Requirements of a mobile procurement framework for rural South Africa

摘要

Every day about 1 million people become mobile phone users - 85% of these live in the developing world [7]. The biggest potential of future mobile development will not be in the already saturated first economy market but in the market of about one billion potential mobile users in emerging economies. The increasing availability of mobile technology and coverage in rural emerging economies will enable the usage of mobile solutions to improve existing business processes. This paper will discuss the mobile utilization on basis of a concrete mobile procurement use case. M-procurement offers huge efficiency improvements in the currently highly inefficient procurement processes in rural areas of emerging economies. Although m-business applications today are well established in the first economy, and the concepts and problems are well known, there will be no "copy and paste" approach for the Next Billion market because of the infrastructural and cultural differences. This paper will provide a list ofrequirements for an m-procurement framework for rural areas of emerging economies on basis of an m-procurement prototype deployed in a Living Lab in rural South Africa. It will also discuss the methodology which will be used to design and develop this framework using the end user knowledge and input.