24 April 2008

Preparing unstructured data for migration to DII(F)

Active Navigation, an information management software company, today announced that the Royal Air Force (RAF) has selected Active Navigation to help prepare all UK bases for its move to the DII(F) (Defence Information Infrastructure Future) programme, run by the EDS led ATLAS consortium.

The DII(F) project aims to bring together the information systems of Ministry of Defence organisations into a single platform, replacing the myriad of bespoke systems that exist at the 4,000 locations worldwide.

In less than eight weeks Active Navigation was deployed at more than 30 UK RAF bases to:

Uncover what information assets exist on bases
Identify duplication, near duplication and data redundancy in unstructured content
Organise station information to fit the mandated RAF file plan
Migrate content from old file structures to the new RAF file plan
Wing Commander Colin Mulready, SO1 RAF IM stated, “The task of preparing bases for the move to DII(F) is a large undertaking; to try to prepare bases’ data for migration manually would have been neither feasible nor cost-effective. Active Navigation is helping us to address this task in a logical, effective manner and will help to improve accessibility to relevant information and assist in the compliance process.”

Peter Baumann , Chief Executive of Active Navigation said, “This has been a great opportunity for us to demonstrate that, even for a complex organisation like the RAF, it is possible to identify inappropriate, redundant and duplicate data across a large set of networks in a short period of time. As a result, the RAF will have a lighter load of data that is cleansed and ready for migration to DII(F).”