The previous phase should provide clear knowledge on requirements for data providers to implement the project. The main goal of this phase is to analyse those requirements and decide whether to participate in the project or not. In reality, there may be obligations (legal reasons and/or international agreements) for the agency to continue with the project. In this stage the scope of any obligations must be made clear to make an effective analysis and decision.
It is necessary to involve all internal stakeholder groups to compile the following information:
- the legal requirements or other arrangements with other agencies to implement SDMX data exchange
- the impact on the current statistical business process. It would be useful to use the GSBPM as a tool with which to standardise the analysis and compare process and impact with other agencies;
- support from management to secure a mandate for the project in the agency's overall strategy
- the IT actions to be performed for the success of the project;
- the resources and budget required for the project;
- identify capacity building that is required and the cost.
It is suggested to consider the following skills for the resources planning (several of the roles may be covered by the same people)
- SDMX technical expertise: experts in the SDMX technical standards (data message formats, SDMX Web Service implementation); and experts of SDMX Information Model and guidelines to support data modellng;
- Subject-matter expertise: They have the greatest knowledge of the actual data (and outlying data to consider), are the best testers, and are most aware of the production process and scheduling;
- IT development and architecture skills;
- Expertise on metadata to support the "mapping" between metadata used in the internal production processes and structural metadata defined in SDMX.
The main goal of this phase is to analyse whether to implement the project requirements or not
Though this is a very early stage, previous project evaluations/lessons learned may help to analyse the feasibility of the project.
Outputs of this phase:
- Impact analysis of project implementation;
- Cost/benefit report;
- Resource and capacity building planning;
- The decision on whether to launch the project and if so, the scope of what to implement.