Interactions between traceability and information systems

Even before acquiring the ability to write, it's highly likely that mankind had already begun to trace his path, if only by sowing pebbles, like Tom Thumb, or by recording his group's hunting scenes and those of everyday life in cave paintings. Is tracing an innate or acquired faculty? The answer is probably neither simple nor binary. In a natural way, this acquisition may result from hunting habits or from following animal tracks, enabling hunters to recognize and track their prey... Whatever the acquisition process, the essential point is that human society is faced with a twofold problem:

• that of tracing the activities of one's own people for the purposes of sound management, or to find one's way around, or to bear witness to for future generations;

• that of tracing – in the sense of "stalking", or marking – its environment to ensure its subsistence.

Both approaches were, and still are, necessary for the survival of the human species. And little has changed between the archaic notions of traceability and those that are part of our current preoccupations, apart from the increasing complexity of flows and the considerable number of players involved in transactions, which have blurred the lines, both figuratively and literally.

Today, the traceability of industrial and agricultural products has become a major economic, health and ecological issue. And this situation is amplified in the IT field, both in terms of traceability within the operation of the information system (IS) itself, and in terms of the effects managed by IT.

As long as the management of agricultural, industrial and commercial products systematically involved paper input/output before and after management or calculation processing, traceability remained materialized. This has not been the case for a good quarter of a century! In fact, we have observed :

• increasing dematerialization of exchanges, which are carried out digitally, through "electronic data interchange" (EDI) for example;

• the increasingly widespread use of electronic payments;

• the recognition of e-mails as authentic in business-to-business relations.

While technological tools have evolved considerably, in terms of the habits acquired by information systems professionals, vast gaps remain to be filled. At the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, the "traceability" aspect of many IT projects remains, at best, an afterthought, and at worst, a completely forgotten sub-project, suffering from a minimal specification, sometimes in the technical specifications, sometimes in the functional...