Dr. McNaughton is Director of the Centre of Excellence for IT-enabled Innovation at the Mona School of Business & Management and is currently doing active research in the areas of Open Source Software, Open/Big Data and Mobile Computing. He is a founding member of the Caribbean Open Institute, a regional coalition of Caribbean organizations that engages and works with regional governments, researchers, journalists, technologists, NGOs, and academics, to raise awareness, strengthen capacity, and foster collaborations towards the adoption of open development approaches.
MSB through a collaboration between its Centre of Excellence and an interesting mix of partners (more on that in a subsequent Blog), has gained the distinction of being one of 20 best winning ideas selected for the "Technologies for Financial Inclusion Program ". This was in response to a Multi-Agency Call for Project Ideas that would improve the low-income population’s access to financial services by applying innovative technological solutions in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). The Call attracted 420 Idea submissions from 30 Countries...
The application of Computing in Business (some folks call it MIS) is continually evolving as a discipline. As an Industry, we've now learned after many years of failed IT Projects (17% success rate according to the Standish Report), that critical success factors are more about Organizational Context, Culture and People rather than the technology itself. Perhaps we could refer to these collectively as the "Politics" of the Organization... The Open Source phenomenon has rattled the very foundations of the commercial software industry.. And while Open-Source has spawned some fascinating technologies, it Is fundamentally more about the Philosophy of Collaboration and Community than about technology itself...