Our iHRIS pilot phase is now drawing to a close. We’ve had
some really useful feedback from our users and have done several iterations of
development to address the points raised. We’re now in a position where we have
imported the entire HR dataset into the new system and in the New Year we plan
to slow down our rate of change and enter a more maintenance-like development
cycle. This means that iHRIS will be live and users will start cutting over to
the new system, using it as their primary HR planning tool. With this in mind
it was very important for us to setup our production server before Christmas and
migrate our first official release to the new environment.
Just in the nick of time USAID came through with the goods
and our shiny new HP ProLiant arrived in the office. Now all we needed to do
was rack it in our “data-centre.” I use that term in its broadest sense as in
true Malawian style our data centre is actually a single rack cabinet in an air
conditioned room (not common out here) with a backup generator that broke down
two years ago! The rack does of course have a battery backup but with all the
kit plugged into it we can only really survive a power cut of 10 minutes or
less.
With none of us being proficient server technicians,
installing the new box was not without its moments of comedy, but we got there
in the end;
The Ministry of Health closed down for Christmas on the 13th
of December; this gave us the opportunity to sneak in this week and try to sort
out the spaghetti mess that is the ministries computer room while nobody else
was there. Over the course of three days we managed to tidy Teddy’s office so
it vaguely resembles a useable space and also sifted through the mountain of
discarded desktop machines they have, find the ones that still have a pulse and
set them up as proper workstations in the computer lab. We even had time enough
for some guerrilla networking which will hopefully mean we can all get IP
addresses a little more reliably in the New Year!
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