It Compliance And Controls: Best Practices for Implementation

Chapter 10. Principle 2: Life-Cycle Management

OVERVIEW

Life-cycle management addresses an organization's need to embrace technology to manage the short- and long-term fiscal and strategic directions. This is necessary as organizations accrue more technology that is both more complex and designed for distributed interactions with all levels of participants. Increasingly the development of customized software platforms and modules to fit the organization's unique business requirements is occurring and through greatly increasing number of third parties. The establishment of a program that provides assurances regarding the manner of development, acquisition, and maintenance with a view toward reliability and trust within the systems allows for both aggressive production deadlines and confidence in the results these systems produce.

The software employed, whether purchased or developed in house, ultimately ensures and maintains the integrity of the data throughout the system. This fact impacts the techniques used throughout the development process and those used for validating software effectiveness and efficiency.

Operational systems require management and changes to reflect the ever-growing organization that they support. These changes may reflect the addition of a new division or the introduction of a new enterprise collaboration site. Vendor patching, software enhancements, or other code modifications must all be thoroughly analyzed. In fact, all changes to an organization may impact ...