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Category: Practice

September 30, 2020

Building Tomorrow’s System to Meet Yesterday’s Problems

Since 2009, EPA's Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water (OGWDW) has been trying to replace its aging and technologically obsolete SDWIS State system. Originally designed in the mid-1990s and based on a data model going back to the 1980s, the majority of the States, Territories, and EPA Regions use SDWIS State to help manage their drinking water programs. To avoid a fifth incarnation, OGWDW needs to ensure the new system meets today's needs.

December 3, 2019

Moonshot Projects

Apollo was the original moonshot project. Most of us will never work on a real moonshot project. But sometimes we can turn a project into a moonshot if we're not careful.

September 3, 2019

The Problematic PMO

It's tough to recognize a problem project if the experts charged with preventing problem projects are the cause of them. How do you know if you have a problematic PMO?

February 21, 2019

Vendor “Shoot-out”

Are you considering the purchase of an off the shelf business system? This article describes the Software Capabilities Demonstration and how you can use it to help select the system that works best for your users.

January 20, 2019

Some Inconvenient Truths About SDWIS

A recent Association for State Drinking Water Administrators (ASDWA) report commented on the EPA's Safe Drinking Water Information System (SDWIS). This article addresses inaccuracies about SDWIS in the report that may affect user expectations.

December 23, 2018

Ethical Basis of Good Design Practice

Building a trustworthy system that effectively protects the confidentiality, integrity, and accessibility of its data to meet information security requirements is mainly the purview of the developers. However, stakeholders (especially Subject Matter Experts, or “SMEs”) have an ethical responsibility as well. It’s quite possible for the SMEs to affect trustworthiness by placing constraints on the user experience ( UX) design contrary to good design practice. These constraints can adversely affect system integrity, degrading system trustworthiness. Furthermore, the rationale driving the constraint may be unethical from a business (and not technical) perspective.