A common request is to maintain traceability into the supply chain. This has always proved to be problematic for a number of reasons, some technical and some political. I am offering here a potential solution.
We have, in many industries, now progressed beyond the clone-and-own approach to reuse, and some support for genuine reuse of requirements and other design data has become expected.
The underlying principle that I have used is that the organization owning the data is the only organization that will be afforded editing privileges. This applies whether the organizations in question are different legal entities, working to a contract, departments within a single business, or individuals with clear responsibility boundaries. This allows us to manage the access rights based on the owning organization.
DNG currently has the limitation that anyone who has read access to any of a Project Area (PA), has read access to the entire Project Area. This can be managed by use of smaller PAs, tied together with a Global Configuration (GC).
Another issue has historically been that of access and firewalls. It has been rare for organizations to let suppliers inside their firewall. Cloud hosting eases this to some extent, and if your immediate reaction to that is one of horror that your data could be trusted to the cloud, then please look a little deeper. It can be as secure as working with a server in the basement of one of your many sites. Continue reading »