Introduction

This chapter provides guidance on how to identify and understand your requirements for digital preservation services, from high-level needs to the detailed documentation necessary to enable systems to be developed or procured.

The importance of understanding your requirements as a precursor to implementing any kind of solution cannot be overstated. To omit this step should be as unthinkable as attempting to build a house without detailed architectural plans. Taking the time to do this properly will improve the quality of the end result. This is even more critical for smaller organizations with limited resources, where maximizing value for money is vital; understanding what matters most ensures that those resources can be invested to achieve the greatest possible impact.

This chapter begins by examining how to develop a set of requirements, including identifying and engaging with everyone who can and should contribute, modelling business processes, and drawing on existing work. It then considers how requirements should be articulated and documented, and the types of requirement that need to be considered. Finally, it looks at how the resulting requirements can be applied in practice, as a basis for developing actual systems and services.

Identifying stakeholders

An organization's requirements for digital preservation will not derive from any individual or single group; a wide variety of parties will have an interest. These may be key individuals, or those representing the interests of wider groups with whom it is not possible to engage directly. They may also be decision makers, who need ultimately to authorize the adoption of those requirements as a basis for implementation. Identifying these various stakeholders, and what role they need to play, is therefore an essential first step in understanding one's requirements. They will, of course, vary considerably from case to case, but a number of common categories of stakeholder should be considered: