The Framework

Planning and Design Phase

With funding secured and an understanding of what is needed and feasible from the activities conducted in the previous phase, the Planning and Design Phase has four components that seek to design the system, plan for best practice data governance, sharing and management, and establish a formalised financial sustainability plan.

Objective:

Develop a description of the data to be collated from pre-existing sources, newly collected in the field, and delivered by the SIS that ensures data is comprehensive, consistent, high quality, and FAIR. This includes consideration of who will be involved in which aspects of data management, what processes will be used to develop and manage data assets, and what systems and technologies will be employed to manage data.

Key definitions:

  • Data governance is the management structure that ensures data is accurate, accessible, secure, compliant with regulations, ensures the organisation’s data is used in an ethical manner through establishing and managing guidelines, policies, procedures and roles.
  • Data strategy refers to a plan that outlines how an investment will collect, collate, manage, analyse, and use data to achieve its objectives. It defines the processes, technologies, and governance measures needed to ensure data quality, availability, accessibility, and security. It largely encompasses the three Ps framework – People, Process and Platform, which are described in the activities below.
  • FAIR data: means data is...
    • Findable ensures that data can be easily discovered through unique identifiers and metadata, reducing duplication of efforts and time waste.
    • Accessible guarantees that authorized users can securely access the data through standardized protocols, usability, inclusion and open access, while respecting data privacy constraints
    • Interoperable enables seamless integration and combination of data across different systems and platforms, fostering collaboration and comprehensive analysis.
    • Reusable promotes transparency and reproducibility by describing data, associating them with licenses and provenance information, and adhering to community standards.

Activities:

Objective:

looking at what is realistic from the idealised system design brainstorm, design how the system will be built, using the structure of the data architecture and solution building blocks. These are established enabling efficient collection, storage, processing, analysis and dissemination of soil related data. The architecture should be structured in a way that it supports various functionalities, ensuring reliability, scalability and usability for diverse stakeholders with varied needs. The system architecture design is largely made up of two broad parts – the architecture building blocks and the solutions building blocks. The two building blocks form a cohesive structure for developing and deploying a robust, scalable, and user-centric product / service that meets the organisational objectives and user needs.

Key definitions:

  • Decision Support Tools (DST) “are designed to help users make more effective decisions by leading them through clear decision stages and presenting the likelihood of various outcomes resulting from different options (Dicks et al., 2014, Parker, 2004). These can be dynamic software tools, whose recommendations vary according to the user's inputs, and they may suggest an optimal decision path.” David et al. (2016)
  • Architecture Building Blocks (ABBs) are abstract components that describe the fundamental parts of the systems architecture. The ABBs provide the high-level structure and requirements of the system such as its capabilities, functionalities, interoperability and standards.
  • Solution Building Blocks (SBBs) are concrete components used to implement the architecture defined in the ABBs. The SBBs are specific products, technologies or configurations that address the requirements defined in the ABBs. The SBBs are implementation specific and directly contribute to the system development. Some examples include – sensor devices (e.g. moisture sensors), database management systems (Amazon S3, PostgreSQL), data processing tools (Apache Spark) etc. The ABBs unveil the high-level requirements and the conceptual structure of the system, while the SBBs ensures the actual implementation adheres to the conceptual structure and addresses the requirements defined in the ABBS. Click here to view the table below to understand the relationship between ABBs and SBBs:

Activities:

  • Design backend
    • How will you map the target system to existing efforts/products/services?
    • How will you ensure the SIS is interoperable with pre-existing systems and technologies?
    • How will you link to/add Decision Support Tools, to the extent required?
    • How will you upload new information to system? And would you like the end-users to be able to do that as well?
    • What will be the process documentation plan?
  • Design frontend
    • Considering user needs identified in the initiation phase, how should the front-end interface look and work? What features should it have? What languages should it support?
    • How will access to the SIS and data be managed? Open access, user registration, authentication, or something else?
    • Dashboard:
      • Overview (required): A summary of soil health metrics, recent activities, and alerts.
      • Interactive Map (optional): Displaying soil data geographically, allowing users to zoom in/out, click on specific areas for detailed information.
      • Widgets (optional): Customizable components showing graphs, charts, and tables related to soil parameters.
    • Data Input:
      • Manual Entry Forms (required) For users to input data such as soil samples, GPS coordinates, and observational notes.
      • File Upload (required) Supporting various formats (CSV, Excel, etc.) for bulk data import.
      • API Integration (optional) For automated data collection from external sources (e.g., weather stations, remote sensors).
    • Analysis Tools:
      • Data Visualization (required) Graphs, charts, and heatmaps to illustrate soil properties over time and space.
      • Statistical Analysis (optional) Tools for performing statistical tests and regression analysis on soil data.
      • Predictive Models (optional) Implementing machine learning algorithms to predict soil health trends and recommend interventions.
    • Reports and Alerts:
      • Customizable Reports (optional): Generate and export reports in different formats (PDF, Excel).
      • Alert System (optional): Notify users of critical soil conditions (e.g., nutrient deficiency, contamination) via email or SMS
  • Supporting Resource:

Objective:

Build on the high-level plan brainstormed in the Initiation Phase to develop a concrete financial sustainability plan and organisational plan that will guide the following phases and to be iterated throughout the lifespan of the SIS.

Key definitions:

  • Organisational plan: addresses how the SIS will function organisationally as an integrated system of people and processes.
  • Financial sustainability plan: addresses how the long-term core costs of the SIS will be covered through government funding and revenue generation while potential external funding is used for value addition, expanding functionality, reach and impact.
  • Theory of Change (ToC): an “explicit, testable model of how and why change is expected to happen along an impact pathway in a particular context...[it] identifies the context and key actors in a system and specifies the causal pathways and mechanisms by which the research aims to contribute to outcomes and impacts.” (MELCOP, 2019)

Activities:

Objective: to determine whether all available and relevant information has been collected and synthesized, and all key stakeholders are in alignment to be able to move forward into the next phase of the framework.

Activities:

  • Develop a workplan for the next phase
    • Review all the information gathered from the activities conducted in each component- were any gaps identified that need to be addressed in the next phase?
    • Review the components and activities in the next phase and incorporate into the workplan
  • Develop budget proposal for the next phase
    • Refer to financial sustainability plan when allocating funds according to different tasks
    • Obtain approval from any authorizing organizations and/or donors to proceed (if applicable)

User Feedback!

We value hearing your feedback on your experience using the framework for your SIS interventions so we can improve it further to benefit future interventions. You can provide feedback using the contact form below: