What we do...

Some family members, friends and colleagues think that we are dynamite computer scientist, wizards, geeks, or you name it. We will come up with a new fancy software package or hardware thingy - developed in mind, programmed and shaped by hand. That will almost certainly not be the case though. We don't expect to write one single line of code. Both Thomas and I come from that line of business and worked there several years before going back to school. We wouldn't want to change that but today our focus is just different. The purpose of going back was to go in a new direction and we have. Almost from day one.

Our interest today is what encapsulates ICT and makes it a success or failure. People. Human beings. You, us and properly your annoying neighbor as well. That is not unusual for a cand. merc. dat. student. Even though some end up as programmers/developers most graduates end up as project manager, consultants etc. in that line of business. And damn good ones. Understanding people in the context of ICT and vice verse. But most are practitioners. They use their skills acquired from management-, organization- and strategy-related courses. Meta-theoretical courses, such as "Philosophy and Sociology of science and methods", are usually not so popular. We know! We have been instructors in one of these :-)

What Thomas and I do best (not compared to other but compared to ourselves) is to combine the more practical theory with reflection on a meta-theoretical level and utilize it to extend and create knowledge. You could argue that this is the case for all academics but it varies a lot in our opinion. Practitioners often lack this insight. This is not a critique but what we do different from most others we know.

What does all that mean for our master thesis? Well, as said we won't be designing a new software package or hardware thingy physically. Design is definitely not our strong side so be grateful for that :-) We won't be making a strategy and road map for an ERP implementation in a mid size Danish manufacturing company either. To many master theses, books and articles already covers this. No fun in meta-synthesis really :-)

ICT4D is still a rather unexplored field and theory scattered. No books or journals will cover our topic in any sense and give us an easy recipe to establish theoretical viability, methodological reliability and so on. Currently we have a vague idea of research questions and working our way through the scattered theory on ICT4D. At some point this should narrow down our research questions, enable us to propose our theory, and by methodological considerations go out and collect our data, analyze it and end up with a conceptual idea for improvement to status quo. Bottom line, we are not developing software or hardware but conceptual ideas hopefully, grounded in theoretical and empirical research.

I actually wrote this post to outline in a simple way what we will be doing and not doing. Right now I fear to have caused some confusion but I'm sure it will become much clearer along the way :-)