My Project

So, now that I've been here a week and a half, I can give you all a little bit more information about my project, or maybe I should say projects. . . . . Marcelo (my partner from Brazil) and I are working with the APPD (IND) which in English means File/Archive, Library, and Data Processing Unit.  Our goal is/was to develop a high-level strategic plan for the office incorporating advice and options on how to better align their enterprise IT and data management systems.  I must say, we've come a long way in the time we've been here.  There have been many challenges including understanding the project, setting the scope for what is obtainable in one month, working through language barriers, working with a translator (not as easy as one might think), and learning about the culture, values, and beliefs of the citizens of Makassar.

On Monday, we presented our high-level preliminary report of what we have learned so far and how we think we can help.  We ended up giving them some initial recommendations of short, mid, and long-term strategies for each of the three departments in the unit/organization.  We are spending this week identifying tools they can use and hopefully will be making some kind of training for them to deliver next week.  What is frustrating is that there just isn't enough time to do everything we'd like to implement.  We will leave them with mid and long-term recommendations to implement in the next six months to three years.  However, even with the short-term recommendations, we will only be able to implement one or two of them, but hopefully they will be ones with the greatest impact and they can try to do the rest on their own.

Marcelo and I are working great together!  It is interesting in that I'm not only learning about Indonesia, but Brazil too!

Discussing priorities

Marcelo and Jess