Anticlue

Inheriting a Department

Things in life change, people move on, organizational structures change. All of a sudden one day, you are blessed with a new opportunity of supporting the systems for another department.

One of the first steps is to find the data and where the data goes. How to do this? Get a listing of all of the applications of the department, the version, the last major update, the current customer contact. Find out the platform and data base engine of the application. Also determine all of the interfaces, are they manual, batch, or realtime? Is there a standardized data format? Is there a yearly cycle of business that they need to coordinate with? What steps need to be done to interface data from one system to the next?

Finally, layout a high level diagram of all of the systems and the data flow. This picture is invaluable in trying to see the landscape.