Developing systems: information management considerations

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Know your business and your business information needs

Systems are often deployed without an understanding of the business information needs they must support.

Without this understanding, key business information can be at risk. However, information risks can be rectified by clear system planning and governance.

To mitigate risks, system development processes should start with an understanding of:

• What business operations will the system be required to support?
• What information is critical for this business, for staff performing the business and for clients?
• What information will be critical into the future for this business, for staff performing the business and for clients?
• How long into the future do business and regulatory requirements say this information will be required?
• What information currently supports this business? What additional information would improve business processes?
• What risks to information need to be mitigated in the proposed system?

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Plan any integrations with current business systems well

If you are planning for your new system to draw data from an existing system, make sure that managing software change and rewriting integration pathways as required is built into your current and future project schedules.

It is also important to keep monitoring the accuracy of data passed through integration pathways, as the frequency of software change can limit system compatibility and impact on data accuracy and completeness.

Integrations are typically expensive. It is worth assessing whether other approaches, such as developing reports or workflows to facilitate the routine exporting or snapshotting of long-term value information, may be more appropriate.

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Plan for the stability and longevity of your core business information

Depending on the nature of your business, it is likely that some information in current systems will need to outlive these systems and will therefore need to remain accessible and useable.

To make these transitions as seamless as possible, it is important to consider long term information needs early in system planning and development, and to develop appropriate management strategies. There are a number of important information management considerations which should be part of the planning for new systems, or part of ICT strategic planning. These include:

• identify and plan for mitigation of system dependencies that impact on long term value information
• develop specific migration pathways for identified long term value information
• identify legacy systems which need to supported long term
• consider platforms which support open formats for data management and export
• in the case of outsourced arrangements, set and manage service agreements that include information management obligations for high value/high risk information.

Digital data volumes in organisations are growing exponentially and unsustainably and the impacts of this are starting to be felt. To ensure there is no ongoing legacy of large volumes of digital data, system planning processes need to identify:

• What information can be routinely purged and when
• What information needs to be sustained through the system and how this will be achieved
• What are risk-appropriate management strategies that can be applied to high value information first and foremost.

Risks of not planning for data longevity include:

• poor management of information needed for long-term business purposes
• contravention of various regulations and requirements for information retention
• requirement to pay ongoing software licensing costs for legacy systems if business areas require ongoing access to information in these systems
• data duplication and dual processes though maintaining legacy systems concurrently.

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Be aware of the information-related impacts of system change

Implementing new systems gives organisations the opportunity to rethink their business processes, and often processes are simplified and streamlined.

However, this can mean that information which had an important use beyond the immediate needs of the business process may no longer be captured in the same way, if it all. This may be a necessary trade off, but nonetheless one that should be made with a full understanding of the implications.

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Plan and manage change

Implementing new systems gives organisations the opportunity to rethink their business processes, and often processes are simplified and streamlined.

However, this can mean that information which had an important use beyond the immediate needs of the business process may no longer be captured in the same way, if at all. This may be a necessary trade off, but nonetheless one that should be made with a full understanding of the implications.

When deploying new systems, effective change management and training is also required to maintain an organisational culture which values information management.

The implementation of new systems can lead to extensive data duplication where the change is not well managed. Staff may be unclear about the new business processes, leading to inappropriate practices such as storing information in multiple places, adopting unofficial parallel processes, or continuing to retain paper documents despite new automated digital processes.

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Deploy metadata requirements strategically

Metadata is a powerful tool for information management. When designing systems consider:

• What metadata will best enable business flows and the creation and management of effective, useful information?
• What metadata enables the ongoing use, understanding and accountability of business information?
• What metadata will need to be carried forward through system change and be persistently linked to business information for meaning, context and accountability purposes?

These considerations need to be balanced against the workload of creating certain metadata manually as part of a process. The effort required to check and remediate the quality of metadata to maintain the specified requirements over time also needs to be considered. Creation and capture of metadata should be automated where possible, and integrated logically within business processes.

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Assess your need for system documentation requirements

Information about systems may be critical information for the ongoing use and management of these systems.

When developing a system consider current and future business needs for information about:

• system rules
• system metadata
• system validation and security processes
• workflow authorisations
• workflow processes etc.

It could also be important to capture point in time representations of these, to identify what processes or rules were in place at any specific point in time.

Where a system is outsourced, you need to consider whether the service agreement includes the right to access system documentation. If it is not, you should  consider whether this could be problematic or an unacceptable risk in the long term.

Published April 2014