Last week’s Outcomes Monitoring and IT conference raised a number of issues around database planning and implementation.

The first  is that contact management and outcomes monitoring are two very different things, and should be approached as two different projects needing different tools.

Outcome monitoring – the basic tracking of variables that have been adopted as measures or “indicators” ….
Source:  Globalhivmeinfo.org

Customer relationship management (CRM) consists of the processes a company uses to track and organise its contacts with its customers beneficiaries.
Source: Wikipedia

Organisations need to get this clear in their minds and concentrate on building a specification that focuses on one or the other.  Working through a database specification is covered in some detail on the Lasa ICT Knowledgebase with these database articles.  Conference organiser, Dr Simon Davey of Preponderate Network, also developed a summary factsheet to help organisatons work through the process of identifying their database need and implementing a system. We’ll cover this in the next post.

The second is that regardless of organisational size, the barriers to adoption of  a database tend to be very similar:

• Financial – lack of  funding or funders to support the project
• Expertise – lack of in-house skills and knowledge
• Capacity – lack of staff time to prioritise the project
• IT infrastructure – IT infrastructure to support database is anadequate
• Time – these projects can take 12 months or more to go from specification to implementation
• Data – what’s collected, why it’s collected and where it’s stored

If you’re engaged in a datbase project, tune into the next post where we’ll look at some simple strategies to help with database development.