April 26th, 2007
Legal Exoskeletons
I like to think most of the IT systems I work on as being best suited to extending human capabilities in an “exoskelaton” manner. In doing so we gather data about interactions that are of varying importance that occur person-to-person, person-to-system (and even perhaps system-to-system). Sig likes to talk about passing an object through a workflow and storing the changes in state as it goes. I wonder however in these days of information laws such as the Data Protection Act and the Freedom of Information Act, how much and to what level of detail, we are allowed to capture, store and use before we are touching the edges of legality.
April 26th, 2007 at 7:09 pm
Mike, aha!
Actually what I suggest handles any Data Protection Act better than the legacy method of documenting the events as those are focused on the actor (often human) and what he “does”.
Object driven is focusing on the object of interest for the organisation, (almost) never a human. Even in a hospital the objects of interest are virtual objects like conditions, in service organisations issues and so forth.
Thus the capture of data will be limited to who and when somebody interacted with the object of interest. And that cannot ever be limited by such laws as it would counter a very basic part of society - accountability!
So not only better (I argue) re. Data Protection Act but also SOX, Basel II etc etc compliant per design
April 27th, 2007 at 7:57 am
Sig, I guess what I was thinking about (but didn’t manage to put down well) is not so much access-control or level-of-detail but more data-life-cycle. There are specific requirements about destroying data you have gathered after a certain length of time. I just wish I knew more about them so I could make sure I was building them into my systems.
April 27th, 2007 at 9:36 am
Mike, suspect the destroy-data-requirement applies to personal information and not to who signed for a package, who was employed at some date, who assembled my car… and as you know that’s what thingamy is interested in
Guess UK GAAP and Tax Office and so forth will have their say there - like “keep the records dammit!”
Ah, well, in worst case it will be simple to add a feature of “after x years this and that property of such object shall be set to xxxx)”!