Our Approach to the Project

To reach the goals of this project, the SEER DMS team is performing the following steps:

1. defining the project (see Project Definition),
2. specifying the requirements (captured using modeling techniques),
3. designing the solution (see Candidate Solution,
4. implementing the design, and then
5. delivering and maintaining the system

From the start it was acknowledged that this project could only be accomplished with the active participation and cooperation of the SEER Registries. For this reason it was decided to employ a JAD (Joint Application Development) approach involving subject matter experts (SME’s) from the SEER Registries in the Project Definition and Requirements Gathering Phase of this project.

Since a project of this scope and magnitude should result in an end product which goes beyond a mere duplication of the systems which are presently in place, going beyond to also encompass areas where needs exist or new technology can be applied to accomplish increased efficiencies, it was determined that Requirements Gathering must include the entirety of the business of Central Cancer Registry Operations, not merely the operations of the current systems. Applications, therefore, are to be business driven, developers user-centric and requirements to include systems, people and manual components, and appropriate technology solutions in all areas.

Because Central Cancer Registry Operations goes far beyond the current systems assisting in the work, it was very important to draw from experts from both the IT and Operations sides of the issue. For this reason, methodologies (such as Unified Modeling Language (UML)), which are very Object-Oriented (OO) were excluded from consideration. OO is an important design strategy, however OO is not meaningful to business people, including the Registry Operations experts needed. What was selected was a methodology based on Flavin (Fundamental Concepts of Information Modeling, 1981) with:

• Objects ( “What”) captured through Entity-Relation Diagrams (see Object Models)
• Processes (“How”) captured through Data Flow Diagrams (see Process Models)
• Events (“When) captured though State Transition Diagrams
• Locations (“Where”) captured through Location Diagrams (see Location Models)
• Socio-Political (“Who”) captured through Socio-Political Matrices (see Socio-Political Models)