and believe in its potential,” he says.
Okoli recently shifted his research focus to open-content software in which individuals in communities create, modify and share content. He is investigating the mechanisms of information creation through Wikipedia, the free, collaborative online encyclopedia, as well as other, open-content projects. “Most of the academic articles that came out on Wikipedia a few years ago were short and very critical,” says Okoli, who has received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant to study Wikipedia. “However, numerous scholars like me now consider it a legitimate and valuable—albeit not always accurate—source of information. I believe that the open-source mechanism is a superior technique for creating high-quality products.”
