This is the age-old question of who works for whom and who owns what. This is often tricky as the reason you have a business application system is to support the various departments in the organization.
Without the Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, or Operations department, there would be no need for a business application. So the owner of the system needs is the business departments. With that said, the departments should not own their own systems as allowing the departments to control their systems leads to security concerns and conflicts when departments attempt to work together.
Management has approved the use of technology systems in the organization in order to help facilitate and manage growth. As you know, change management takes on many forms, both from organizational change management and system change management.
For organizational change management, the recommendation is to have the business manage the impact to the business users. For system change management, this should be managed by the IT department based on resources available.
For new feature requests, these should be communicated by the business as requests to IT and then prioritized by management. Configuration — leveraging out of the box functionality that you are able to accomplish without writing code.
All configuration and development should be handled as a part of an application life cycle management process utilizing source control. With regards to working with a partner, partners should be viewed as an extension of the team and utilized accordingly based on skill, availability, and timeline.
When The New York Times first joined the world wide web in , there were a handful of engineers who maintained the website and publishing software. The applications we use to support all of our digital services now number in the hundreds.
Similarly, our technology team is now the second largest department at the company. All of this growth means that sharing information about our applications by word of mouth is unsustainable. This is most pronounced during P1 incidents when teams need to find information about the service that is causing a problem as quickly as possible. As The Times invests in digital products and continues to grow our engineering teams, we realized we needed a centralized source of information about all of the software systems we use.
Improving the visibility of the systems our organization owns would only make our products better and the lives of our colleagues easier. So, we did what many engineering teams at The Times do when starting a new project: we wrote a Request for Proposal or, RFP and talked to engineers and product managers from different teams to understand their needs. In our conversations, we tried to understand the pain points teams felt when looking for information about an application.
Our RFP was useful in gauging whether teams were interested in our solution and whether it could actually address their problems.
The responses to our RFP were overwhelmingly positive, so we began brainstorming what an application catalog might look like. With the idea of an application catalog validated, we held interview sessions with a wider group of people across The Times to understand what details they might want from such a centralized resource.
We prepared a questionnaire to guide our conversations. At the end of these sessions, we had a list of metadata that our colleagues thought would be important.
The metadata included a roster of applications we own; what an application does; whether an application is a critical system; the technology an application uses; contact information for the team that owns an application and where people can find information about it. This list informed what we decided to include in our MVP. We chose our own team, Delivery Engineering, as the stakeholder for the MVP because we wanted a quick turnaround on feedback in order to demo the catalog for other teams; this is a process we often follow on projects within our team.
Some of the important things we considered while building the MVP included:. Adoption Friendly: Not only were we seeking to build a list of existing applications, we would be asking colleagues to change their habits while building new ones. With that in mind, it was important for us to make it easy for both engineers and non-engineers to contribute information to this resource.
We decided to create a yaml file that would live in the Github repository for this project; anyone on a team could add metadata to the file. Data Integrity: Keeping the data up-to-date was a goal of ours from the beginning of this project. There needs to be a professional in charge of the accuracy of the actual data in the databases—and a technician is not the best choice.
A good data steward knows the business inside and out, as well as the data used by the business on a daily basis. If you do not have data stewards assigned for all of your business-critical data, then data governance and compliance with regulations like GDPR can be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.
Here are some things to consider as you approach your plans for establishing data ownership and stewardship:. Understand the data requirements of all current systems, those developed in-house and those you bought. Be sure that you know all of the data interdependencies of your applications and how one application can impact another. Assess the quality of your existing data in all of your existing systems. It is probably worse than you think it is.
Then work on methods and approaches to improve that quality. There are tools and services that can help here. Redesign and re-engineer your systems if you uncover poor data quality in your current applications and databases. You might choose to change vendors, or re-platform or rehost applications with poor data quality.
But if the old data is still required it must be cleansed before using it in the new system. Work on methods to score the quality of data in your systems, and tie the performance and bonuses of your data stewards to the scores. How does your organization approach data ownership and stewardship? Applications Insight from Guy Harrison. Big Data Notes from Guy Harrison. Emerging Technologies from Guy Harrison.
Database Elaborations from Todd Schraml.
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