Showing papers by "John Effah published in 2013"

Standardizing a developing country health information system through proprietary software: Ghana's experience

Abstract: This study aims to understand a developing country’s experience with health information system (HIS) based on standard proprietary software compared with that based on free and open source software (FOSS) as documented in the literature. The developing country HIS literature has focused more on experiences with manual systems or FOSS. Less is therefore known about the development and use of HIS based on standard proprietary software. Using qualitative, interpretive case study methodology, this study investigates Ghana’s experience with the development and use of proprietary software to standardize HIS across the national, regional, district and hospital levels. The paper highlights the inflexible nature of the standardized proprietary approach to HIS under top-down development in developing countries and the resultant challenges and recommends FOSS based on bottom-up participatory development as a better alternative.

Social Construction of Open Source Application for Student Records: The Case of Cape Coast University

Abstract: The purpose of this study is to understand the development and use of open source software (OSS) for higher education (HE) administration in a developing country. Research on OSS in developing country HE has thus far focused on teaching and learning. Less attention has been paid to the area of administration. This lack of attention may be due to the back-office nature of the administration function, which makes it less obvious to academics. Nevertheless, HE administration provides significant support for efficient and effective teaching and learning and thus requires equal research attention. To extend the OSS research in developing country HE to the administration domain, this study focuses on the development and use of OSS for student records administration in a higher education institution (HEI) in the developing country context of Ghana. The research question motivating the study concerns why and how a developing country HEI developed an OSS for administration, how the various interest groups shaped the software and how the software shaped them in return. The study follows social construction of technology (SCOT) as a theoretical lens and qualitative, interpretive case study approach to trace the experience of the University of Cape Coast (UCC) in Ghana in developing and using OSS for student records administration. The findings provide rich insight into the various interest groups who shaped the software and how it shaped them in return.