Data Journeys: Identifying Social and Technical Barriers to Data Movement in Large, Complex Organisations

Publication date: Available online 6 December 2017 Source:Journal of Biomedical Informatics Author(s): Iliada Eleftheriou, Suzanne M. Embury, Rebecca Moden, Peter Dobinson, Andrew Brass Managers in complex organisations often have to make decisions on whether new software developments are worth undertaking or not. Such decisions are hard to make, especially at an enterprise level. Both costs and risks are regularly underestimated, despite the existence of a plethora of software and systems engineering methodologies aimed at predicting and controlling them. Our objective is to help managers and stakeholders of large, complex organisations (like the National Health Service in the UK) make better informed decisions on the costs and risks of planned new software systems that will reuse or extend their existing information infrastructure. We analysed case studies describing new software developments undertaken by providers of health care services in the UK, looking for common points of risk and high cost. The results highlighted the movement of data within and between organisations as a key factor. Data movement can be hindered by numerous technical barriers, but also by other challenges arising from social aspects of the organisation. These latter aspects are often harder to predict, and are ignored by many of the more common software engineering methodologies. In this paper, we propose data journey modelling, a new method aiming to predict places of high cost and risk whe...
Source: Journal of Biomedical Informatics - Category: Information Technology Source Type: research