IDEMS has led the integration of disparate climate data services and systems in Zimbabwe by focusing on both the human processes driving data management as well as the technical resources available.
As the Meteorological Services Department (MSD) team highlighted, reorganising and updating existing systems for real-time and on-demand data exchange, the project “marks a significant step toward a more responsive, integrated, and stakeholder-driven meteorological service in Zimbabwe.”
Zimbabwe’s MSD and National Water Authority (ZINWA) are separate public services that work in very distinct ways, but serve the common goal of strengthening policy, practice and public information for population health, food security and environmental wellbeing.
As with many such public institutions, both work with a variety of isolated legacy and new systems, each often the remains of short-term historical initiatives no longer funded or actively supported.
Many data integration projects approach this problem of fragmentation by developing yet another brand new system to consolidate all the existing data in one place. (In theory, all the now-redundant technology can then be thrown away, but in practice it often remains a critical but creaky foundation for its successor.) While this approach may ostensibly solve one data integration challenge, it often overlooks many other reasons that separate systems were established in the first place, ongoing access and governance issues in relation to the different data involved and the risks of prioritising a one-size-fits-all mindset.
This is often because enabling diverse systems and databases to work together effectively – while retaining different approaches to ownership, data sharing and exchange – is more complicated and time-consuming (in the short-term) than parachuting in a new solution. Over time the cost of such false economies often escalates, but this becomes someone else’s problem.
At the heart of MSD and ZINWA’s data integration challenge were two practical (human) problems: lots of data entry with little or no subsequent data use; and the triumph of data ownership over data sharing. Once these were addressed, and MSD’s existing climate data management system updated (not replaced), both MSD and ZINWA were better placed to deliver together their shared goal of public environmental wellbeing – with enhanced skills rather than new solutions.