HUMAN INVOLVEMENT AND E-BANKING

The fast advancing global information infrastructure (including information technology and computer networks such as the internet and telecommunications systems enable the development of electronic commerce at a global level. The nearly universal connectivity which the Internet offers has made it an invaluable business tool. These developments have created a new type of economy, which many call the ‘digital economy’. The aim of this paper is to offer the reader a means by which human involvement in e-banking may be evaluated and improved. At the heart of this problem lies a need to characterise human involvement, since, once the issues are clear, the specific e-banking factors can be related to them in the form of a model. In this work we therefore take as our task: 1. What do we mean by human involvement or participation, and how does this compare to the often overwhelmingly technology-based approaches to information systems developments? 2. Where might human involvement be grounded theoretically? 3. How is this theoretical grounding to be taken forward to a set of pragmatic approaches to be applied by practising managers? E-banking owes its existence to a revolution in the enabling technologies. In this paper, however, we are less concerned with the technologies in themselves, and more with how value and advantage may be leveraged from them. To understand the issues here we need to go back to their roots, which lie in the adoption and application of information technology. In the early days of IT, most approaches to its implementation and management focused on the technology (the so-called “technology-based” approach). The sections which follow therefore begin with this, before outlining the more recent human-centred methods which are of such value in e-banking. Consequently, we will first look at participation from a recent historical perspective, and use this to develop an approach to human involvement which is applicable to the domain of e-banking. Finally, we will present action guidelines for human involvement in e-banking, and describe how these may be used to evaluate and implement e-banking solutions which are true to participative needs.