What C-Dog did next, part 1: “not so much big data, as many small data”

I think I first met Ivar Strand on the back doorstep of the Ministry of Finance in Mogadishu, almost a decade ago. He is a tall Norwegian, with proportionately less obvious need of the close protection team who were, as they have to be there, around.

For the last decade, Ivar, Ian his laconic Canadian colleague and their team at Abyrint (like Labyrinth but with the front and back doors taken off…), have been making the road by walking it, in fairly tough contexts, with an approach that strikes me as promising, sustainable and developmental.

Assurance enabling localisation

Their ‘classic’ offering, so to say, has been diligent international development assurance, following trails to their end exhaustively, and working iteratively so that country systems more completely enable that.

This has been proven in Somalia over a decade, first with the Norwegian ‘Special Financing Facility’ and then with the World Bank-held Multi-Partner Fund, through which $100ms have been successfully invested by World Bank contributors in service delivery through the systems of the Federal Government of Somalia – with the levels of assurance that funds did in fact go where they were intended to that you would expect those funders to look for – and the World Bank portfolio now close to a billion dollars.

At a time when others, including the UK, were getting chary of ‘budget support’, and doing things on host government financial systems more generally, this is a pretty striking result:

·         in itself

·         in the outcomes in terms of education, health and other basic services available and delivered

·         in terms of localisation, value for money and sustainability, rather than ‘microwave’ external aid

·         in building/rebuilding core government functionality

And they are now taking that approach to a few other places, Yemen among them.

Aby.dev general case Data Management System, and no-code Form and AppBuilder

Over the last two years, coming out of Abyrint’s ‘classic’ work, Ivar has been building a rather clever thing, to address, both in global development contexts and otherwise:

·         the task of trying to ingest and make sense of large volumes of data that do not always come in precisely consistent formats with last month, or indeed within a set

·         being able to set up at-scale, near real-time data management quickly and without having to involve developers/coders:

As he puts it, the target here is “not so much big data, as many small data”.

Aby.dev (the working title for now) is a general case Data Management System and no-code AppBuilder, that’s going to be available on a SaaS basis very soon.

My outline summary based on a day’s walkthrough last week with the team, is thus:

•      A fully general case form builder, app builder, and real-time MIS and analysis system

•      You can make it what you need it to be, with no code, and an easy and intuitive visual interface

•      End to end data integrity and visibility, from the disaggregate data gathered at the start, all the way to the top-line reports

•      Highly secure – particularly compared with some of what has been used in global development historically

•      Browser-based – no hardware requirement

•      Fully hosted for you: press one button to start

And all of this available at a low monthly cost, for functionality that you could otherwise pay one-off five or six figure sums to set up.

Making the road by walking it

As of last week I’ve joined the Abyrint team working half-time to help on both the classic and the Aby.Dev sides.

On the latter, you’ll be glad to hear, I’m not working on the code (qv. the Tommy Cooper Stradivarius/Rembrandt joke:

) but on use cases and roll-out.

We think that this could be a rather useful tool, for things ranging from adaptive management of basic services in Global South countries at one end, to Mittelstand-style companies and bright start-ups who have data management needs that don’t readily fit the boxes that some of the standard products would squeeze them into.  If any of that could be you, very welcome to get in touch by any of the usual means.