1. Understanding the knowledge profile of the users

The products are not easy to comprehend by their nature, which made it crucial to have a detailed understanding of the users’ knowledge profiles. The clients being serviced include users from both the private and public sectors as well as a variety of areas. The terminology, which may be familiar to specialists from the ICT sector, is oftentimes uncomprehensible to non-technical clients.

2. Providing a detailed description of the products

Although you can always turn to SK’s managers with any questions you may have when placing an order or simply scour the internet for answers, we saw the value of providing a detailed description of the products accounduring our discovery phase of the project. As a result, we wrote out thorough descriptions for each product that bring out the nature of the product as well as its potential use cases.

3. Analysing the connections between products

Concerning the products and services, we paid extra attention to the connections between them that affect the ordering and management processes. Unlike when ordering a pair of shoes, where there are no procedural conflicts when ordering an identical pair, SK’s products are connected to companies through a so-called unique handshake that must not have an existing duplicate.

4. Fulfilling special requirements

It is also important to acknowledge the special requirements that apply to different products and that are impossible or impractical to fulfil without the associated products. To prevent potentially failing orders from being placed and the frustration that would create, we made sure to pay careful attention to the numerous validation rules and associations during the design, analysis, and development phases of the project.

5. Ensuring security

The cornerstone of all of SK’s products and services is security. It is not possible to provide an e-stamp service that is comparable to a notarised signature without having trust in the service being offered. Additionally, the team must have a sharp eye and be very precise to gather, handle, and store large amounts of sensitive data. In such a context, security does not simply mean having superficial rules, but a whole architectural foundation that provides efficient support to the development of the application. 

To ensure security, it is important to have a clear overview of who did what, where, and when. It is also important to follow the principles of data segregation and the capabilities and construction of the hosting server that supports the application. To avoid any potential weaknesses, we covered a huge part of the code repository with automated tests. A cyber security expert audited the e-service portal’s final version’s compliance with various rules. 

6. Focusing on the whole when migrating data

In essence, the e-service environment already existed prior to the analysis and development of the new version. This meant that although we had created a new and better e-service portal that incorporated additional requirements and rulesets, the new solution could not work before data was fully migrated from the old one. Data migration is often a complicated process because the new architecture, database, and ruleset do not have backwards compatibility with the previous solution or its work processes. This creates conflicts between datasets which must be resolved for the new solution to work cohesively.

7. Iterative migration

From the very start of the migration process, we realised that we would have to take an iterative approach towards handling the information concerning the users, orders and additional data associated with those orders for thousands of companies. It is impossible to perfectly copy over hundreds of thousands of entries in one go and unreasonable to go through the database manually. By taking a procedural approach, the conflicts made themselves known, which made it much easier to migrate the whole.