Technology Is Not The Answer, but It Should Not Be The Problem

This article was originally posted by Taylor Downs, Head of Product, on The OpenFn Founder’s blog as “Technology isn’t the answer, but it shouldn’t be the problem.”

March 23, 2015 — Salesforce Foundation originally published this blog post.

Three out of four IT implementations fail. While this is an accepted rate in the corporate world where CEOs are accustomed to doubling down, conflicting pressures and tighter budgets in the social-impact space push the chance of failure even higher. Without good data, decision makers from the field to the boardroom are hamstrung. Technology alone is never going to solve social problems, but the inability to get it right has and will continue to sink promising development programs. We built openfn.org to address this problem.

Here’s the context.

Over the last four and a half years, Vera Solutions has been designing and building data systems with Force.com for leading impact-first organizations around the world. We’ve now worked with 125 clients in more than 40 countries. We’ve witnessed our partners transform their organizations with good data systems. “É uma revolução!” said one staffer at PSI Mozambique. We’ve also gained experience with dozens of other technologies designed to serve social impact organizations. These tools have enabled our partners to improve their operations in diverse ways ranging from communicating by SMS with thousands of farmers in Mali, to collecting loan repayments using MPESA in Kenya, to analyzing household survey data in India.

Hundreds of these tools exist, but social impact organizations face three main barriers to successful implementations:

1. Picking the right tool is hard.
2. Even if you pick the right tool, a successful implementation of that tool hinges on solving complex people and process problems.
3. No single tool does it all, so you’ve got to figure out how to integrate more than one — and they rarely ‘play nice’.

Figuring out the people and the processes, that’s always going to be the hardest part to get right — whether or not the technical work presents a barrier. OpenFn.org’s first objective is to knock down the technical hurdles so that organizations can focus on that important contextual stuff.

We see a future where the technical setup of a mobile money platform, a biometrics tool, even an offline clinic registration platform, feels just like downloading an app from the app store.

We’re still a long way from that reality, but we’ve built an open-core integration platform that’s poised to bring together the “technology for development” landscape with clicks, not code. Our team of integration specialists and Apps page guide users to the right tools based on their needs, our blog will feature in-depth case studies and implementation guides, and our jobs engine fast-tracks setup of robust integration and automation solutions, enabling our users to get data flowing from one technology to another in just a few minutes.

This is where we stand.

Over the last 6 years, OpenFn has delivered interoperability, data integration, and process automation solutions to dozens of the world’s leading impact-first organizations, including UNICEF, Population Services International, Population Council, myAgro, Lwala Community Alliance, Vera Solutions, Dimagi, and more. OpenFn solutions strengthen existing digital systems, improve service delivery, save time and money, and help organizations worldwide scale their processes, programs, and impact. So far, different organizations have integrated more than X number of technologies, including Open Data Kit (ODK), Kobo Toolbox, DHIS2, CommCare, Salesforce, custom databases, and more.