Let's have a look at the computer systems empowering strategic decision making process in business. Those processes :

• concern interests regarding major economic, financial, industrial, legal, health or safety topics
• remain complex, are composed of many steps and take place over a long enough period of time
• involve multiple stakeholders from different domains and specialties : experts, decision makers, assessors, ...
• are subject to the continuous evolution of these dimensions (scope, complexity, duration, speaker) and generate "unproductive" back and forth trips by trial and error

In such demanding situations, special actions are required. So traceability is vital. It promises the ability to generate traces and to track processes.

Without traceability :
• risk of missing errors, confusion, misunderstandings and interference, already existing, significantly increases
• time required for verification becomes much more important, if not prohibitive
• quality of the results deteriorates
• undetected inconsistencies affect the result
• detected inconsistencies do not indicate the root cause of error, leading to repeat the whole process
• when time is short, arbitrary decisions to continue can lead to wrong outcome
• stakeholder confidence is degraded, and with it, their motivation
• in case of error or fraud, the legal, ethical and moral reponsibility is diluted or not allocated
• there are no means or incentive lever to improve the process.

In computing, traceability is the property of a system or application, which allows you to navigate throughout the execution trace of a process. It may involve in general :
• information (data) storage, archiving and versioning
• the realization of processing traces (who, what, when) with the causal links resulting from control flow and data flow and the relationship of responsibility assigned to stakeholders
• ways to browse these resources (versions, traces, states) at both the scale of a single data and at scale of the whole system
• the ability to view any version or status, to create alternatives to evolution (branches), to compare and merge them
• replicability, verifiability, support for consistency, the impact calculation of change, the incremental calculation, the unlimited and selective undo / redo
• taking into account correlated application lifecycle, which when evolving will produce different results for the same data set.

Note that although the traceability can involve the asynchronous information exchange by file or packets traveling through the network, we focus here on applications using database management systems that can then guarantee transactional consistency of data versions and evidence of processing.

Even within this scope, traceability features being not available natively in infrastructure or in tools, it becomes necessary to implement them specifically. What is difficult, risky, expensive or even prohibitive, since only the problem shifts to a higher level of abstraction so much more difficult and demanding.

Given the magnitude of this task and the inability to dispose of such generic solutions, many organizations are reluctant to put money on the table and continue to take the risk of partial coverage, fingers crossed. However, the advent of cloud computing, with its promise to reduce infrastructure costs and its potential for widespread dissemination of solutions, potentially increases the audience and with it the risk of interference between stakeholders value chain, which has the effect of increasing the failure risk of involved processes.

When properly implemented, traceability provides inherently regulatory compliance, auditability warranty, liability protection, effective collaboration, multiplied productivity, significant cost reduction.

The essence of our experience and technological methodology is now embedded in a generic way in MyDraft, Cloud-base platform of components assembly to produce flexible applications, rich web interfaces powered by a patented traceability engine you can integrate into existing information systems.

The correlated evolution of data and programs is facilitated and encouraged by a systematic monitoring (who, when, what, where), but also by the unique ability to go backwards (time machine) in order to instantly restore any previous state of the system and make reproducible any previous processing. This ensures in addition automatic compliance with the requirements of normative frameworks for governance, the foundation of business 2.0 trust.