This involves understanding how the line of business system is managed and supported. The majority of questions below are based on the Electronic Document and Records Management Systems (EDRMS) Preservation Toolkit: Understanding the technical infrastructure, created by the Digital Preservation Coalition EDRMS Preservation Task Force. The questions have been amended slightly and expanded to be relevant to line of business systems.
Functionality
- What recordkeeping or preservation functions (if any) does the system have? In particular, does it retain all changes to records or are they permanently overwritten or changed? For more information see Section 2 of the State Record of New South Wales’ Checklist for assessing business systems.
- Can the records and their metadata be exported or extracted easily (either in full or in part)?
Hosting and support
- Who hosts it and where is it hosted – is this done by a 3rd party supplier, in the cloud or hosted onsite?
- Does your organisation have a support contract?
- How long will it be supported for? Does the supplier have a roadmap for the development of the system?
- If applicable, what is the duration of the contract with the current supplier? Are there any Escrow arrangements?
- Is the system used jointly with other organisations?
- How is the system backed up? What are the timescales and arrangements for this?
- Has there ever been any loss of records from the system and was it possible to recover from this loss?
Documentation and history
- Is the source code for the system available to the organisation?
- Are user manuals and/or design documentation available?
- What is the history of the system? Have the records previously been migrated from another system? If so, when and what? Have records previously been transferred to an archive service? In either case, is there documentation relating to this?
Security and access controls
- Is encryption used?
- How is access to the system by users controlled and managed?
Version
- Is it an off-the-shelf or a custom-built system?
- What software and version is the system?
- Is it still being used within the organisation or is it a legacy system?
- How long has it been in use within the organisation?
- When was it last upgraded?
- Does it run on current operating platforms?
- Does the organisation have plans to move to a different system in the near future?
Integrations
- What other systems does the system integrate with and how?
- What other recordkeeping systems does the system integrate with and how? E.g. EDRMS and unstructured records
- Does it include or integrate with a database management system? (if so, you may need to ask the questions above for the database management system).