Data Work-Flow Planning Is The Key To Surviving The Digital Age & Internet (Your Address Book)

Business Data Work-flow Management From Interview 2 Hire all the way 2 Retire 4 Client & Customer

For cost effective and efficient data storage and retrieval you’ll need to evaluate the overall work-flow of any data creation process in order to get the best results for the complete system and architecture. It is a good idea to understand the data work-flow and the associated data, all the way from the interview and new hire process down to the retirement process.

Effective data work-flow planning will help you make cost effective decisions for data management including decisions for security, archival, backup, as well as, the overall business strategy and process.

To illustrate, the employee data work-flow may look something like this:

1. The applicants are interviewed for hire, now, and in the future.
2.  An applicant is hired.
3. The applicant data is inputted into the human resources (HR) database. The data likely includes the following: name, birthday, social security number, photo, department, and payroll information.
4. The applicant data is passed from HR to security. The data may include the following: employee code, badge name, badge information, security clearance, roles, and responsibilities.
5. The applicant data is passed from security to the information technology (IT) department. The data may include the following: standard logins, passwords, access rights, and account or profile data.
6. The applicant data may be accessed from physical machine operating systems, virtual machine operating systems, and, web enabled applications, including local access and, or, Internet access, while utilizing various formats for data display i.e. time display format, name display formats, security private key phrase/password formats for encryption etc.
7. The applicant is removed, suspended or expired from the active systems. Data of inactive users may require retrieval terms or time limits and update or migration policies for archival.

As you can see, each step in hiring a new employee or even a new contractor, within an organization has a specific set of input data and a specific set of output data to be managed. It is useful in knowing which values are owned by which department. of which organization, and in which databases, machines or networks that may be involved when retrieving the information for your business processes.

If you make the wrong decision, such as obtaining someone’s name from the IT department instead of the HR department, you could get unknown results if HR changed the name and the value wasn’t appropriately reflected in the target systems. Your ability to map data information successfully is based on these decisions. Do you host your client data in a cloud? Where exactly is the data in a cloud? Or, do you host your data locally and only permit "opt-in" style membership for the public facing sites that are more and more often moving to cloud like architectures known as virtual computing.

It’s important to maintain consistency across all the information. Realizing that various applications may need many more than one of the various formats available for time, locale, telephone number format or even the user or persons name formats currently in use. An application will often not change its format to suit the data, and, it doesn’t always have the rights or ability to manipulate information For example; The application may not have the capability to remove the area code or for performing regular expression parsing against your data. Applications then may require additional resources or libraries to maintain the required format when the format is not available from initial source.

Keep track of all the formats in use, in your forms, in your address books, etc., and, determine which of your applications need particular formats so that your work-flow provides the appropriate information. Meta-directories and other methods of parsing information may be necessary if, for example, the original source of the data provides information in a particular format but other sources, that may be outdated or advanced, provide invalid data because of the format.

Well managed data work-flow aids in the providing of data security while enabling the secure provisioning of the data access in such that the data is managed from a primary source and then accessed through various levels of delegation. Delegation may include elements of encryption, permissions, and rights for machines as well as users. included in the work-flow may be the encryption of data. Data encryption management provides the necessary elements for security.

For example effective encryption key planning will provide:

• Confidentiality - Ensures that only intended recipients can read files
• Data Integrity - Ensures that files can’t be changed without detection
• Authentication - Ensures that participants in an electronic transaction are who they claim to be
• Non Repudiation - Prevents participants from denying involvement in an electronic transaction

In Summary:

We've discussed the importance of standardizing information and data locations across a system, project or enterprise. We've established that a name should be consistent across all systems, a number should be in the same format, and terms should be standardized. For example: When referring to a data table , taxonomy term or business category in one application it is a good idea to keep the same term, table name or category when implementing the various applications and connections to data stores such as for an LDAP directory, contact address book, or, web database application.

Only through efficient work-flow planning can we provide for the secure availability, and, future accessibility, of secure, direct and effective information for retrieval. Effective data retrieval and storage is effective management and effective management reduces the total cost of ownership of data systems and architecture.

Good initial work-flow planning enables the efficient use and storage of data thereby reducing redundancy and lowering long term costs of ownership and maintenance.
Work-flow planning provides the basis of an effective security and archival back up plan or policies thereby reducing the costs of data retrieval and conversion. True effective privacy and security is managed and provided for through effective data work-flow planning.

Examine your goals, your scope, and your data work-flow plan often, and appropriately, or, the end result may be data that’s unmanageable and too expensive to operate or maintain.