“From Independent to Federated Systems: An Integrated Inventory Information Management System Prototype for Requirements Analysis” *

Determining requirements is often the most difficult part of system development, especially when there are many different stakeholders with different requirements at different sites, managed by different contractors. The stakeholders for the Integrated Inventory Information Management System (IIIMS) include the sites, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) site offices, the NNSA Program Integration Office, NNSA HQ, and others. A critical issue was shifting the focus from a set of totally independent systems to a federation of systems that collectively provided a complex-wide perspective for nuclear materials management. This paper describes a prototype that is being used as both a proof of concept and a tool to further explore and refine the requirements. A team, including nuclear materials managers from multiple sites and NNSA offices and information systems people, has been working to define the needs to support materials management at the complex level. A nuclear material Standardization Task Team (STT) also identified several issues and proposed solutions. The STT issues included the need for a permanent, complex-wide unique item/record identifier, a stable project code, and a standard for characterization data. The prototype started with the Nuclear Materials Inventory Assessment reporting requirements. The STT solutions and several other requirements were added. The database design was extended to satisfy these new requirements and can be further extended as additional needs are identified. The paper focuses on the needs the prototype addresses, the benefits if those needs are satisfied, the data structure to support them, and several queries or scenarios.