Question

Question 1

Argue any SIX (6) factors that will cause the unsuccessful of Sahana software project in offering an effective timely access to comprehensive, relevant and reliable information for humanitarian operations today.

Answer 1

The major factors which will cause the unsuccessful of Sahana software project in offering an effective timely access to comprehensive ,relevant and reliable information for humanitarian operations today are:

1. Sahana Foundation is an well known successful organisation in terms of its reliability and stability, but always in the corporate world and in public sector, stakeholders usually prefer real time testing for its performance. It's very difficult to adapt an untested system in the changing environment, since SAHANA is free & open source software, the developers don't feel any responsibility or any sort of obligation in case of software issues. This plays devastating role when it comes to local maintenance ability and downstream troubleshooting scenarios.

2. The Sahana project works for a global community and hence it needs stability and consistency in its working.This is difficult to maintain this as it has no fixed owner institution/s.The changing institutions have a negative impact its steady working and development.

3. In the workflow & structure of Sahana it's very important to deal with the quality of data imported. Since the data that has been fetched, are gathered by individuals or various organisation who didn't use Sahana, because of this it's quite challenging to process the data before executing. To uplift this type of cases, there must be a support system to provide smooth functionality and to facilitate the quality of imported data.

4. One of the biggest challenge for Sahana is security issues. Sometimes, if the ISP(Internet Service Provider) itself is a victim of a cyber-attack and troubled with power failures, then the remote server pings won't be accessible over the internet. Because of this, it is impossible for other to access the network since it targets the domain with network ping to congest the internet via a distributed multitude of servers.

5. The people who use the Sahana platform are different from the people who actually develop it.The users of the software might not be understand or use the new features added by the developers which will make the promotion of Sahana difficult.Hence the software should have more user friendly interface so that even a layman in technology can use it.

6. Some features of the software like messaging and situation control may need real time response