This sounds great! I'm very excited to see ODK evolving in the way described by @LN.
Background: I'm using ODK in my role as software engineer at the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF), for a number of tasks. AMF fund bednets and organizes their distribution together with other partners and governments. A typical distribution reaches all households in a country/province, at a scale of millions of bednets. ODK is helpful for:
- Collecting household-level data during the registration (e.g., size and GPS coordinates of beneficiary households)
- Recording bednets that are distributed
- Keeping track of logistics (e.g., capture waybills as nets move to their distribution points)
- Monitoring during and after the distribution.
Our needs and challenges, particularly with regard to ODK and DHIS2:
- Governments in partner countries often choose solutions other than ODK for political/non-technical reasons. In particular, DHIS2 is often preferred because it is already used in the country, perceived as more secure, or just better known. This is a pity, because ODK is simpler and more reliable, leading to better-quality data.
- There's a potential to improve documentation around security, and to publish case studies of successful ODK use.
- Better fine-grained access control would also help (easier way to set up enumerator and supervisor accounts; better controls regarding who can see what data; limit some form elements (like a
select_onequestion) based on the enumerator's access rights, ...)
- DHIS2 works better than ODK in multiphase projects, like when there is a separate registration of households, followed by bednet distribution.
- ODK's upcoming entity-based workflows might help here
- Access control seems crucial for that (e.g., only sync entities that a user can access; avoid syncing millions of records to a phone)
- DHIS2 has built-in dashboards
- Some sort of dashboard or reporting feature integrated closely with ODK would help.
- PowerBI is used by some partners, but the cost and inability to share dashboards is often a blocker.
- Several of our partners use scrappy home-brew dashboards
- More thoughts on DHIS2 and ODK (already linked-to by @LN above)
One more thought related to integrations, which doesn't really fit elsewhere: There is currently no good ODK export for large, complex forms. If a form is complex (e.g., has repeat groups), XLSX is the only option that I know of; CSV does not contain fields in repeat groups. Yet if the form is large (100k or more submissions) XLSX is slow or fails completely.
In such cases, we use the API, but that's a bit cumbersome and not all partners have the expertise. Alternatively, we split forms into multiple sub-forms, which is also cumbersome. I would love to have a CSV export that supports repeat groups, or an easy way to export a subset of submissions in XLSX.