Information technology to strengthen local community tasks: Village fund and Elderly Payment System case studies

The Elderly Payment Information System (EPIS) and the Information of the Village Fund (IVF) are two information system projects that we designed and analyzed by utilizing information technology to help the activities of local communities more efficiently and effectively, both at the administrative level and the village group level. Two groups of students from the School of Information Technology at Mae Fah Luang University participated in both projects from the beginning. One group started in December 2011 and the other in December 2012. Each project took 6 months to complete. The impact of these two projects will reveal firstly that information technology, especially available hardware and software that are not beyond the capability of a local administration to implement, can make existing tasks more effective and efficient. Secondly, the students who participated in these two projects have acquired a great opportunity to work as information system analysts and designers in real situations where local communities actually solve particular problems by utilizing information technology for their own tasks. Lastly, for the School of Information Technology and Mae Fah Luang University as a whole, it can be demonstrated that a curriculum utilizing Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is an appropriate direction for this type of study.