Determining information management needs for enhanced international safeguards

摘要

The Safeguards Information Management System initiative is a program of the Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Arms Control and Nonproliferation aimed at supporting the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) efforts to strengthen safeguards through the enhancement of information management capabilities. The DOE hopes to provide the IAEA with the ability to correlate and analyze data from existing and new sources of information, including publicly available information, information on imports and exports, design information, environmental monitoring data, and non-safeguards information. The first step in this effort is to identify and define IAEA requirements. In support of this, we have created a users' requirements document based on interviews with IAEA staff that describes the information management needs of the end user projected by the IAEA, including needs for storage, retrieval, analysis, communication, and visualization of data. Also included are characteristics of the end user and attributes of the current environment. This paper describes our efforts to obtain the required information. We discuss how to accurately represent user needs and involve users for an international organization with a multi-cultural user population. We describe our approach, our experience in setting up and conducting the interviews and brainstorming sessions, and a brief discussion of what we learned.