Strategy

To support its activities and its commitments, IDOC has limited human resources and proper financial fund. In order to optimize human resources and funds, IDOC has adopted a strategy based on two major principles: "pooling of resources" and "compliance with standards" to face with its 3 departments (IDOC-INSTR, IDOC-OPE, IDOC-DATA) all its missions

1. Pooling of resources 

This part of the strategy includes hardware and software purchase, and software development. This pooling strategy is expanded by developing partnerships (i.e. « virtualdata platform of P2IO labex»). 

IDOC activities being significantly pooled, it allows some skill redundancy and a more efficient resource management. It allows also a repartition of responsibilities in the information transit from hardware elements and the network to « high level » applications. Projects participate to this pooling strategy and profit from the best return on investment. 

This approach is beneficial for both IDOC and its partners. It allows a better use of hardware resources and skills. This approach enables IDOC to meet its commitments. The global return on each investment is greatly increased. 

The integration of a new project at IDOC requires from the project leader understanding of this pooling strategy and his commitment to it.

 

a) Human ressources 

Pooling strategy has many benefits: 

  • Pooling of IDOC staff skills allows each project to benefit from redundancy of skills required in the project development. 

  • Staff expertise increases due to pluralism of implementations using collective tools and software items. 

  • Tool mastery is strengthened by using common procedures and rules. 

  • This strategy brings a reactivity which would have been difficult to produce otherwise.

b) Procurement and use of hardware resources. 

IDOC sets up the most adapted hardware technologies to process, store and transfer data, under project requirement constraints. The different hardware infrastructures are based on standard and modular elements, allowing a wide adaptability to the requirements and a reusability. 

The pooling of hardware items allows to purchase in large quantities and with a higher quality within a constant budget (it might even occur that those items would not have been affordable to projects otherwise).

2. Compliance with standards 

This approach aims to have IDOC adopt methodologies, tools, software, procedures, etc. with the following characteristics: widely recognized and used, adapted to IDOC's themes, with excellent visibility and sustainability, and having limited implementation costs.  

IDOC closely follows the evolution of these social and technical bridges that enable for instance open sharing and re-use of data. 

a) Software development 

Although IDOC might temporarily have enough resources to develop dedicated software, experience has shown that specific developments are difficult to maintain in the long term: they become quickly out of date and their potential updates are no longer supported. 

The strategy is thus to systematically use or reuse existing solutions available from partners or the open-source community. IDOC thus aims to use commonly known tools and software for all developments.1. This set of tools is shared by the whole team and is enriched along each new activity. 

b) Participation to standards, technological monitoring and inclusion in citizens' objectives 

In addition to its obvious interest in established standards, IDOC also participates in the development of new standards or new ways of proceeding, particularly in the field of data management or computer resources

 

IDOC technological monitoring aims to explore future technical developments that seems promising for its present and future requirements. It allows to be prepared to integrate the right tools at the right time, if and when their benefits are validated. The participation of IDOC members in regional and national networks allows to reinforce the effectiveness of this technology monitoring.