Abstract:
“You can see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics”. This
offhand remark by Robert Solow, the Nobel prize-winning economist [1] has stimulated
many other economists to conduct more rigorous analyses on the impact of information
technology on productivity.
The research presented in this dissertation has been conducted on a large
telecommunications utility. An important business process of the utility, that of collecting
information on its geographically dispersed network assets, was automated using mobile
computing and wireless technologies. The research compared this newly developed
automated process with the current, manual, process of sourcing the field network asset
data using paper-based templates, and capturing the data manually from the templates.
The results of the pilot for this automated business process were encouraging and
demonstrated an improvement of over 50% in the productivity of the data collection
process, and its integrity. An important aspect of the research outlined in this dissertation
was to design and implement the mobile computer-based electronic data collection
prototype to minimise user obstruction to the technology deployed. The prototype was
tested for technology acceptance by the targeted field workers. This test also proved
successful.
The research demonstrated that an improvement in productivity of over 50% was
achievable from a well-considered investment in information technology. The results
from the research also pointed the way for the deployment of this data collection solution
in other utilities, e.g. electricity distribution, water reticulation, and municipalities.
Through user prototype tests and a cultural intervention process on the targeted users
(field workers), the research also demonstrated how the automated business process can
be geared for use by low-skilled field workers, so important to improve productivity in
developing economies such as those in Africa.
