The Mincom solution for archiving illustrates an outdated concept where historical records need to be removed from the database and moved to tape in order to preserve the stability and performance of the system, under the constraints of limited storage space and CPU capacity. Such historical records would be kept only for legal / auditing requirements. Maintaining these records represents a liability to the organisation.
Currently organisations came to realise that historical information represents an asset, that has a commercial value in itself, either by being traded as a commodity, or by being analysed in order to extract valuable statistical and planning information used for decision making. New tools for “data warehousing” have emerged. Due to technological advances, storage space and CPU capacity no longer represent critical resources. The critical resource becomes the information itself.
Under these circumstances I believe the user group needs to suggest to Mincom to re-design the MIMS archiving solution along different principles:
- historical records are a valuable asset and need to remain readily accessible to the user for the life of the system
- the emphasis of archiving needs to move away from physical deletion of records to logical “delete” via inactivation
- records could be classified into “historical” and “current”; this classification is transparent to the users and is operated internally by MIMS
- records may be shifted by MIMS in the historical area and back in the current area behind the scenes through system intelligence rather than manual system administration procedures
- “permanent” archiving by moving records out of MIMS should be a last resort option; it needs to be in text format and as independent of the MIMS version as possible.
Currently organisations came to realise that historical information represents an asset, that has a commercial value in itself, either by being traded as a commodity, or by being analysed in order to extract valuable statistical and planning information used for decision making. New tools for “data warehousing” have emerged. Due to technological advances, storage space and CPU capacity no longer represent critical resources. The critical resource becomes the information itself.
Under these circumstances I believe the user group needs to suggest to Mincom to re-design the MIMS archiving solution along different principles:
- historical records are a valuable asset and need to remain readily accessible to the user for the life of the system
- the emphasis of archiving needs to move away from physical deletion of records to logical “delete” via inactivation
- records could be classified into “historical” and “current”; this classification is transparent to the users and is operated internally by MIMS
- records may be shifted by MIMS in the historical area and back in the current area behind the scenes through system intelligence rather than manual system administration procedures
- “permanent” archiving by moving records out of MIMS should be a last resort option; it needs to be in text format and as independent of the MIMS version as possible.
