humanitarian.info

Michael is abolutely right when he says that ICT projects can’t solve process problems on their own. It continues to puzzle me that so few people have worked this out in the humanitarian sector considering that we’ve been saying this for so long now. Anybody care to predict what will happen to UNOCHA’s OneResponse, a platform without any process behind it? Answers on a postcard, please.

I recently exchanged emails with another colleague whose work I respect and whose views are generally solid. He’s taken it upon himself to develop a management dashboard to manage humanitarian missions. I used to think this was a great example of how ICT could support humanitarian work, but I’m much less convinced now, for reasons which tally with Michael’s post:

• All these systems suffer from their “weakest link”. If one person fails to enter data (or fails to enter accurate data), the utility of the entire system falls dramatically.
• Systems which try to do too many things suffer from lack of focus. It’s better to do one thing very well than a lot of things quite well – otherwise users will not pick up the system.
• System competition – even the smallest NGO has information systems (usually for finance if nothing else) and some of them have extensive systems. Trying to introduce a new (external) system will meet a lot of resistance.
• Adoption costs are extremely high – all staff in the organisation (including those without much computer experience) have to be trained on the system, which is difficult (but not impossible) to manage.
• Support costs are extremely high – if the system fails, there needs to be a full service level agreement with somebody to fix it – which is very difficult unless there is a commercial provider willing to do that.
• Scaling. It’s easy to introduce such a system as a pilot in a single country office of a single organisation – it’s much harder to introduce the same system across a range of country offices.
• Variability. If each country office wants a slightly different system, i.e. adapted for their needs, the costs of introducing and supporting it across the organisation go up exponentially.
• - Internal weakness. The system will only be as useful as the information systems that the organisation already has in place (e.g. reporting, standards, monitoring, etc) – and generally NGOs don’t have very effective formal systems in place.

After I sent the email, I read it back and realised how negative it was. It’s easy to point out the flaws, but the question of how we deal with those flaws is much more elusive. The points above might prove useful as red flags to warn us of possible pitfalls, but are we doooooomed to keep chasing after something which may not in fact be possible to achieve? Again, answers on a postcard…