Institutional readiness
An evaluation of institutional readiness can feed into costs and implementation. It is also informed by stakeholder analysis and risk analysis, so you may want to consider adressing thesetwo areas first before assessing institutional readiness. Institutional readiness covers not only the presence and avaialbility of skills, finance and infrastructure, but also refers to the culture and policies in place within the organisation and wheather these will support the business case or will need to adapted.
Process
This is the process that a practitioner should follow to build this section of the business case. This should be a numbered list!
- Maturity models (see I Review 6 Digital Preservation Models So You Don’t Have To):
- Purpose: comparator analysis (functional competencies, best practice)
- Cross-institutional readiness (different groups involved? e.g. IT, library divisions, vendors e.g. hosted services)
- awareness of other cultures or policy contexts within different divisions (e.g. use of cloud or in-house systems) -- what has got a chance of getting through and what will get laughed out of the room?
- Digital preservation objectives as part of organisational mission?
- Gap analysis - skills, functions, required change (also useful to do comparator analysis with peer institutions)
- Ownership, responsibility, accountability - roles and responsibilities, organisational structure, job specifications
- clear leadership and communication? collaboration rather than enforcement
- Stakeholder analysis - demand, expectations, priorities, awareness/engagement - what are they trying to achieve? How does DP support them?
- Examples from different domains? Internal and external, senior management, users, depositors, etc.
Content
This should describe the contents or structure of the business case, resulting from following the Process above Describe the change you want to see in the organisation
- where are we now
- where do we want to be
- timetable
- staged progression over time? long-term vision and/or small term component of that?
- continuous improvement? capacity of the organisation to adapt to change?
Skills
- staff time / availability
- exemplar skills profiles from organisations (in-house might mean local tech skills, hosted might mean project management/procurement/SLAs)
- training programmes - does this mean change to existing posts? or change to team workloads?
- skills gap analysis exercise?
Infrastructure
Finances
- financial preparedness - ability to fund the necessary infrastructure, staffing
- sustainability of any funding allocated to DP
Stakeholders
- ways to engage? language? (e.g. IT: 'business continuity', ITIL)
- demarkation of functional responsibilities (e.g. define DP policy vs execute part of it; support and guidance vs mandates)
Scenarios
Thoughts on how to adapt the content of this section to particular scenarios that the business case is focused on. Eg: Risks to consider/prioritise in a business case for a repository system, or Risks to consider/prioritise in a business case for new DP staff, orRisks to consider/prioritise in a business case for a digital preservation service
Resources
- Andreas Rauber; Digital Preservation in Data-Driven Science: On the Importance of Process Capture, Preservation and Validation. Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) 2012
- C. Becker, J. Barateiro, G. Antunes, , J. Borbinha, R. Vieira. On the relevance of Enterprise Architecture and IT Governance for Digital Preservation. In: Electronic Government, 332-344. (2011)
- Digital Preservation Readiness Capability Maturity Model and Digital Preservation Readiness Balanced Scorecard
- Scoremodel: DP evaluation tool ideal for small / less technical organisations. Also see: "The case for yet another digital preservation evaluation tool"
- Geoarchiving Self Assessment (Microsoft Excel)
- Business Model Canvas - the broader picture to the business, in one page.