Thanks for your comments. I'll try to answer your questions and give you a quick update on where we stand with IMSMA as we head into the summer of 2004: The IMSMA Re-Engineering project (NG) will begin sometime in the next 60 days or so. Once the project gets going we will be expanding our web site to reflect more news and information about the new system. I appreciate your comments about a discussion forum for IMSMA topics, but as you can see from the old ETHZ web site the field response to this kind of initiative has not been very strong over the life of the IMSMA project. This doesn't mean that we are not interested in hearing the views of people in the field, but it does mean that the field does not seem to have been too interested in sharing their views with us.
As to your specific questions about the system we will begin making data vailable as soon as we have a firm plan in place. As you might imagine we do not want to put out a document with too much speculation and too little act. We share your interest in IMSMA course material and we will soon begin developing an entirely new set of documents and training materials for the new system. This will need to wait until we have a product in hand, but conceptual planning is already well advanced. I can tell you that the emphasis of the new training package will be on users and operations. This has already been implemented in our PfP training and has been well accepted by Bern and those attending the course. We have also completed a field test of this operations focused training concept and found it to be very successful.
We are not forgetting the IT section, but we have found that IT concepts are not magic especially for professionals like you. This also applies to a large part of the very well trained local staff people we work with in the field. Many of them are university trained IT professionals. This means that they already have a firm grasp of the concepts behind IMSMA. While we will work with the IT support teams we will no longer be focusing our limited resources on maintenance and administration of the system as we did in the past. Our IMSMA Re-Engineering is based on comments from the field and these comments tell us that what the field wants is a much simpler system that will be both easier to maintain and to use. This does not mean that any of the functions currently available will be sacrificed, but it does mean that we will use a modular approach keyed to the demands that we do have from the users.
We appreciate the work that you have been doing in the field to support IMSMA and we hope that you can wait a little while as we prepare to bring the new IMSMA into being. Your comments are being heard here in Geneva and incorporated where possible into V3 and into the new IMSMA. The new system is a 2 year project that will be delivered in phases starting next summer. It is not likely that the Afghan programme will want to use the first increment of the new IMSMA, but will wait for the complete system with all of its updated and expanded functions to be delivered at the end of the 2 years. At the same time it is very likely that the majority of all IMSMA programmes will be able to profit from the first release next summer. Our upgrade and release plan will take time to implement and the more complex programmes like Afghanistan will benefit from the experience of others as we release each set of new functions.
As to your general interest in the new system and on-going 2nd level support for V3 we are currently in the final stages of arranging new contracts to provide these services. I can tell you that the role of ETHZ will be tapering back over the next few months as they will not be directly involved in the development of the new system. This will include the gradual phase out of the web site you mentioned. Despite the fact that we will be ending our development relationship with ETHZ you can be certain that we will continue to support V3 until the new release is available to everyone. Details on the new support arrangements will be made available to the field as soon as a new contract can be put in place. In general you will see little change to the current support system with the focus running first through the Regional Support Coordinators, then Geneva and then on to a 2nd level support provider.
The immediate future of V3 will be highlighted by the release of an IMSMA Service Pack/Update sometime in the early fall. We will provide more information on this as the final testing is completed and we narrow down a firm release date. Once this update has been completed we will probably not be performing any additional updates to V3. Our strategy is to concentrate our efforts on the new system rather than spend time trying to patch V3, which will be replaced at the majority of locations next summer and at all locations within 2 years.
I hope this helps to clarify things for you. I am sorry that you feel left out of the loop. Honestly speaking your voice is one of a very small group that has a lot of influence on what we are doing. You would be surprised at how few people have anything to say about the system good or bad. We try to keep in touch with everyone in the field either directly through the Regional Coordinators or via e-mail. I can tell you that the number of comments we receive is and has always been very small. The vast majority of our feedback comes from an even smaller elite corps of technical people. Frankly most are international staff like you with a small group of local staff commenting from time to time. We value all the feedback that we do get so please keep talking to us, but I think it is important for you to know that while a discussion forum sounds like a good idea to us too it has never really been something that has taken off.
