Current state assessment

Assessing your current state helps your agency to understand your business, data, and information management environment. This provides a strong start to determining your project's business needs.

Interoperability Development Phases presented as a diagram that shows Data governance and management supporting the Current state assessment, Gap analysis, Future state, Planning and design and Implementation phases.

Considerations

  • objectives and goals for the business processes and its data
  • current processes, procedures and practical methods of users – and what they want to achieve
  • hurdles, gaps and inefficiencies staff and users have encountered when using the business processes and managing data
  • legislation applicable to your agency
  • results from activities that identify your systems, information and data, for example a business systems assessment framework (BSAF) and data holdings audit

Features and tasks

The approach to this phase differs across agencies. Your agency must determine the features and tasks that your current state assessment needs to build interoperability. Your agency’s specific needs will define the method and priorities of your assessment.

Feature

Tasks

Data architecture and data flow

For the system being assessed, document:

  • the current technologies
  • the flow of data from collection points to general business use and storage
  • data structures, models and quality standards, and metadata architecture

Data/business system discovery

For general business:

  • Data inventory
  • refer to your existing systems register, data catalogue or information asset register
  • catalogue the existing business systems and data
  • use data harvesting software to find data across your agency's data collection
  • gather information on the legislation, policies and standards applicable to the data
  • gather information on the data's custodianship
  • undertake an audit of data holdings for data migration to determine the types and volume of data in your agency

Data profiling

Analyse and identify data that needs migration or remediation for a new solution.

In a data analysis, include:

  • data format
  • data quality
  • data complexity
  • relationships with other datasets
  • collection points
  • storage and size
  • data lineage
  • security classification

Define business rules

Document the current business rules that apply to the data

Data quality assessment

Analyse the quality of data to assess whether it is fit for purpose.

Determine relevant standards and formats

Analyse the standards and formats your data must comply with. These include:

  • industry/sector standards for data exchange
  • data structure, formats and taxonomies
  • semantic web standards

Key participants

Assessing your current state requires a range of skills from different sections across your agency. If your agency does not have the necessary time or internal expertise, external parties may be necessary to undertake the work for you.

Key participants may include:

Related links