Open Atrium for Pan American Health Organization – Rethinking Customized Development
Black Box - a device, system or object which can (and sometimes can only) be viewed solely in terms of its input, output and transfer characteristics without any knowledge of its internal workings (wikipedia).
¶ I’ve seen my fair share of ‘black box’ systems…hell, some government agencies seem to be drawn to them like the proverbial moth to a flame. The government contracts a company (usually one of only a handful that have the resources and visibility to bid on the solicitation) to build software, a database, an analytical toolset, etc., from the ground up and for a very specialized purpose. Millions of dollars are spent on the system, which generally turns out to only moderately accomplish the requirements and tasks originally set forth in the contract. Also, in many cases, it’s not the actual end-users who are determining the components/requirements the system must meet, from an operational perspective; instead it’s the contracts officers, technical departments and prospective contractors who determine the final capabilities (see ‘Methodology in the Age of Technology‘). Contracting regulations also generally don’t dictate how a company has to reach a goal/requirement/etc; instead, they are free to innovate, develop, and work toward a particular goal (generally within a certain flexible budget), depending on their own capabilities and talents. In many cases, these big companies sub-contract components to smaller, more specialized companies that have employees with particular skill sets not held within the larger entity. Also, many companies develop proprietary tools based upon their understanding of particular clients’ general requirements, which are then marketed to various entities. While these are based upon the perceived general needs of various organizations, they are not specifically tailor to an individual organization’s mission. We all remember the Federal Bureau of Investigation VCF system that cost over $100 million, prior it being scrapped as non-useable. I’m not saying this, overall, is a bad system – there are many reasons to build proprietary systems from the ground up, particularly in the classified environment or in unique use-case examples where certain technologies might not yet be fully mature.
¶ In my experience, having been an ‘end-user’ in government agencies (Federal as well as State and Local), private companies, and non-profit organizations, the aforementioned approaches lead to a ‘black box’ syndrome, where the contracting entity is then tied for the life of the product to the contractor originally hired to develop it. Good for the contracted developer, but bad for retaining flexibility, scalability and cost-effectiveness.
¶ Enter Development Seed and their Drupal-based content management system, Open Atrium. Last week, Development Seed released a customized version of Open Atrium for thePan American Health Organization‘s (PAHO) Emergency Operations Center. This customized system incorporates a requirements-driven, PAHO-specific functionality on top of the baseline Open Atrium Foundation. I’ve used Open Atrium for my own work and have had the opportunity to test out other Development Seed products, such as Managing News.
Source: Development Seed
¶ Open Atrium is simple, elegant, and functional – exactly what I look for in a technical system. And, even better from an end-user perspective…it’s FREE. It works great directly out of the box and is intuitive enough that a person (like me) with limited technical ability, greatly benefits from it’s baseline capabilities and can even do some minor customization.
¶ The PAHO build is intended for use in a distributed manner to organize EOC disaster response activities – data collection forms, workflow, various output formats, etc. Basically, each country would use a local instance of the customized Atrium, with the ability to output data to a regional or headquarters element. The Dev Seed write up does a better job of explaining:
The data collection forms are used to assess damages to and the availability of services in health institutions in affected regions, report water quality, shelter availability, and health conditions on the ground, and give an overall situation report. This feature is meant to be used in a distributed way, whereby a country’s Emergency Operations Center team installs a custom distribution of Open Atrium on a local office web server. The feature is then used to organize the local team’s data collection and make it easy to get the data out of the system and sent to the central regional Emergency Operations Center or to headquarters.
¶ From my perspective, the PAHO build represents an ever-increasing trend in technology development – one I think is long overdue. Open source packages like Drupal are become more robust, with worldwide developer support and ever-increasing capabilities. This allows for use of modular and easily customizable tools for a variety of functionalities. No longer does an organization have to pay huge sums for an off the shelf product that doesn’t meet their specific requirements, or pay even more to have a system built from the ground up. As the PAHO example shows, companies like Development Seed can build very customized products, based on Open Source systems, that meet the exact needs of an organization for a fraction of the price. They can focus on the underlying methodology of the organization and build functionality to match. Now, smaller organizations (to include a start-up or non-profit) can afford to get exactly what they need. It is truly the blending of both product and platform – Open Atrium is the product foundation, while customization turns it’s capabilities into a true platform.
