Question

MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Debate has emerged and raged on regarding many African countries including Ghana not making rapid economic progress in an emerging knowledge economy. Poverty exists in spite of development being driven by technology, fuelled by information and powered by knowledge, and, many are oblivious to the reality that information and communication technology (ICT) cuts across all aspects of our lives.

We take a queue from the ICT driven economic experiences of the United States during the dot com boom and developments in Finland and other Western economies. We are informed by issues of globalization, the knowledge economy and the transformation of business processes using ICT in India, China, Korea and Malaysia. Close to us in Africa we are encouraged by economic growth using ICT in Rwanda and South Africa.

Pundits have argued that illiteracy is to be blamed, and mathematics and science education needs to be prioritized. Others say it is in our attitude fashioned by our past which does not relate development as an independent variable relative to other variables such as technology. While some view our challenges as lack of leadership to implement sustainable ICT policies and strategies at a macro and micro level, many argue that development of a nation’s economy has much to do with input from ICT personnel. They do not only belong to the domain of personnel with tacit knowledge of engineers who should provide infrastructure but such need to study policies that determine development

a.

1. As a person in charge of IT in a government department in Ghana, what indicators will you use to convince your colleagues that there was a need to take steps to usher this country quickly into a knowledge economy?  

2. What software option will you recommend to your ministry? Open source or Microsoft as proprietary software? Provide reasons for your recommendation.

3. List FIVE (5) ways of how the TPS can be of use to a government department.

b.

1. What challenges are government organizations likely to face in deploying ICT to change their operations?

2. Which communication medium would you recommend for a government

department, a cable, wireless or something else? Justify your recommendation

Answer 1

A.)

i. turning the economy into the knowledge will make the ecomony grow at high pace and would result in companies from outside the country to participate and invest in their and making new oppurtunities for them to grow Today the growth is mainly dependent on the intelligence of the people and without high intellectual level we wont be abe to grow and would not be able to compete with the world.

ii. The Microsoft will be the best for this as it is know for its high quality and highly reliable product and has a brand value and trusted user all over the world and offer a great deal of feature and other requirement at affirdable cost with best feature possible.

iii. government can use the transaction processing system(TPS) 1.to recive the payment from the citizen. 2.allow the citizen to make the payment on supported platform. 3.Allow the citizen to recieve payment from supported medium. 4.Allow the company to revert the transaction on the source medium. 5.Allow the governement to keep track of the transactions

B.)

i. Government will be facing number of challenges like the people not able to understanf and resist to use the system and government will be facing the issue from the people being not in support of the system and people would nnot be able to understand the ICT and does not believe in system for its reliability and moght even discard the system.

ii. Cable system is best to be used as it provide high speed than wireless network and have more reliablity and we can use the mix of cable and wireless, the cable will be used to transmite the signal into a office and after that the wireless outer can be used to provide the internet access .