Meeting Development Challenges by Introducing Global ICT Standards to Agricultural Industry in Sri Lanka
Abstract
Agriculture is the main source of livelihood of the rural population, whichaccounts for 70% of the total population in Sri Lanka besides issues related to theagricultural value chain, more specifically supply chain deficiencies are seriousdemanding urgent remedies. Meanwhile, the World Summit on the Information Society(WSIS) includes e-agriculture as an area of application of Information andCommunication Technologies (ICTs) to ensure the systematic dissemination ofinformation in order to provide ready access to comprehensive, up-to-date and detailedknowledge and information, particularly in rural areas. Although the digital presence ofmajority of Sri Lankan industry is commendable, agricultural industry is not anadequate level. One promising solution for this situation could be development of anonline trading portal.
With the objective of rectifying the issues briefed above, by adopting designscience research methodology, proof-of-concept implementation of a trading portal foragriculture industry has been completed in this study. The information artifactsdeveloped in the research being thoroughly evaluated in laboratory with interestingresults and real world empirical evaluation is in the pipe-line of future work.
Therefore, it is possible to claim that the portal developed is capable of reducingthe majority of supply chain deficiencies in agricultural trading while in compliancewith Global Electronic Business Collaboration Standards. In this work we have selectedrecommendation from United Nation‟s Center for Trade Facilitations and ElectronicBusiness (UN:CEFACT), i.e. UN:CEFACT‟s Modeling Methodology (UMM) andInternational Organization for Standardization (ISO) phases of a business processnamely planning, identification, negotiation, actualization and post-actualization.Among the contributions from this work, not only the operational trading portal but alsothe documented eCommerce solution developed approaches based on the globalstandards are central. The systematic eCommerce solution development methodologydocumented here could readily be re-used in many other trading scenarios fromdifferent domains.
Key words: UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology, REA Ontology, BusinessCollaboration Standards
