IMSMA Newsletter and Website - Reply from Alan Arnold (3)
Reply to My follow up (2) by Alan Arnold, GICHD
Sorry to hear that you are feeling left out. We are trying to keep the information flow going and at the same time keep things moving ahead on the project. In fact I have been away from the office the last couple of weeks conducting a series of demonstrations and question and answer sessions concerning the new release of IMSMA. This trip included meetings with the UN in New York, VVAF, SAC and the US DoS. We planning a series of regional meetings to discuss the new system and provide demonstrations to programme managers and operational staff from the current IMSMA sites. These will begin later this summer and extend into the late fall of this year. The regional coordinators will inform the sites and send out invitations as soon as dates have been determined.
In the mean time I will try to answer as many of your questions as I can. The new release will be called V4 in order to stay with the current naming convention. The NG name was never really an official part of the new release and has been dropped. As far as the internal structures and concepts being employed there has been a lot of work accomplished and we are well along with the first stages of the development process. The system is divided into a core module representing the basic information required to perform operational mine clearance activities. These elements all come from the current IMSMA data set.
The remaining IMSMA data elements will be represented and expanded into a series of functionally based support modules. These "Plug-Ins" will provide enhanced support for MRE, VA, Hazard Reduction, Q/A and many other tasks. I am scheduling a series of meetings to help us validate our approach to these functional modules. We will base their functionality on the current system and expand and update things to reflect current feed-back from the field. In all cases the objective is to design tools that are simple to use for non-IT staff. The first meeting will focus on MRE and Victim Assistance and will take place at JMU in mid-August. Invitations will be sent to MRE and VA organizations over the next few weeks. I will organize a group or groups to discuss Tasking, Clearance, Hazard Reduction and other the operational issues later this fall.
The new system will be released in small increments beginning this fall (October). The first set of locations selected for the release are all small sites with limited needs. As you can imagine this does not include Afghanistan. The sites were selected to match the capabilities available in the first Pilot Version of the new system. The Pilot test will begin sometime before Christmas. The regional coordinators will perform the installations and training on site. Once these locations have been installed and we have a good idea how operations are going we will expand to other locations. The entire process will take about 18 months.
Once all of the sites have been offered the opportunity to transition to V4 we will discontinue support for V3. This will be a phased process and has already begun. We have already eliminated V3 training from our support package and will only be providing emergency updates to the system from this point forward. All support services from ETHZ will end on June 30th of this year. The team there has already been significantly reduced and no further updates for V3 are planned.
In terms of the general concepts being put in place for V4 the key point is the shift from a emphasis on IT to Operations. The system has been greatly simplified and will contain a number of wizards designed to reduce the need for IT support and make it easier for users to interact directly with the system. This starts with the complete integration of the GIS package into the user interface. Navigation will be accomplished directly on the map or through the gazetteer. We have also redesigned the system to incorporate a much more flexible approach to data collection, form design and reporting. These tools are all new and represent a significant simplification of the system which will allow Operations users to take a much more direct role with the system.
The concept of DDE has also been much improved in order to eliminate the need for the complex data distribution schemes now being used. Data can be collected and recorded in a number of locations at the same time and is brought together through an Operations Workbench approach that allows Ops Officers to easily review and validate field reports as they are incorporated into the system. This means that the system will be available to a much wider range of NGOs and field operators for direct data entry. We will work with national authorities to regulate the distribution of the system, but from a technical perspective we will be encouraging a much wider use and distribution.
We will support this approach through direct user training here in Geneva and in the field. We have already started this training and I am sure you have received a request for information about the staff there. The idea is to identify operational users of the system and begin their training with basic courses outlining the concepts of information management. Once the basic course has been completed we plan to move on to a course directed to the integration of information management into daily operations. Finally, in a last stage we will move to training on the system itself. In all cases the basic concept courses will be required prior to moving on to system installation. Our emphasis will be on Operations Staff and system users.
The IT aspects of the system are rooted in basic open source Java and SQL technologies which are familiar to IT professionals and should not require a great deal of training. As a result the current train the trainer IT approach will be phased out. This decision reflects our commitment to make things easier to use and discussions with UNMAS and others that indicate a desire to reduce the need for IT support in the field. Clearly there will always be some needs in this area, but we are working to making these much more routine and directly related to the care and feeding of the network and the tasks directly related to IT rather than mine action.
I hope this helps to answer some of your questions. At this point we would look to begin a transition for the Afghan programme in late 2006. Thomas and I will stay in contact with you and the Operations staff there in order to keep you informed as things change. The first step is to involve the Operations staff in the training process. Please be aware that this training is not designed for IT professionals nor will it look at any of the details of the new release. In fact in the first stages we do not even have any computers in the classroom. Our goal is to provide a background that makes it possible for real operational support staff to use the system on a day to day basis and gain real value from it.
Thanks Karl for this information. According to this, the new system is already developed and they are just testing it and implementing it in the MACs from now on. The idea of having a reduced number of IT personnel in the MACs sounds good and cost-affective but, they have to provide as much trainings to the Ops staff as they become IT expert and can use the system independently. Meaning that GICHD regional coordinators should spend almost all their times in the field. Although they might have simplified the system and would look easy to use but from experience we know that most of the field staff hardly know how to use simple computer applications. It would be a challenge and at the same time would be a good policy of integration of IT staff with Ops in the MACs even though IT staff might have little influential in the MACs but I personally still would be happy if it happens so.
Thanks for sharing this information Karl and for your input Qasim. I did try to get some information from Ananda last year but not much was available at that time. It will be interesting to see the new system since the whole concept is in line with what I have been promoting since 2001. I doubt that the new system will be implemented in Sri Lanka where I\'m working now though because hopefully mine action will start to face out here by the time the V4 is ready to be distributed.
Thanks for your kind inforamtion about IMSMA V4 and I am looking forward to hearing from you about in future.
Thank you very much for your dedication to have things smarter than they are going to be.
I\'d like to draw your attention to the word \"support\" in last para of Alan\'s letter. It means special staff is to perform the information management. And what is then the difference?
Another point is quotation from Emil:
Summarizing the Idea of this training I would like just to tell that GICHD,UNDP,UNMAS and mine action community became more supportive and turned to the idea that IMSMA is pure operational tool and should serve for operations, versus the previous fact that it was under the umbrella of IT specialist, and as it was said donors dont have any willingness to create position for IT specialist, but they have the willingness to do it for field staff who involved in the field operations.
Could we consider the GICHD,UNDP,UNMAS\'s nowadays attitude towards IT people as a fair one? How is it possible to appoint people with no skills to be responsible for mine clearance, but to not accept those, knowledgeable in IT to be a focal point for all to collate, process and distribute related data on survey, clearance, MRE and MVA all interrelated and also based on many additional info, e.g. gazetteer?
I would like to say thanks for your\'r up dating my information about what is going on with the new version of IMSMA and hopefully this sharing of the information keep us in activite our knowledge in this field , thanks again and I appreciate for you\'r efforts, have all my best.
First of all I thank Karl for the effort of gathering IMSMA administrators, user in a forum where they can discuss different things and issues regarding IMSMA.
I am happy that we are moving from IMSMA V3 to IMSMA V4 and the new version has all functionality, which is that much simple that our operation can use it without IT support. What I am more concerned is that whether operation can use this new version without the IT support? Do our operation have that much capability of the data management, data analysis, and data quality and data integration? My second concern is that countries like Afghanistan where we have decentralized data entry system will be able to have data management system without IT support? My third concern is that if the GICHD has the plan to discontinue support for V3, what will happen to the countries like Afghanistan? As they have no recent plan and we also cannot move in such fast way from IMSMA V3 to V4, than such a countries need proper and continuous support for IMSMA V3, Thats all for this time and wish you all the best.