Kia ora koutou,

It occurs to me to wonder how other people keep track of which of your systems affect / require which others of your systems. Eg an institutional repository sourcing data from a research information management system; a database requiring Shibboleth to access; an opening hours page populated with data from a library system API etc etc.

When I was starting the job I diagrammed it as a network to make sense of it to myself, and later transferred this into Visio; I’ve kept it up-to-date over the years and it’s *really* handy when showing the scope of our job to outsiders, or explaining to ITS that if they do X then all these things will fall over, etc. But it’s increasingly difficult to emulate everything in 2-dimensions!

I still like the 2d printable overview, but would also like something a bit more interactive that lets me drill down to a particular product to see what it depends on, and what depends on it, and give a bit of detail of what precisely the dependency is. I’d especially like it to be practical to add smaller systems, like that one web-page I created as a bridge between a certain vendor’s API and our legacy Microsoft Access database – so they’re noted and don’t get forgotten, but also don’t clutter up the main overview: so I guess assigning degrees of importance to different systems. And, while I’m dreamining, I’d rather it not be Yet Another System itself requiring management and upgrades!

Semi-related, I’m also needing to track product upgrade cycles and have been pondering how best to do this.

Any thoughts appreciated!

Deborah Fitchett
Head of Department: Digital Services

Library, Teaching and Learning, Te Wharepūrākau
P O Box 85064
Lincoln University
Lincoln 7647
Canterbury
New Zealand

p +64 3 423 0358
e [log in to unmask] | w ltl.lincoln.ac.nz<https://ltl.lincoln.ac.nz/>

Lincoln University, Te Whare Wānaka o Aoraki
New Zealand's Specialist Land-Based University


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