Responses to comments on “IT in the field”

I apologise for not writing another article sooner. I’d like to respond to some of the comments on my previous article, IT in the field, by some of the people I mentioned, Jeff Allen and Jon Thompson. I’ll include their comments and my responses inline.

Jon writes:

1) Almost no one uses PDA’s. Mobiles – yes. (See my post on Nokia Data Gathering.)

I would argue that I’m coming from a different position, not on what’s currently in the field and being used, but what could be. I think that Jon is referring to a similar kind of future possibilities in his follow-on article. But I’m also thinking in terms of what an organisation (NGO or government) can do to avoid these problems in the first place, by changing the way that they deploy technology.

I accept completely that PDAs are not commonly used in the field at the moment. However, I’d suggest that organisations take a much closer look at deploying PDAs (and mobile phones) instead of general-purpose PCs in current and future projects, as it would avoid most of the problems that Jeff reports and that we are discussing here.

2) Is anyone buying and deploying Inveneo? Who is Aleutia? What is their penetration. Odds are Jeff’s guy in Congo will never know about either.

I’m not intending to put the onus on Jeff’s guy in Congo, or any other end user, to select appropriate technology for their circumstances. I don’t think they have the technical skills or buying power to do so. The choice was already made for them by the organisation that supplied a PC running Windows without antivirus updates. I believe that this was a bad choice, driven by the factors that I gave in my previous article, and that different choices could be made in future to avoid such problems.

3) Webmail will stay the same until the cows come home. Sure, someone can write tricky code but will the guy in Congo ever see it? Probably not.

Actually, I have seen comments asking why Google doesn’t use their own Gears library for their own webmail service, particularly in the context of recent Gmail service outages. If they did decide to do so, the benefits should translate immediately to users with low-bandwidth or intermittent connections, in the Congo as elsewhere.

4) Mac OSX does not exist in the rest of the world and barely in the Balkans, some of which are even slated for EU membership.

I don’t see that as a strong argument against deploying alternatives such as MacOS X in new systems. We have a problem: poor maintainability of traditional IT systems in the field. We have to find solutions to those problems, which may involve deploying different technology. The same argument applies to Ubuntu.

5) So you do support Ubuntu adoption as an alternative? I think you are getting my point. You could just install Ubuntu and forget about the AVG argument.

But the end user will not deploy Ubuntu. The providers of the equipment will have to do it for them. That’s my point, that the organisations have to change, not the end users.

Vertical programs that distribute hardware almost never follow-up so anything they put in the field is usually toast within a few months.

That’s precisely my point in the last article, even if I rambled a bit in the process of getting there. But I think it would be great to have hard numbers that we could present as evidence to the organisations to get them to recognise the problems in what they’re doing, and to change their ways.

For example, let us just say that something causes the OS to hiccup so the well meaning local IT guy steps in and recommends reinstalling the OS. Of course the owner doesn’t have one so the IT guy offers one of his own. Bootleg install. Story over.

That is certainly true for general-purpose computers, but even a minimal amount of BIOS lock-down can prevent the reinstallation of the software, or make it significantly harder. There’s also the question of why the man in the Congo is turning to his “local IT guy” for technical support? Why isn’t the organisation that provided the computer providing support for it as well?

9) Forget about NGO’s as they are not the problem. Remember, this guy worked for the Congolese Gov’t so he gets whatever trickles down (a few odd machines from international agencies)

These “international agencies” are precisely who I meant by NGOs. Perhaps I should have included IOs as well, but all this jargon is going to get very confusing to anyone who’s not an expert in the field. Is there any reason not to lump NGOs, IOs and government programmes into the same basket as “organisations” all?

His support team? The local DVD vendor and the well meaning IT tech. Therefore, educate the local health official, the DVD vendor and the local IT tech…

And why are they his only (or primary) means of support? MSF sent Jeff out to deal with a problem that wasn’t even to do with any equipment that they provided (as far as we know), but it was stopping the man in the Congo from interacting with MSF.

Had MSF not sent Jeff to the Congo, you, me and Jeff would be none the wiser.

Indeed, but had the original organisation not sent out the wrong equipment (a Windows computer with no support and no antivirus updates), MSF would not have had to waste a lot of valuable time and money and resources on sending Jeff out in the first place. Also, had MSF provided their own, more suitable equipment, for the man in the Congo to use, Jeff would not have had to make an on-site visit either.

I’d like to respond to Jeff’s comments as well, but this article is already getting rather long and ranty, so I’ll leave that for another day.