Background: The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the pace of digital transformation in many organizations, and as a result, an increased number of digital services are being offered to employees and customers. This trend, however, is likely to further pronounce the digital divide with some user groups of particular social/economic status being less able and likely to make the most out of the services moved online. An inclusive digital service, therefore, needs to acknowledge and address such issues, and this assignment focuses on developing students' understanding of this matter.
Title: Addressing the Digital Divide in Accelerated Digital Service Provision
Assignment question: Discuss how a new digital service offered by an organization in response to the changes in life caused by the Covid-19 pandemic should consider the digital divide. In doing so,
- Select and introduce a real-world organization of your choice (it can be any public or private organization). Briefly reflect on the services the organization was offering before the Covid-19 pandemic.
- Discuss and justify a new digital service that could be offered by this organization in response to the new ways of business and life forced by the Covid-19 pandemic. This can be via a digital transformation of an extant non-digital service, an improvement of an extant digital service, or the introduction of a service new to the organization.
- Explain how this new digital service leverages one (or more) core digital technologies (e.g., Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud, IoT) to add value to its customers.
- Critically discuss the risk of adding to the digital divide via offering this new digital service. Explain how specific group(s) of employees/customers of the organization would be vulnerable to a sub-optimal use of the proposed digital service if their needs are not considered.
- Develop and justify two mitigations for the digital divide when providing this service.
Equal weight is given to all five parts. Follow the 5 points above as the structure of your submission. References to theories/frameworks used should appear at the end.
IS course suitability: This assignment can be customized for a variety of IS courses including: digital transformation, digital innovation, digital services design, digital business strategy, business analysis and process management, and management information systems. The expectation on the depth of the analyses and engagement with concepts/theories can be adjusted to the level and content of the course.
Suggested mode/length:
- The full version of this assessment was successfully used as a 3000-word essays as the only assessment of an MSc course.
- A lighter version of it has been successfully used as a 1000-word assignment as one of the three assessments of an Introduction to IS course.
Learning outcomes assessed: Some learning outcomes that could be assessed by this assignment are:
- Demonstrating an understanding of how the Covid-19 pandemic has changed the ways in which organizations offer services to their employees and customers.
- Demonstrating a knowledge of the role of specific digital technologies in digitally transforming the services offered by organizations and applying this knowledge to the particular case of a chosen real-world business.
- Presenting evidence and reasonable arguments for justifying why the specific digital technology being discussed will enable the proposed digital service in a way that will benefit the chosen organization.
- Logically questioning the non-inclusive way in which the proposed digital services might provided by particularly reflecting on the risk of digital divide and developing ways of mitigating it.
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Mo Moeini, PhD
Assistant Professor in IS
Warwick Business School (WBS)
University of Warwick, UK
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