V.ISC.4900 - National Livestock Identification System (NLIS) Database Uplift: Current State Business Rules Extraction

Summary

On September 15, 2023, the Australian Government announced that Integrity Systems Company (a subsidiary of Meat & Livestock Australia) was the successful recipients of a grant to replace and enhance the NLIS Database and its supporting systems, as part of the funding to support traceability database upgrades, announced for the October 2022–23 Budget biosecurity package. The NLIS database has been in operation for more than 23 years, and while it continues to perform its intended role, it is nearing the end of its maintainable life. As a vital resource in underpinning biosecurity and market access, the build of a new national livestock traceability platform will ensure that there is a fit-for-purpose data capture, storage and distribution system for tracking livestock and their movements. The new platform will provide improved interoperability in being able to accommodate additional data inputs from other systems.

The project to deliver the new NLIS database is planned over three years and is divided into six stages. The Strategic Discovery, Discover and Define, Architecture and Design, Phased Build, Deployment and the Decommissioning of the existing NLIS database.

Objectives

The second stage, Define and Discover, uncovered a need to further understand the current system, to properly inform the future requirements. Further work was is required to build an understanding of legacy business rules which are currently implemented in the NLIS platform (many of which are not documented). The implementation of these business rules has been done through the method of stored procedures on the NLIS databases based on routing patterns and transaction logic. To gain the right level of visibility into these business rules they have been extracted from code into simplified and easily consumable format fit for non-technical business users.