How the cost of building the DAPP can be recovered

How the cost of building the DAPP can be recovered

In putting up a case for the acceptance and approval of the DAPP, you may be faced with a situation where the PC has already been convinced of the benefits of having a DAPP but remains reluctant due to the cost of obtaining one. This is very likely to be the case for new or very small schools, but is also applicable to big schools having many students.

Should this be the case, one of the most useful properties of a DAPP comes into play: the ease with which the institution can, within a few years, recoup the money spent in building it. Better still, after recovering the capital costs, the DAPP can be further transformed into a viable and sustainable income generation tool for the school. Here is how:

1. Our recommended method for funding DAPPs is for institutions to levy the students. The levy will be a very small and affordable amount and may be required as a once only payment or as a periodic payment.
   
   If the school chooses to use the periodic model, the DAPP will also become an on-going source of revenue for it. See these examples for more explanation:
   
   Once only levy: In a school where there are 10,000 students, charging a one-time levy of N500 yields 10,000 x 500 = N5 million and charging N1,000 yields N10 million naira (which is already the full cost of the DAPP)
   
   Periodic levy: In a school where there are 10,000 students, charging a periodic levy of N100 per session yields  N1,000,000 per session. Doubling this levy i.e. requesting N200 per session yields a total of N2, 000,000 per session. In 5 years, the cost of building the DAPP will have been recovered and from that point, it becomes a viable revenue generation tool for the institution yielding N2, 000,000 per academic session. Alternatively, after the first general levy, only new entrants may be asked to pay this levy.
   
   Note that these results will, of course become much higher for schools having populations greater than 10,000. For schools where the population is less than 10,000, these results can be matched and even surpassed if the levies in the two scenarios are increased to, say, N1, 500 and N500 respectively.

2. Another highly recommended method is to solicit for sponsorship, support and funding from private sector organisations such as banks and telecoms companies. A DAPP is a unique new product in the Education sector of Nigeria. It is built using state-of-the-art technology and it has the potential to cause a paradigm shift in Nigerian education plus it is the first of its kind in Nigeria.
   
   These superb qualities, coupled with the allure of the new age Information craze makes it a very attractive project for the private sector to support as part of their corporate responsibility programs. These companies would be happy to have their brand displayed as sponsors of the DAPP.
   
   On approaching these companies, the deal could be that their logo and brand would be displayed on the DAPP website as sponsors. Now, the DAPP is going to be aggressively exposed and promoted to the whole world so this would also double as a very smart PR move for these companies.

3. Mandatory subscription fees from all lecturers and students who also wish to take advantage of the service. This may be a small amount like N2,000 yearly.

4. Offering a paid service to academics from other institutions who wish to take advantage of the school’s DAPP to gain international exposure: For those schools and institutions or for private researchers who do not yet own a DAPP, using an existing DAPP would be a convenient way to publish their papers.

The backend: Registration and members area (dashboard)

The backend: Registration and members area (dashboard)

Basically, a DAPP is a website where lecturers have accounts as authors on the website. Anybody that wishes to use the website must be registered with an author account. Registration is carried out by the DAPP System Administrator (SysAdmin) who would be trained for free as part of the project.

After registration, the Lecturer is able to login to the website. The SysAdmin also gives him a unique web address to his e-portfolio. This address will be of the form www.universitydapp.com/author/lecturername e.g. www.unibendapp.com/author/boseojo

Once logged in, the lecturer is taken to a member area. This area is known as the dashboard (i.e. a place from where he can monitor and manage his portfolio, just like the dashboard of a car). The dashboard contains links and buttons for managing his e-portfolio.

From the dashboard a registered lecturer can, amongst several other things:

1. Compose and publish any write up: Even if he cannot complete the composition during the current login session, he can save it as a draft to be worked upon at a future date. In addition, he can set up completed write ups to be published automatically at a future date.
2. View and manage their e-portfolio: The e-portfolio is a page that displays all the write-ups that have been published by a particular author/lecturer. Authors can add, edit and delete already published write ups.
3. Create and manage their e-profile: The e-profile is like a short professional bio/description of the author which is appended to every write up published by him. This profile may include information such as qualifications and specialties.
4. View and manage the comments that were left on their articles. Authors can edit or delete comments left by other people. This is an innovative way of controlling inappropriate language and comments. Alternatively, they can turn off commenting on individual articles.
5. View the main DAPP website and make comments on other similarly published works.

Linking This State ministries with an Intranet will achieve the following:

Linking This State ministries with an Intranet will achieve the following:

1. First of its kind in the Nigeria:  This becomes the very first state government to implement an Intranet in the whole of Nigeria.
2.  Put This state in the league of world class governments in the developed economies of the world (US, UK, China, Russia etc).
3. Distinguish This state as a leading state for ICT usage in Nigeria.
4. Provide the operational backbone for the achievement of the State Government’s development plans by facilitating the work of the ministries and increasing their efficiency.
5. Jumpstart Nigeria’s ICT revolution by setting This State as a Pioneer.
6. Reduce operational costs of the ministries by up to 20%
7. Increase the speed of information sharing and collaboration among ministries by more than 1000%
8. Increase productivity of the ministries by up to 80%
9. Increase operations efficiency by over 200%
10. Streamline the activities of all the ministries
11. Provide the most secure method of handling and transmitting sensitive information within the ministries while at the same time preventing access to such information by unauthorized parties.
12. Drastically reduce inter-ministry communications costs.
13. Improve access to information for ministry staff.
14. Improve the organization and management of information among the ministries and departments.
15. Substantial reduction in bureaucratic barriers within the ministries
16. Provide a centralized source of information accessible to every staff/employee of the ministries.
17. Provide centralized control and management of documents.
18. Provide up-to-date information that is instantly available to every member of the ministries.
19. Put world class technology at the disposal of ministry staff
20. Synchronize activities and scheduling within the ministries

What is an Intranet?

What is an Intranet?

An intranet is a very secure and private framework for connecting computers in a corporate environment. It substantially improves internal collaboration, communication, productivity and efficiency. It also provides for the staff/employees a single, reliable access to an organization’s private information in a very secure way.

Intranets have been known to increase productivity and efficiency of organizations by up to 1000% while offering an impressive Return on Investment within a very short period. No wonder they are at the heart of every corporate organization today and have been confirmed to be responsible for the competitive relevance and success of these bodies in the information age.

Why Does This State Need an Intranet?

Intranets have long been a critical factor for the operational success of any corporate entity. From the massively spread global corporations to small scale establishments and government agencies in the developed world, the presence of an intranet has proved time and again to be the best solution to collaboration and communication between their different sections.

The publishing process

The publishing process

As soon as an author hits the “publish” button on the DAPP, many things happen instantaneously behind the scenes, all transparent to the author.

In chronological order:

1. The article is saved to the DAPP archive, appears on the DAPP homepage and becomes available for immediate download and review.
2. The article is emailed to all subscribers of the DAPP
3. The article is submitted to Google Scholar from where it becomes available to over 100 million users and scholars actively searching for information from around the world every day
4. The article is submitted and listed on digg.com, technorati.com, stumbleupon.com, reddit.com and del.icio.us. These are the top 5 aggregators and trackers of web content today and provide the article with a combined potential readership of 700 million people from around the world who use these websites daily.
5. The article is optimized for search and then submitted to the world’s top 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo and Windows Live Search). Using ground breaking accelerated submission technology, the article is made available to some 500 million searchers within 30 minutes, an unprecedented feat in the world of the web (note that without our accelerated techniques, the article could take anything from 48 hours to a week before it begins to show up in web searches).
6. The article is converted into a web distribution format through another groundbreaking process and syndicated to other universities and institutions across the web.
7. The article is submitted to the Internet archives under the category which it belongs.
8. The article is submitted to specialized e-libraries, category archives and academic directories.

Note that the aggregate effect of all these actions is that this one article is made available to a combined audience of some one billion people around the world every day!!! Compare this to the 70, 000 (monthly or quarterly) median distribution for Nigerian/African print based educational journals and you can begin to appreciate what the DAPP can really do for any academic institution and the stupendous potentials it brings.

How does it work?

How does it work?

A DAPP is made up of two primary areas: The public frontend and the member area (or backend).

1. The Frontend

This is the part of the DAPP that is accessible to the public. It is basically just like a regular website. On typing the DAPP address (e.g. www.universitydapp.com), a visitor is taken to the DAPP homepage. The homepage of any website is the first page that you see when you type in its address. It is like the welcome page and gateway to other areas of the site.

- The homepage

On this page, excerpts of recent and featured published writings and comments are shown, together with such statistics as most read, most emailed and most discussed writings. Other things include most published authors, a visitor map (that shows where the DAPP visitors are coming from), DAPP channel highlights, random write ups, featured lecturers, article archives, subscription links etc

Aside from the homepage, other areas that make up the frontend include:

1. The article page (where the full write up is shown together with the author e-profile and links for email, print and sharing). This page also displays links to related articles, other articles by the same author and other articles in the same Channel.
2. The channel pages where all articles from a particular channel are listed. DAPP Channels are areas of the website dedicated to specific disciplines/faculties like Social sciences, Arts, Science, Engineering etc. They also serve as a means of categorizing the writings.
3. The e-portfolio pages
4. Archive pages (displays previously published articles searchable by date)

What is a DAPP?

What is a DAPP?

A DAPP is short for Digital Academic Publishing Platform. This is a trademark name for a type of web application which we at Tanlen have packaged specifically for universities and other academic and research institutions. A DAPP provides universities, academic and research institutes with a means to publish scholarly papers, essays and other academic writings on the Internet.

Who is a DAPP meant for?

A DAPP is meant for any tertiary institution including but not restricted to:

1. All Federal Universities
2. All State Universities
3. All Private Universities
4. All Federal and State Polytechnics
5. All Colleges of Education
6. Private and Government owned research institutes and laboratories

What can be published on the DAPP?

Virtually anything can be published on the DAPP. This could be in the form of text, photos and even videos. They include:

1. Research papers
2. Studies
3. Theses and Term Papers
4. White papers
5. Scholarly articles and opinion
6. Technical papers
7. Abstracts
8. Journals and journal writings
9. Essays, discourses and sundry write ups

Our Core Values

Our Core Values

Because every project we undertake has its own distinct characteristics and poses its own unique problems, our solutions are always engineered from the ground up to fit the specific challenge. However, to maintain the uniform standard and quality that has characterized all our completed projects, our work is closely guided by values which are at the core of all our operations. These are:

- Best practices

- Quality

- Elegance

- Durability

- Integrity

- Green (environment friendly)

Cost and Expense Management

While we never compromise on quality, we keep an eye out for irrelevant expenses. Our operations procedure includes steps that eliminate excessive wastage of funds by introducing DuPont control points into the project implementation plan. This type of integration eliminates redundancy and ensures that each step of the process is achieved via the route of least expense without sacrificing on quality.

Best Practices and Quality Control

Our general procedure includes 16 operations benchmarks against which we continuously measure the quality, durability, efficiency, reliability and cost effectiveness of our work as the project progresses. At every point of the project life cycle, performance is repeatedly measured against quality-cost and cost-performance ratios.

In addition, all our projects involve an extensive and rigorous pre-launch beta phase in which we test all infrastructure by simulating over 70 trouble scenarios. This is meant to ensure that they preserve their integrity even after very many years of deployment.

Every Project is Unique

We regard every project as a unique challenge and offer to deploy a solution that meets the most current standards of the IT industry. By making use of cutting edge technology, world class information software and highly trained field specialists, we design every project to meet the strictest benchmarks of quality and cost effectiveness.

Project Implementation

The project, to be called This State Distributed Intranet Platform (KSDIP) shall be deployed in 4 overlapping phases spanning a period of between 50 to 70 days. These phases are:

-          Pre-deployment survey, geometric prototyping, design outlay (alpha) and skeletal phasing

-          Development and deployment

-          Testing (beta), troubleshooting, streamlining and phase launch

-          Manpower training (free for up to 5 persons) and technology transfer

Value Added Services (Free)

As an additional bonus service, we shall undertake the free training of up to 5 staff on the usage, administration, troubleshooting and support for the KSDIP. We shall also perform basic project branding, identity design and operations research for best practices.

Our Technology

To achieve optimal performance and conformance, we use the most recent stable versions of hardware and software from the world’s leading technology firms to create a world-class solution. The technologies we use include leading brands such as Cisco, Intel, Oracle, Dell, Sun Microsystems, RedHat, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Fedora. This is the same technology as those used in developed economies, sometimes even more cutting edge!

Nigerians and Religion

Nigerians are very religious.

Because of this inclination, Nigerians tend to be positive minded, however, the country still remains a tough one where life is generally on the rough side for over three quarters of the populace.

Everyday, Nigerians complain about the hardship in the country, what with the perennial electricity problem, crime, unemployment and poverty. Yet, on certain occasions, you may be privileged to watch a politician known to everybody as a dishonest crook praising God and telling the world that even though it is very obvious that he’s a crook, he is not really a bad man but a God serving born – again Christian or Muslim. Yet everybody knows he’s not.

Nigerians are gradually being pushed to the edge. But their positive and hopeful way of thinking helps them to push back the edge. This is the way that Nigerians have reacted to the hardship in the country. Many Nigerians have evolved into hopeful people. Hoping, each one, on their God to make things right again. Yet not a few of these hopeful ones still contribute to the general negative situation by a flaw or flaws in their character (e.g a secret cult boy who goes to Church regularly and even takes Holy Communion sometimes).