Business systems and applications change, they get upgraded and updated. Sometimes they fail, sometimes they just become unsupported or no longer needed.
Whatever your reason for changing systems, there is one thing you need to do – decommission them. And that isn’t as easy as it sounds. Luckily for you we have the decommissioning business systems workflow to help you out.
You can find the decommissioning workflow and supporting advice on the website.
The workflow has 4 different paths you can take depending on what’s happening with the records the system holds. But even that isn’t easy either as you may find you need to take more than one of those paths. I mean, let’s face it, it’s unlikely that all the records will be doing the same thing, right?
So, let’s look at a couple of scenarios where someone had to take more than one path in the workflow to show you how it works.
Using one path in the decommissioning business systems workflow
Fred is the Director of Information Management Services at Lamingtown Power. You might remember him from our disposal freeze examples.
Recently they upgraded their eDRMS to a new version and all of the records in the old one needed to be migrated over to the new system.
The first thing he did was have the IT team and the records team work together on the migration process to make sure all records were migrated to the new system correctly.
Once all of the checks had been done, he had the IT team check the decommissioning workflow to see what they needed to do next. As all records had been migrated, they could just decommission the system and dispose of the digital source records in the system…. And document said disposal of course.
You could also use a single workflow path if all of the records in the system had reached the end of their retention period (so long as you did all the usual pre-destruction checks). Usually you will only be able to use one path in the workflow if all records are doing the same thing – e.g. if all have been migrated or are inaccessible.
Using multiple paths in the decommissioning business systems workflow
Ginny is the Senior Information Officer at Lamingtown Shire Council. One of their business systems needs to be decommissioned. She’s been working with Katie on this and they’ve managed to identify the records it contains, but some of them are covered by a retention and disposal schedule and others are not.
So, to decommission the system, she follows 2 different pathways in the toolkit. The first path she follows is for the records covered by a schedule. By following that path she manages to determine they have all reached the end of their retention period and can be disposed of.
The second path is for the records not covered by a schedule. This path asks her to determine if they have long-term or short-term value. She uses the advice on the QSA website on how to do a high-level appraisal of records to determine their value, which will help her decide what to do next. Once that’s done, she can continue to work through the next steps in the workflow.
More information
You can find more information about decommissioning business systems and migrating digital records on the website.
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Also, just like in the movies, all names, characters, places, and incidents portrayed in this blog post are fictitious and are not based on real people or incidents in any way (as far as we know).
And if you’re interested in the story of Lamingtown so far, you can check out the other blogs.