Reviewing the views of ICT in development

The role of information and communication technology (ICT) in national development is argued to depend on how ICT is viewed. Building on Orlikowski and lacono's classification of IT views we proposed in an earlier work that ICT can be conceptualized as: tool (means to achieve something), computational (the machine), ensemble (part of socio-economic context) and enabler (what ICT enables). We presented this as a hierarchy where the higher you go from the tool to the proxy view, the stronger ICT influences national development. In using our framework to evaluate ICT for development (ICT4D) projects, we realize that the notion of a hierarchy is untenable. Here, we argue that the relationship b…