个人简介：

Robert M Davison is a Professor of Information Systems at the City University of Hong Kong. He has published around 200 academic articles in a variety of journals and conferences. His research interests span the business and academic environments, is often cross-cultural in tone, and draws on methods and theories appropriate to the context. He is the editor in chief of two journals: the Information Systems Journal and the Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries.

More details from: http://www.is.cityu.edu.hk/staff/isrobert/   

报告内容：

Digital Enablement is an emerging phenomenon of our times. It refers to the ways in which digital technologies have a transforming, empowering and popularizing impact on the business, social and consumer-oriented activities in which we engage. I am particularly interested in how Digital Enablement has an empowering effect in developing countries, given the way it unleashes opportunities for individual citizens, for organizations and for entire countries, to leapfrog over intervening generations of technology. However, digital enablement is not a magic bullet: we still require human creativity, imagination, innovation and intervention. There is also a dark side: some people will be disadvantaged by digital enablement, i.e. there is also digital disablement.  As I argue in this presentation, to be effective in the long term, digital enable requires investments in infrastructure, education and strategy.

The purpose of this seminar is two fold: firstly, I wish to introduce the concept and to encourage more research into digital enablement; secondly, I hope to introduce a measure of critical caution and so ask if digital enablement is really making the world a better place. I will suggest the directions for a research agenda and the challenges that we need to meet and overcome.