Abstract
This chapter explores the concept of platforms, which is not clearly defined in the IS literature. Platforms lead to changes in emerging markets, thus disrupting the logic of innovation, yet these platforms seem to be deepening various digital divides. There is an increasing awareness of digital platforms leading to disconnect and isolation in Africa and the creation of a Second Digital Divide. Platform emergence as IS phenomenon is inextricably linked to the design concepts of platform scaling and platform evolution. The design decisions deliberately made to facilitate scaling receives mention first, followed by a dissection of selected aspects of the emergence process that are externally dictated by changes in contexts, ecosystems, actors, or technologies. The positioning of emerging digital platform design within IS contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the impact that digital platforms design decisions may have on vulnerable African citizens with limited media, data, and digital literacy skills.
TopIntroduction
Africa’s digital platforms continue to struggle for maturity. The mere empirical observance of this maturity struggle is not the research problem underlying this chapter. The frequent observation of this phenomenon has led the authors to identify a design problem that rests primarily on the shoulders of Information Systems (IS) academics for a solution. There are unintended consequences (Majchrzak & Markus, 2013) of rapidly growing platform-mediated global markets (Eisenmann, Parker, & Van Alstyne, 2011). Platforms are driving significant changes in organisations across emerging markets, disrupting the logic of innovation (Kuebel & Zarnekow, 2014). Digital platforms within the African context, however, seem to be creating and deepening various unfreedoms – a concept introduced by Amartya Sen in Development as Freedom (Sen, 1999). This phenomenon describes a situation where the implementation context changes to be more developmental.
Researchers who question the actual underlying causes of the empirical failure of digital technology implementations are reporting their increasing awareness of digital technologies leading to disconnect and isolation (Mariën & Prodnik, 2014) and the creation of a Second Digital Divide (Zhao & Elesh, 2005). There is no doubt that platforms can create immense value, but the design perspective is often underexamined, as stated by Coyle:
“…all too often they are seen only through the lens of the disruption of incumbents, resulting in a narrow debate about whether platforms should be more heavily regulated. Yet the right questions are: what policy framework will ensure the immense benefits are encouraged and widely shared; what will help create new platforms, and sustain healthy competition and innovation; and how can unwelcome aspects of platform behaviour be avoided?” (Coyle, 2016, p.1).
Although digital platforms have received attention across a broad range of academic disciplines by a broad range of scholars, there has been a resultant fragmented literature base with limited attempts at consolidation (Porch, Timbrell, & Rosemann, 2015). The issue of digital platform design in an African context, and specifically the way it may contribute to negative consequences of platforms in African markets, remains understudied. The negative consequences of platforms, and the difficulty of fair allocation of economic value capture by platforms serving downstream markets (Coyle, 2016) often present in African markets, and are related to the same design flaws causing scalability issues in African platforms. This presents a problem of how should African platform systems be designed to (1) scale, and to (2) limit digitally divisive unintended consequences?
The phenomenon discussed in this chapter is the emergence of digital platforms within the African context that has been noted with varying degrees of scaling success (David-West & Evans, 2016) but also with scaling challenges and failure (Rossotto et al., 2018). Within the current global IS discourse on ways to design systems for digital transformation and digital inclusion—a more ICT-artefact focused field of IS research referenced in this chapter—the phenomenon of emerging digital platforms in developmental contexts struggling to scale has been noted with increasing frequency (Ekekwe, 2015), with international platforms being more successful than African platforms in cross-border scaling (Makuvaza et al., 2018; David-West, Umukoro & Onuoha, 2018).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Digital Platform: A digital design artefact (including architecture and governance elements) created to facilitate multi-sided market transactions.
Surveillance Capitalism: Exploitative business model monetising data captured through monitoring of human activity in both the physical and virtual domains.
Platform Imperialism: An increasingly dominant mode of capital accumulation and cultural influence facilitated by digital platforms owned by predominantly developed world corporate actors.
Emerging Platform: Emerging platforms originate in the developing world. Secondly, platform emergence, in our view, refers to the developmental changes and evolution of platform elements, architecture and governance over time.
Platform Design Perspectives: A set of conceptual design perspectives particularly relevant to emerging platform design processes.
Platform Design: The process of conceptualising and realising a digital platform.