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The significance of IT for peace building missions

his article identifies the increasing importance of further development of peace-building, crisis-prevention, conflict-resolution and human rights monitoring missions and the significance of a well-functioning technological infrastructure for such organizations.

Preamble

Conflicts have become phenomenal as a result of co-existence of all societies. In turn, co-existence is now inevitable and requires the need to sustain, due to social changes. Naturally, there tends to be a disparity in acceptance amongst these mutually interdependent communities. Often times such conflicts expand to crisis situations and sometimes lead to destructive proportions. Life is threatened due to these negative developments. As a result this negativity is redistributed into various forms, making resolution of such conflicts a complex affair.

There is large amount of responsibility aimed not at the problem itself, but how it is being handled and then resolved. Conflict management figures in this picture as a result of the diversity of the 'result-resolve' orientation of such disagreements.

Today a vast number of humanitarian organizations are structured with a focal goal of 'creating a better world'. Their contributions in this regard remain very high mainly due to efforts in uplifting 'human significance'.

In addition, conflict resolution, peace building and crisis prevention Missions also have to deal with a bundle of substantial complications in the involvement of 'on-field' operations.

All missions must be certain of the 'facts establishment' phase of their observation. This is absolutely critical and if the detail staging is not taken care of properly, confusion and gaps in the information base might even lead to a political repercussion.

Proper Information Systems have become key in leveraging the improvement of effectiveness of such missions. Most missions are now trying to improve their information services through upgraded IT infrastructure. Their service and motivation towards doing and presenting 'genuine work' is elevated and is more clearly defined when data captured is not disturbed by infrastructural drawbacks.

IT Strategy for Peace Missions

Few points explaining the problems that are faced by the monitors while on duties.

1. The need for structured Information Systems to monitor and report incidents

Generally, the information of an incident is captured on typical office applications. This restricts the users from performing certain actions such as report generation on statistics. Since there are no effective search mechanisms and analysis tools within these applications, Reporting Officers are faced with difficulties in producing rich and readable content.

2. The Requirement of having a reliable data source to report observed incidents

Security and privacy of the captured information is not guaranteed when it is on typical office applications or on paper, hence extra measures need to be taken to assure the privacy of important data.

3. The Necessity to drastically reduce operational expenses on reporting material such as paper and other resources

Most missions spend large amounts of money on paper. Expenses are also incurred for secure storage and maintenance of such facilities. A mission of this nature would also require the support of additional administrative staff in order to carry out operations with such a reporting apparatus.

4. Managing distributed divisions/departments that situated within a territory

When scattered information is not centralized, various misinterpretations amongst sub divisions are a high possibility. Sometimes, departments and individuals invent and operate their own systems and structures to maintain information. This hampers effectiveness of the information gathering as well as making the information gathering less significant as a whole. Additionally, information sharing takes a longer time, as an effective method of making the data available immediately is unavailable. This results in valuable information not being used effectively in decision making.

5. The need to maintain gathered information for a long period and effectively use the database when the mission's activity is closed and reassembled

By not having a structured information base, maintaining the level of usefulness of observations becomes difficult. If the mission's activities are closed or restructured, previously held organizational knowledge faces the danger of being lost. In a mission that has already completed its mandate, such gathered information is useful for research, historical, legal and educational purposes as well as to improve the effectiveness of any future mission that might be setup.

6. The need for Officers to spend time on real field work, rather than in the office

People join humanitarian missions to fulfill their desire to assist a community and actively participate in humanitarian activities. Due to the commitments to the mission, the officers often end up allocating a valuable part of their time to paper work and report preparation rather than important field work. Reducing such work substantially increases the motivation of the officers.

Mazarin's Experience in working with Peace Building and Crisis Prevention Missions

Having worked closely with two conflict monitoring missions we have improved our understanding and knowledge on the essence of work involved.

From our discussions and co-operation with such missions, we encountered more needs that were unique to individual missions. Hence, aforementioned list of needs for a formalized Information System, expands further in terms of different perspectives.

We successfully developed and implemented few key systems at the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) and are in the process of implementing an advanced workflow-based case handling system for Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH). After the introduction of the systems and continuous dialogue with its users, the systems have successfully solved a number of problems.

Feedback received of the systems further speaks of its effectiveness and can be supplemented for perusal.

We have expanded our knowledge of the requirements of peace building, crisis prevention and conflict resolution missions and have established a certain understanding of the technological framework of systems that can be deployed.

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