In Jonathan Donner's study of Rwandan users, the mobile phone is an expensive

and treasured item, used in the main by small individual businessmen and women,

where it has the power to expand the horizons of their business and open up their

workplace and work schedule, allowing them to organise their work effectively in

a way previously unthinkable. In one case documented by Donner, a small restaurateur

is able to develop, via the mobile phone, the kind of simple 'just-in-time'

stock control management and delivery techniques that large corporations spend

millions on IT systems and consultancy to replicate at their scale. At either end of

the scale, the business impact of the technology is simple, and is experienced by

both Donner's Rwandan restaurateur and large multinational corporations alike.

The technology provides a freedom to move through time and space and stay connected

to the business, to make decisions for the business, and to run the business

according to an ever-changing micro-schedule.

In: Knowledge, Technology, and Policy

Publisher: Springer-Verlag
All copyrights reserved by Springer 2007.

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