مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد پیوند بین سیستم های اطلاعاتی و انعطاف پذیری – وایلی ۲۰۱۸

It is predicted that, as the 21st century progresses, the frequency and/or severity of shocks—environmental disasters, economic crises, social and political upheavals—will increase (WEF, 2013). Breadth and depth of impact of these shocks is predicted to increase with growing complexity and interconnection of global systems (Zolli & Healy, 2012). Thus longer‐term trends of economic globalisation and digitisation—plus others such as climate change and urbanisation—sit alongside, and interact with, the short‐term phenomena. Systems of all kinds—from individual households through communities and organisations and nations to the whole planet—will have to cope with these shocks and trends. Resilience is central to this coping; indeed, resilience can be understood as the ability of systems to cope with external shocks and trends. Resilience is therefore essential to future survival of all these systems, and they must strengthen their resilience in order to endure (UNDP, 2011). The heightened reality and perception of shocks, and the related need for systems to become more resilient, has pushed resilience up both research and practice agendas across a range of domains. Research programmes and journal special issues on resilience have emerged in many areas, for example, small and medium enterprises (Bhamra & Dani, 2011), security policy (Cavelty, Kaufmann, & Kristensen, 2015), and civil engineering (Jowitt & Milke, 2015). Practical guides and initiatives have also emerged, seeking to build the resilience of a variety of systems, for example, strengthening business resilience (IBM, 2009), community resilience (Mguni & Bacon, 2010), and public sector resilience (Cho, Willis, & Stewart‐Weeks, 2011). The growing presence of resilience has also been felt in the information systems (IS) domain with, again, special issues (Donnellan, Larsen, & Levine, 2007; Zhang, 2010) and practical guides (eg, DCLG, 2015; ENISA, 2011) on information systems and resilience. However, as will be argued in greater detail below, there have been lacunae in the resilience research undertaken within the information systems discipline: limited conceptualisation of resilience in relation to information systems, and limited testing of concepts in practice. This creates a knowledge gap within IS; space for an improved conceptualisation of resilience, and space for practical operationalisation of such concepts. Our aim in this paper is to address this knowledge gap, seeking to provide a better‐founded conceptualisation of resilience, to test out that framework in the field and to reflect on our findings. We follow this aim by drawing on the subdiscipline of ICT4D—information and communication technologies for development—which sits at the intersection of IS and development studies. Our guiding question was therefore the following: “What can be learned for information systems and resilience from research and practice in ICT4D?” Although work on resilience within the ICT4D field has been limited, we find that it adds some specific conceptual insights and has also been the locus for development of a full resilience framework, used here. ICT4D also provides a priority arena for implementation of resilience research because of its importance: developing countries are on the “front line” of many shocks and therefore in especial need of deepening their resilience (Bene, Wood, Newsham, & Davies, 2012).