As we kicked off Day 4 of the NetHope Global Summit at Santa Clara University, Industry, Non-Profit and Government leaders announced a new step forward for humanitarian efforts by embracing cloud services. I reflected on the mentoring many of us received from Andy Grove, Intel's former chairman. He always said that the best way to succeed is to focus on what you do best. At Intel, there's no question our core competency is technology.
That premise is what launched us on the road to today's announcement of NetHope's Humanitarian and Development Services Cloud initiative. For me, this effort started some three years ago when our Intel's World Ahead and Corporate Affairs groups put our heads together to align our competence in technology with corporate social responsibility. Applying technology leadership to scale humanitarian efforts led us to engage with NetHope, a unique Non-Government Organization (NGO). NetHope's mission is to advance humanitarian efforts through the use of technology, and is comprised of CIOs of 32 of the largest worldwide NGOs. NetHope's "role up our sleeves" approach aligns with Intel's World Ahead objective to bridge the digital divide and bring uncompromised technology access and its benefits to billions of people.
Technology
can add real value to humanitarian efforts by reducing costs and
speeding the delivery of services. We saw this come to life today in the
form of real world examples of how Cloud Services are scaling
humanitarian efforts. A great example of this, demonstrated by Child Fund International (CFI), is the adaptation and reuse of an existing cloud service to benefit child management. In a matter of months CFI was able to outfit field workers in Brazil to use netbooks to streamline their processes. Today, one result of the pilot stood out to me. It showed how the existing paper process can be reduced from one week to 25 minutes. My simple math says that's over 80 times more efficient. Think about the implications this could have for children that CFI and other organizations do not have the capacity to support.
NetHope's cloud focus is perfectly timed with the industry's evolution to "cloud computing"
-- the sometimes over-hyped term for services that are made available
over the Internet. If you've ever signed up for an internet email
account, you're already familiar with the benefits of cloud-based
services: You can get started fast without buying and maintaining
expensive systems. For NGOs, humanitarian cloud services can stretch
limited dollars and IT resources. And cloud solutions are also much more
likely to be successful because they use technologies that are proven
and have already been deployed.
Like
the CFI example above, the Humanitarian Services and Development Cloud
initiative is building upon successful projects Intel and NetHope
members are architecting for scale. Our first success story is the Great Lakes Cassava Initiative (GLCI), an effort led by Catholic Relief Services (CRS) to stem the proliferation of crop disease in Africa.
Intel's contribution included architecting solutions for collecting
much more accurate data on damaged crops and for training farmers on how
to reintegrate disease resistant crops.
The
services that enabled GLCI are located in the "cloud" and became a
catalyst for other NGOs and Government sponsored organizations to
implement solutions showcased at this week's NetHope Summit. The current
efforts are also proving to be sustainable as many of the solutions are
paying for themselves through improved efficiency as well as greatly
reduced time, effort and cost of roll out. The showcase is proving that a
Humanitarian and Development Services Cloud model is a viable way to
solve hard problems -- not just in agriculture but also in healthcare,
child welfare, natural resource management and other areas of need.
Other showcase solutions included the Tanzania Beyond Tomorrow effort where NetHope partners are teaming with the Tanzanian government to architect eLearning for the nation's secondary students; the eHealth Educator, a PEPFAR sponsored pilot in
Lesotho using netbooks to train military personnel and to collect
health records (22,000 to date); and a demonstration of how multiple
cloud solutions can be extend to integrate humanitarian data with GIS maps, developed by ESRI, for mobile field workers.
Intel
has been a strong supporter of the Humanitarian Services Cloud effort
in several ways. Besides architectural leadership, our corporate affairs
group has provided funding to NetHope and some of their member
organizations. Our Emerging Market Platforms Group has created a loaner
program for ruggedized classmate PCs so NetHope members can do rapid
piloting and prototyping.
I
want to stress the importance of collaboration in these efforts. It
couldn't happen without the aligned efforts of NetHope NGOs, Development
Agencies, and industry partners, like Accenture, Cisco, HP, Microsoft
and many others. By adding our combined "Core
Competencies" in technology, we're proving that we can create
innovative, partner-delivered cloud services that solve hard problems in
a matter of days or months. Ordinarily, many of the showcased solutions
would take multiple years to achieve a "one-off" victory. Now, instead
of humanitarian agencies reinventing the wheel, we're seeing the
beginning of a new phase in philanthropy where solutions can be deployed
rapidly and affordably. Replicating and sharing successes with other
agencies and organizations is the recipe for sustainability and scale.
This is exciting to me both personally and as the chief strategist of Intel's World Ahead organization. My personal philosophy is to participate versus donate. I'm
proud Intel encourages that same perspective, saying let's bring our
core competency -- the ability to design and architect creative
technology solutions -- to the world of humanitarian efforts.
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