Case Study: FIRST Initiative

Requirement

A multi-donor initiative designed to help improve the financial sectors of developing countries is being funded by the World Bank, the IMF and the governments of the UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland.

The programme, called the FIRST Initiative, required a system which would enable recipient countries and eligible institutions to apply for technical assistance funding. The system also had to serve as a central store of data for both the Management Unit - based in London - and the Coordination Unit - based in Washington, DC - which are the operational arms of the Initiative, as well as the donors - the World Bank, IMF, DFID, CIDA, SECO, Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs and SIDA.

Due to the sensitive financial nature of the projects, security was a major concern at all stages.

Analysis

Firstserv's programming team spent a period of time gathering information about the system to define the requirements. The users were visited and interviewed to establish exactly what was needed in terms of functionality, usability and reporting.

A final detailed specification was completed and approved.

The solution

Firstserv programmed the website using Adobe's ColdFusion MX. This allowed for rapid development whilst providing the advanced features required by the site administrators.

The front end of the website followed W3C standards and was designed to be quick to load for users where internet access is not reliable and PC equipment is outdated. This is essential given that most recipients of the Initiative would be from low- and middle-income countries.

A wireframe and prototype were produced which was approved by the customer.

The final site was completed to schedule and exhaustively tested both by test users and administrators.

The Firstserv hosting team set up a server cluster to provide a secure failover hosting platform for the site. The programming and hosting team worked closely together so that the requirements could be met exactly.

Conclusion

The site was launched in September 2003 and is presently being used to coordinate 1,000 projects and 3,000 consultants.

The site has proved to be such a useful tool that further work has been commissioned to move systems onto the web that would traditionally be run in-house.

Screen Shots

Please note that some text on these images has been blanked out for security reasons.

click to enlarge	Information Exchange - Compilation of donor funded projects, diagnostics and reports in the financial sector for participating countries can be found from here.
click to enlarge	Reporting System - Projects can be managed from this one screen which works like a desktop application. Attached to each project are contacts, documents, a detailed progress log, and a diary system.
click to enlarge	Project Search - Has both an internet and intranet interface. Both components have advanced search features allowing projects to be searched on the basis of country, region, financial sector. The intranet component, however, also allows access to confidential information, including attached pdf and word documents. The Verity search engine is used for this.

If you have any questions about this or any other projects, please contact us at: enquiries@firstserv.com
020 7536 7930

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