Charities and ICTs: Can IS-enabled Innovation in Business Critical Activities Be Delivered?

This article looks at the ways in which a number of charities are leading the United Kingdom’s ‘Third Sector’ in their use of ICT/IS capabilities to deliver innovations in a range of business critical activities. It shows that new ICT/IS capabilities afforded opportunities within different types of charities to deliver change. In the older charities established in the ‘pre-Internet’ era, these shifts tend to work with and reflect the existing ‘enterprise logic’ or established ‘ways of doing’. In the younger ‘Net generation’ organisations, the shifts tend to be more fluid in nature, enabling the delivery of new ways of doing and denoting the more flexible model of organisation upon which they were founded. Our research also shows that, in all of the charities, information and data capture and interrogation are intensifying