In today’s climate of content exchanges and web APIs, it’s often necessary for someone with both business and technical knowledge to participate in data modeling activities or building data specifications. Dumping data into your organization’s data base often requires the application of sophisticated business rules. There is a significant amount of time and money invested in establishing content exchanges. While the technical implementation is typically relatively simple, the coordination between partners, mapping of disparate content elements, and decisions around what functionality is required can create complexity.
Some background on where content feeds fit into today’s businesses
I’ve been consistently surprised at the lengths a business will go to get certain content into their systems and how difficult it can be to appropriately automate content input processes. Incoming content can vary widely depending on the business and includes transactional content such as an order request and current content like articles and postings. Think of the Google web crawlers as an extreme example. But on the other end of the spectrum is the exchange of highly structured content between organizations with partnerships and day-to-day working relationships. In some industries, entire standards organizations emerge to meet the needs of partnering companies that exchange content on a regular basis. Standards organizations help partners introduce efficiency and scalability into their content exchange systems by standardizing the syntax and sometimes the semantics of the content exchanged, thereby simplifying the lengths each partner must go to transform content into something they can use.
The data feed specifications template for your partner
If you are going to be setting up new feeds on an ongoing basis, a best practice is to develop a standard requirements specification template for new feeds and a package of support materials for partners. The package should minimally include a description of your preferred standard format for sending or receiving data, a sample, a list of fields and business rules for populating them, and a sample data file. If it’s possible to include developer tools, such as a validator or converter, that’s ideal.
The template should be specific to the type of content exchanged but should minimally include the following elements:
- Frequency with which the file will be delivered (and day/time)
- File format
- Filename
- File transfer instructions (FTP server address, API format, etc)
- Data field mapping (if the partner is using a non-standard format
Determining the functional requirements of your content exchange system
In addition to creating a template and instructions to send to your partners, you’ll need make some business decisions as to accepting the feed and making it live in your system. What follows can be thought of as a requirements checklist, albeit a preliminary one, for implementing a context exchange project:
- Will you ask your partners to push files to you or will you pull the files from your partner?
- On what schedule will the file exchange happen?
- Will each file have a full set of all active data, or will you need to trigger adds, updates, and deletes?
- What fields are required?
- What fields are optional?
- Do any fields have default values? Can these be specified by feed?
- For fields that must be matched to a specific set of values, will the partner be asked to provide the field IDs or a set of terms?
- What will happen to invalid files?
- Will you be able to isolate invalid records and load the valid records?
- Who will receive notification of invalid files and what can they do to rectify the errors?
- Will you check for duplicates? If so, what rules are used to flag a duplicate and what happens to a duplicate record?
- What are the business rules for inserting a new record into your database? For example, if it’s an order, do you need to have a customer record set-up? Are there any limits to how many records a partner can post? Are the records loaded directly to a live system or do they go through a review process (manual or automated) first?
Good luck embarking on a content exchange project. Don’t hesitate to contact me if I can help and do post your comments about what I may have missed!
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By Laura Brandenburg. Laura Brandenburg is an independent business analyst consultant. She is passionate about the BA profession and is committed to contributing by supporting this blog as a forum for business analysts to build on each other's experiences. View more blog posts by Laura Brandenburg |
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