The purpose of this Workshop is to provide the market players with a set of best practices that are required for the design, the development, operation and the maintenance of critical information systems including both application and infrastructure.
The Workshop addresses the mission-critical Management (or Business) Information Systems. It does not cover the domains related to mission-critical systems such as Scientific, Industrial (control-command,...),  and Embedded Systems, for which practices and technologies already focus on “technical” requirements whereas their “functional” requirements are generally specific, stand-alone and dedicated to a limited set of specifications.
It is usual to identify three phases in an IT project lifecycle : “Design”, “Build” and “Run”. The Workshop addresses the practices required in the “Design” and “Build” phases, being understood that a major concern of the Workshop deals with the impact produced by those practices on the “Run” phase.
Finally, the Workshop addresses the practices, which are required to fulfil the “technical specifications” (or “quality of service requirements”), that is «Build it right and efficient».
It does not address the practices required for the “functional specifications” (or “business requirements”), that is « Build the right thing »

The Workshop will prepare one CWA on the basis of a first draft specification submitted by the initiators. This CWA will address the following aspects:
F    Requirements related to the quality of the service:
o      Capacity, including scalability
o      Reliability
o      Availability
o      Security
o      Performance
o      Interoperability
F    Requirements related to the life cycle control, and operating around or beyond the designed system limits
o      Ease of operation (including system management) and ease of diagnosis
o      Maintainability and ease of evolution
o      “Non stop” maintenance and deployment
o      Other requirements like Economic and cost dimension, physical environment, hosting.
F    Requirements for the testing process
Another objective of the Workshop is to define precisely the related concepts and terminology.
 
No overlap is expected between these efforts and others standardisation initiatives previously mentioned. The WS CIS deliverable is focused on supporting only requirements specific for Critical Information Systems without impending on other initiatives that address generic IT best practices standards.