A warm welcome to the blogosphere to Robert Kirkpatrick, scion of Groove and Microsoft Humanitarian Systems. With the formalities out of the way, I can tear apart his first post to get at the raw meat inside.
Robert is bang on the money when he says that “In every disaster zone and every rural development environment… paper is still king” and equally on the money in suggesting that this is because paper has a range of natural advantages over digital formats. Despite this he also predicts that “One day, hopefully soon, we won’t need paper in the field”, which seems a strange thing to wish for – the disappearance of a technology which is better than anything else we’ve yet developed.
The usual motor for such wishes is commercial: we’re sold new technologies which aren’t really better than the old ones mainly because somebody wants to make a buck out of it. This approach has a surprisingly successful track record for the obvious reason that people just aren’t that good at rational thinking. We’re more resistant to the sales pitch when the object is right in front of us and appears to work pretty well. Exhibit A: the bicycle. Few people even try to persuade us that they have something better than the bicycle to sell us, because it quickly becomes obvious that they don’t.
Unfortunately in the world of ICT, this natural check often doesn’t apply – it’s not immediately obvious that the novel solution isn’t any better because often the product in question isn’t as tangible as, say, a bicycle. This becomes a real problem when commercial companies approach non-profit organisations, offering them what looks like a free gift. Important to remember: whenever a commercial company offers you its product for free, it’s still a sales pitch.
Having said that, Robert’s offer is more interesting than my skepticism might allow. If “paper is the weakest link in your information supply chain”, then strengthening that paper will strengthen that chain – right? Well, sort of. In my opinion, in the humanitarian sector the weakest link in an information supply chain is more often to be found at the far end – the decision-making end. That’s tangential, because I do agree that there paper is a weak link, if not the weakest, taking us back to Robert’s point:
Data entry is not only a juncture where errors tend to be introduced; it’s also the point that tends to contribute most heavily to latency in the flow of humanitarian information. When critical information needed to match needs to resources reaches decision-makers too late, coordination breaks down, further delays are introduced, resources are misallocated, and too little arrives too late to help a population in need.
Again… sort of. Note to self: future post on how the humanitarian sector may suffer from serious whiplash effects in its supply chain because of the uncertain nature of most of the material requirements, the rapid turnaround required in procurement and the shifting conditions on the ground. This problem means that truly “efficient” supply chain management is not really what’s needed – as Michael says more eloquently, it’s better supply chain visibility that makes for better coordination, since it means that managers can make earlier decisions. WFP, for example, doesn’t order food based on precise headcounts, and nor would more precise headcounts cause WFP to re-think its logistics.
I could be wrong.
As a result of this dynamic, the forms designed to assess population needs at the outset of a response soon become inadequate. Questions must be added. Others must be removed. The schema of the data being collected has changed, impacting form and database design.
Surely this isn’t a technology problem – that it is, it isn’t a problem with the schema, the databases or the processes used to populate those databases? This is a political problem. The basic fields required to respond to a humanitarian crisis are almost invariant no matter what the specifics of that crisis are. The main requirement is to take into account local technologies (e.g. do we need to look for boreholes or surface water supplies), terminologies (e.g. what words do people use to describe their situation) and ontologies (e.g. what are the administrative boundaries).
We can argue about my reservations, but Robert’s post is still based on one major assumption:
As long as paper is used for data collection, error and data loss will continue to reduce the effectiveness of humanitarian coordination, and unless someone invents self-validating paper, it’s hard to see ways that technology can help here anytime soon.
Unless Robert has access to research that I don’t, my personal experience gives me no reason to believe that the levels of error in paper-based data collection are sufficiently high to significantly reduce the effectiveness of humanitarian coordination.
This project sounds interesting – but is the problem it seeks to resolve one that warrants such an investment? Does Robert make the fatal mistake of assuming that certain key processes needed to make it work (for example, people actually cleaning up data in a collaborative workspace) will somehow materialise as soon as the technology is developed? I worry, I worry, I worry…