With BETA11 we have finally decided to commit to the new data structure that has been waiting in the wings for about 8 months.  We continued with the BETA stream on the old 6.2.5 DB structure as long as we could, but now it is hampering our ability to move to the next generation of the RM system.

BETA11 actually uses Release 1. of the new V6.2.6 DB structure and will NOT work with the V6.2.5 Database entirely.  The client and server have been designed to accept the V6.2.5 data structure and apply some intelligent field and table selections based on the differences between the data structures but the client will generate several “non-critical” error warning messages on start up as it attempts to access tables that do not exist in the V6.2.5 data structure.   Obviously, this is not appropriate for production installs. 

The BETA11 structure includes a number of revisions to the data layouts to remove some organisational unnecessary restrictions that in some cases date back over 10 years and surface a raft of new insurance, claims, incident and compliance capabilities.  We are currently working closely with a number of clients feeding requirements for their real-world compliance, claims and OHS operational needs and the V6.2.6 DB structure is intended to meet the architectural requirements of these clients. 

This has been a large project commencing over 12 months ago with just a couple of clients, and over the intervening period has expanded substantially as many more of you have joined the BETA team to provide your own version of these related needs.

BETA11 is a production stable release BUT, for production your DB must be upgraded to the V6.2.6 structure.  We have not built an auto-installer for BETA11 (see below for the reason for this decision), and so if you wish to use it in production you should email me and we will make it available for direct download on your client login page.  In each case we will build a custom upgrade script against our copy of your reference database, or (preferably) we will hand upgrade your database, but you will need to make a backup of your current production database for the  purpose.   For a custom upgrade script against a reference database there will be a small fee.  For a upgrade performed by us against a backup of your production database forwarded to us there will be NO fee.  (The custom script takes a lot longer  to make and is more error prone than if you provide us with a backup of your production database and we run a delta analysis between it and our master reference databases using our tools on our hardware and then provide the upgraded DB back to you – so we are clearly trying to encourage you to do the latter).

The issues are that:

•  the 6.2.6 DB involves some fairly tricky table structure changes to foreign key and version table structures that are very hard to automate outside of the installer package and the installers take about 5 hours to build.  
• the 6.2.6 DB structure is being changed in 3 steps (Release 1 is available now) because we are adding some features that are being designed on-the-fly with a number of clients who want to be able to try some ideas and then enhance and expand the ideas so there are more parts coming over the next two to three weeks.
• there are significant developments occurring on multiple fronts at once which should complete over the next month, so the significant cost in building the installers with automated DB version upgrades is better delayed until there is more stability in the DB structure

Having said that, a conversion to the 6.2.6 structure NOW is safe to do because future changes will be minor enhancements rather than the fundamental re-organisation of a number of tables that the 6.2.5 to 6.2.6 change represents. 

So what should you do?  If you really want to be part of the compliance-insurance-claims-OHS BETA stream – do the change.  If you are happy to use the facilities as we design and build them, then wait until the stable build with the automated installer is released.

What is in BETA11 ?

• Insurance has been moved from being a relatively hidden feature of strategy – control and type-of-control design to front and centre of a new Insurance panel.
• Claims management has been added
• Incidents have been moved from being only a slave table of Risk to being handled independent of risks and able to be linked back to multiple risks (and claims and insurance, etc).
• Legal management has been added to allow for the tracking of legal resources associated with a claim.
• Fixes to screen handling in documents to ensure the document and section master lists are refreshed when documents and sections are added
•  New default inherent likelihood rating level can be set for new unrated topics
• The bubble chart now allows the minimum bubble size to be set so they can be stopped from shrinking to a single pixel when most risks/compliance items are in a single bubble.
• “My Responsibility” summary now accounts for delegated responsibilities.  (Under the cover the responsibility summariser has been hugely expanded to cover all responsibilities in the database so you will soon see a substantially expanded responsibility tracking screen in “My RiskManager” that covers everything for which you have any responsibility).
• A large number of new rules capabilities have been added to the surveymanager engine and enhancements to the JavaScript library.   There is more happening on this front as we progressively expand the direct SurveyManager to RiskManager cross table access.  Our aim on this front is to eliminate the need for the intervening results table to interface the survey engine screens with the RiskManager tables.

Beta 12 will be released this week – look to Friday.  It will mainly be a refinement of the things in Beta11 and expansion (hopefully completion) of the claims management capabilities.  Beta11 is not available as a browser plug-in-client (only in desktop download).

The tutorials are at:

BPC SurveyManager Tutorials

 We will be adding more as time permits.

The illustrated list of input controls is at http://riskwiki.bishopphillips.com/index.php?title=BPC_SurveyManager_-_Questions_and_Input_Controls

Among the new features recently added to the BPC SurveyManager libraries is a new password protected portal mode, so you can  now selectively surface surveys in each organisation to a simple portal without writing a portal survey of your own.   We have added more capabilities to the auto publish functions so that you can have anonymous responders for any survey by setting a flag, and impose login requirements per survey without adding user login questions at the start.

The portal mode will be particularly useful to teachers running classed based surveys, because you can now use the portal on a class wide basis in a school based computer for all students to concurrently access a class based survey without you having to publish to them first or send invitations.

There is lots more coming to survey manager over the next few weeks so keep tuned.   Among the changes coming to the SM library is a significant expansion of Survey Manager’s ability to directly interrogate and update risk, insurance claims and incident tables for those using BPC SurveyManager as part of their BPC RiskManager application suite.

The BPC SurveyManager Maintenance WebClient is getting some new features to expand the range of surveys that can be built with it.  We have kept it artificially simplified now for a number of years as it was always intended to be an entry point solution, but the increasingly complex surveys some of the heavier survey manager clients wish to create mean that we really must make more of the survey engines huge range of capabilities available in the web client.   We have recently completed an analysis of the types of clients using our survey technologies heavilly, and those of you making the heaviest and best use of the tech are also those attempting the most complex of surveys.  

The current web client just does not do the underlying survey engine justice and we feel it is time to really let it stretch its legs.   We will try and keep the over-all feeling of simplicity the same, and in fact some things will seem to get simpler because the current release tries makes some things just too mindless by doing a whole lot for you in the background.

Even so, we are told, our web client is still way more powerful than most similar survey clients, but if you like the current one, just wait for the enhancements coming.

Oh, and don’t forget, that we host surveys on our servers, so you can contract us to manage your survey needs on your behalf.  The service includes your own database, the survey engine, emailing invitations, the portal, at least daily backups, 24 hour monitoring, responder assistance, maintenance of the data and content and even assistance with creation of surveys.  All clients are encouraged to try out this extremely economical service as an alternative to doing it yourself.  The distributed nature of BPC SurveyManager means you can exchange surveys and data with our servers to feed back into your risk systems, for example (or just point your survey manager or risk manager clients at our servers in addition to using the web client).

We received an excellent specification from one of our clients – MFS – for a ‘Topic Based” view of compliance to augment the risk of non-compliance concept supported in the earlier BETA’s and we have integrated that concept into this release of Beta7.   

There are some new charts, report views and export capabilities to be brought into the system yet to complement the assertion views of risk so expect BETA7  to be rapidly replaced by BETA8 

In this release:

1. Main Features Added

• Document Management
• Topic View and Topic Solver
• Publishing Authorities
• Current and Residual Bubble Charts and Expanded MS Word export

2. Detail

• Vastly improved flow of control in Compliance Unit.
• New custom screen architecture to allow inclusion of user customised data entry and access views and other optional screens.  The MFS Topic Solver is the first such example.
• New configurable MFS Risk/Compliance Topic Solver Sub-system.
• New Document management with sections module.  A Document+Section  can be linked to each risk, and compliance questions/assertion tested against the documents.  The document management centre and finder support views of risks by document list, document, section list and section, with word export and drill through to risk details from the document centre.
• New Current and residual risk bubble charts with controls ratings views
• Revised chart screen presentation
• Revised and improved MS Word export from Chart screen.
• Associated new Administration and Setup-Profiles configuration screens.
• SurveyManager – New data entry modes and markup tags added
• SurveyManager – New anonymous and on-demand survey publishing support
• SurveyManager – Potentially annoying bug due to bug tracking system dependencies removed.
• Bug Tracking – The “Phone Home” behaviour of the RM bug tracking system has been changed to write a local log instead.  The phone home system was good where client networks allowed the message through (as some of you discovered when we phone you to tell you there was something wrong with your server, but too unreliable for general use due to the few clients allowing the transmissions.  We have therefore replaced it with a log file, in the temporary files directory so we can at least get the log data if needed. It is only written in the event of a critical system issue.

In this BETA our latest thinking on how a whole of organisation/government governance system should work starts to become clear.   The unique twist is that we are using the risk record to store risks, compliance obligations and compliance obligation events.  So every risk record contains all the information necessary for it to be a compliance record, and vice versa.  Thus every risk has a compliance view and every compliance issue has a risk view – and you can enter data into either view at the same time.  With the addition of documents and sections (for legislation, policy & procedure references, etc) each of which has at least one person responsible for it, you can also see all the compliance obligations + the calculated risk of the obligation breaches by document/section.  Combining this with the already existing other of ways of structuring risks (folders, master-child trees, documents, people, complex searches, etc) you can navigate and summarise the risk/compliance landscape from different angles and using differing ratings and tie it all back to the corporate plan.

Every risk or compliance item can have an indefinite number of groups of assertions/questions linked to it so differing teams can apply multiple and differing checklists and evaluation criteria to the same issue.  In this mode, risk-causes become factors explaining a less than optimal question response adding a layer of structure to a risks usually flat causes list, and each cause/contributing factor can have its own list of strategies / controls to manage / respond to it.   Thus the risk’s flat strategy list becomes structured by the causes of the risk.  Given that all this can be linked to a document and a section within that document (and the document and section have their own activation and update control responsibilities and tracking) you now have an additional set of ways to slice the risk/compliance data.

There is quite a bit more coming in this area as we surface the new corporate planning, compliance obligations, financial elements, and performance management modules progressively over coming releases.  There are a number of other components in the wings.  You may noticed the FlowCharting module with its script engine already in your client that has been there for sometime.  Apart from allowing you to draw and execute scripted multi-user flowcharts, the module is also intended to connect to hooks sewn through your database.  It has been waiting for the some of the other parts of the system to catch up, and you should soon see new flowchart views hooking the various objects  like risks, obligations, strategies, etc together.

It is an ongoing debate internally how much of the compliance support should be delivered through survey manager (which in theory could do most of it) and how much through the RiskManager client.  So far we are essentially doing both – we are adding features and tags to the SurveyManager library to support compliance tables for those that will decide to run with a heavy compliance survey focus and adding the all the compliance capabilities to the main RiskManager client.  So it is taking longer than we would like.

The other major project is a detailed documentation of the bowels of the SurveyManager engine and posting of the same on the riskwiki, so you may have noticed that there are lots of changes happening there as we progressively document the huge tag and property lists directly from the code base.  This is also seeing a cleanup of some of the SurveyManager code, and inevitably addition of even more features.

The new SurveyManager library has been deployed into our live servers so those undertaking surveys are actually using the updated system.  We have not yet deployed it to off site clients, but will include it in the next Beta release.

We hope to have a Beta7 out before Christmas… so watch this space.