Promoting development through information technology innovation: The IT artifact, artfulness, and articulation

In this theoretical article the author explores how information technology (IT) innovation can be harnessed to promote the socioeconomic growth of developing nations. Adopting a behavioral perspective, he proposes that effective IT-based societal development requires the learning of a key competency, termed as IT artfulness: the creative or ingenious transformation of work/social practices through the contextually appropriate use of IT tools. The elaboration of this perspective is based on the nature of IT artifacts, and the way meaningful action in IT-based practices is constituted through articulation, which refers to the process by which interpretive schemes shape behavior or perception. Harnessing IT as an effective spur to socioeconomic development is seen to require the modification of relevant interpretive schemes in society that permit: (a) the innovative potential of IT to be recognized, and (b) human and material resources to be skillfully managed to achieve desired changes and heightened welfare.