| Abstract |
A great deal of data has been collected over the past century from the numerous geothermal prospects in the countries of the East African Rift. It spans a broad spectrum of time, formats, and disciplines, e.g., geology, geochemistry, geophysics and reservoir engineering, GIS and remote sensing. These data tend to be isolated and siloed among individuals and departments; legacy non-machine-readable data tends to be unintegrated with modern digital data. A modern RDBMS is the best way of integrating this vast amount of disparate information in order to correctly make important decisions, such as where to commence exploratory drilling. We have found that geothermal scientists in east Africa must be all-rounders able to understand the language of the multiple disciplines and data types involved, correctly interpret their diverse data, and proficient with both modern data management tools and the ICT foundations those tools run on. Staff must operate according to international best practices in order to properly interface with developers and multilateral aid organizations. Furthermore, east Africa is a dynamic business environment with constant personnel churn, which poses a particular challenge for developing geothermal projects that typically take the better part of a decade to come to fruition, much longer than most other forms of renewable energy. Therefore, a robust team that can be successful in this market over the long term must be extensively cross-trained and have triple redundancy in all key positions. We have learned that the human resource architecture is as important as the technical data management architecture. We would like to share these lessons with our colleagues. |