I am currently working on a Financial system which is in development. It is a batch process. Data goes in one end, goes through a number of processes and a report is output at the end containing numbers.
What happens is that when the data file arrives, a developer then manually "cleans it up", it gets loaded into another application where the data is processed, it then gets manually "enriched" by somebody who cuts and pastes data from another file and merges the two, it passes on down the line and the next person may find a mistake in the data so it goes back to the previous step to get fixed and so on it goes on.
I have all the "applications/ scripts" that process the data under Version/change management, but nobody in the company appears to be worried about managing the data itself at the intermediate steps as they believe it will all eventually be automated. Should I be concerned ?
Do I really need to capture the data inputs and outputs at each step in the process ?
Can data be a Configuration Item ?
thanks
Stuart
