Out-bound Record-level Accountability in Information Sharing Systems

If you can’t remember to whom you told what; how could you possibly know who to inform if an earlier fact you reported needs to be revised?

When organizations transfer information between systems, they sometimes fail to retain the details about which records were transferred where and when.

What happens today in many systems, especially batch-oriented data transfers, is this: a selection process (e.g., males over 40 with account balances under $20,000) is run against a system of record.

This process produces a specific number of output records. These output records are then transferred to the intended recipient. The original data holder, for billing purposes, often retains a record of the selection criteria used, date/time, quantity of records transferred, recipient of the data, etc. Notably, the original data holder does not record exactly which records were transferred.

Unlike Source Attribution which has more to do with the recipient of shared information retaining the pedigree/attribution of the information received, out-bound record-level accountability refers to the detailed logs of what records were sent to whom, when, etc., as maintained by the originating party.

Without out-bound record-level accountability … ensuring data currency across information sharing ecosystems can be problematic. The challenge being when a record changes in the originating system, how will one be certain which recipients of the original record need to be notified?