Australian Computer SocietyTom Worthington, will detail how the Internet and low cost intranet technology can be used for business. He argues that businesses should look at simple internet technology, before investing in custom computer applications.
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This document is: http://www.acs.org.au/president/1997/outsrc/expdte.htm
The printed version (15 December 1997) for the proceedings is available and "slides" are also available.This talk is adapted from one to the AIC Integrated Document & Workflow Management Systems Conference, 12 December 1997. Draft of 27 January 1998:
the content of this talk will be developed here. Suggestions and comments welcome: tom.worthington@tomw.net.au
In March 1997 I visited the USS Blue Ridge by helicopter (6) off the coast of Queensland, during Exercise Tandem Thrust 97.
The Blue Ridge (LCC 19) is the flagship of the U.S. Seventh Fleet; a 620-foot 18,500 ton, 1550 crew purpose built Command and Control ship.
The "Joint Maritime Command Information System" consists of computers distributed throughout the ship, with data from world-wide sources presenting a tactical picture of air, surface and subsurface contacts. According to the Blue Ridge Home Page: "...enabling the Fleet Commander to quickly assess and concentrate on any situation which might arise. This ability to access information from military and civilian sources throughout the world gives Blue Ridge a global command and control capability unparalleled in Naval history." (7)
The Blue Ridge is essentially a floating web server. Military personnel sit at PCs and laptops, using mostly ordinary office automation and internet software. Equipment is tied down using webbing straps, rack mounting and in some cases adhesive tape.
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We are in the middle of a revolution in the way organisations operate. That revolution is the Internet. One aspect of the change is that computer applications become more standardised. What once required an expensive new system design and development by experts, can now be done with low cost standard components, downloaded from the 'net. However, the essential ingredient is still to know what your business is and how to use the technology to achieve it.
This revolution creates challenges, particularly for senior managers. If you manage a service based organisation, you might find it disappears into the Internet in the next few years; becoming "virtual", with no buildings, staff or equipment.
In 1994 I chaired a Federal interdepartmental committee on electronic document management (2). The report of the committee discusses possible impediments to the use of electronic documents by Federal Government agencies and the implications of the Internet.
About eighteen months later there was another committee (which I was on) about on-line indexing of electronic documents in Federal Agencies (3). In the period between the two committees a great deal had changed. The Internet had gone from something for academics and anarchists, to a serious computer network for Government and business. The Internet was starting to provide the standards, infrastructure and customer base for serious electronic document systems. I argued that we could use meta-data tags embedded in web documents for indexing Government information. This was too radical for many of my colleagues and still is for some.
In November this year I was nominated for the "Search Engine Working Group". This is another Federal interdepartmental committee looking at the details of implementing what was proposed by the previous committee. Its first report is now available (8).
The latest development is that the an initiative to build a Whole of Government Secure Intranet was announced by the Prime Minister 8 December 1997 as part of the Investing for Growth statement (9). The Department of Defence was announced as the lead agency for the initial infrastructure phase of the project, 18 December 1997 (10). The Department of Primary Industries & Energy is the lead agency for the applications phase. The project is being co-ordinated by the Office of Government Information Technology (OGIT) in partnership with other Commonwealth agencies.
The aim is to provide a secure on-line intranet environment for the Commonwealth Government. It will be used for all intra-government communications, including voice, data, TV, multimedia and electronic business transactions. A draft Request for Proposal (RFP) for the provision of the network infrastructure and facilities management was released for comment, 12 January 1998 (11).
The novelty of producing web pages wars off, after the first few hundred. You start to realise that you need to worry about version control, test and production databases, archiving.
My approach to these issues has been to set up the new home page as a pilot system and then hand it over to someone else when the maintenance problems started. ;-) In the pioneering period over the last few years this was a feasible approach. However, if you are hiring a person or a company to look after your web pages, ask them about management of web documents.
You cannot just delete old web pages or move them to new locations (which is almost as bad as moving them).
Before setting up your web, think about how you will manage the documents. What changes are likely in the structure of your organisation? What happens when the senior staff mentioned in the pages change? What do you do with the web pages for an event, after an event?
Once you have published a set of web pages, with particular addresses and directory structures, they are very difficult to change. Even if you have an automated system to restructure your web site, your customers will have the old addresses recorded in their system.
A few techniques I have found useful are:
No software or computer system will assure the integrity of your business critical information, only well trained staff can do that. The best software will not work, if the staff are not trained and motivated to use it properly.
When I started doing web pages, in 1994 I was quickly struck by how much like software development it was. At first there is frustration with all the peculiar codes to learn (the syntax). After a while there is the pleasure in producing impressive results with a few simple codes. Then there is the frustration of maintenance. Last of all there is the problem of managing complexity.
In the last three year's web tools have developed as much as programming tools did in ten years. It is no longer necessary type in tags manually. There are visual diagramming tools for showing the link relationships between web pages.
However, like programming, there is no substitute for training, experience and a deep knowledge of the discipline. Beginners can quickly get into a lot of difficulty building unreliable and un-maintainable web systems.
Like software, web pages need to be tested before being put into "production". There needs to be a plan for the future and an idea of how changes will be accommodated.
Before putting your valuable business documents on-line, think of how they are related: which are most important to the reader? In what order will they be read? Will they be read on-line or downloaded?
Decide what you will use the web for and partition your web servers accordingly. You are likely to have a public "home page", with promotional information on it, perhaps one or more product specific sites. The may be separate division of the organisation.
Put internal organisational material and your public web page on separate servers, unless you are very sure of the security of your system. There is a risk that your public server will be attacked via the Internet and you internal documents copied, destroyed or altered. One way to avoid you system being attacked is to not have one: put you public web pages on someone else's server, well away from your organisation.
Even if there is no deliberate attack, a mistake in security setting may allow a public web crawler to come along and index all of your internal, private documents. I have seen one university computer system where just about every file was indexed, not just the web pages.
Where there are separate collections of information, or they are produced by different parts of the organisation, consider separate servers. While in theory your organisation is one happy supportive family, in practice intra-organisational rivalries can make maintaining a web service difficult.
If you have trained, disciplined staff and Internet software, you might not need additional document management groupware or workflow software. Also you may not need a bigger computer system.
Document Management: Web documents need not be flashy graphic rich, tastefully designed works of art. You can run WP documents through a converter and produce a basic system quickly. Text, WP, spread sheet and other document types can be made available from a web page. Existing mainframe application can be interfaced to the web.
Groupware is provided free with the Internet in a simplified form. You can use manually prepared electronic mailing lists for sending around items for discussion. You can use free list server software to automate the process. You can use internal non-public newsgroups for announcements and discussion. Low cost and free web based conference systems are available.
Workflow systems allow automated routing of electronic forms around an organisation. At each step there are a defined set of items to be completed, calculations made and checks on data. However, if you do nothave a complex application, just have the form e-mailed around and manually completed. Some e-mail applications now include simple workflow functions.
I dislike the term intranet, but suspect we are stuck with it. Technically an intranet is an internet that is not connected to the Internet. Clear? ;-)
Let me start again: an internet (with a small i) is a network made by joining two or more networks. The Internet (with a big I) is the publicly connected internets around the globe.
To build an intranet, just disconnect your organisation from the Internet. What is left is an intranet. In practice a firewall is put in to try to keep what not for the public on the intranet, while providing access to the Internet.
I dislike the term extranet even more than intranet, but suspect we are stuck with it as well. An Extranet is a part of your intranet made available via the Internet.
Not all your employees are in your buildings on your internal computer network. You can provide access to internal resources via the Internet, while still keeping the information private.
For occasional use a simple way to get information out is to have someone in the office e-mail the material to the outside. This has the problem of needing manual intervention and the risk that the information will go to the wrong address or be read on the way.
A risky, but easy strategy is to have public, but unannounced, web pages. Those who need the information are given the web address. If there are no links from publicly known pages, then no one should ever see these pages (there are commands for asking well-behaved crawlers not to index these pages).
The next step up is to put a user id and password on the system. This will protect from all but really determined attackers, assuming your staff choose sensible passwords and change them regularly. For more protection you can use encryption.
It is important to keep in mind that document management is not your organisation's primary business. You need to deliver enough document management to facilitate whatever the business needs and no more. Having a very secure and sophisticated system is of no value if it cannot get the documents to the people ho need them, when they need them. You might decide that it is better to go for technical simplicity and rely on the good sense and training of your staff.
As usual, I prepared a draft of this talk and issued it to the ACS National Council and several mailing lists for comment (in total several hundred people). One comment deserves special mention:
"My main comment is that I'd like to see a section about the Customers or Users of the Government generated data which is your main topic. This is a pet peeve of mine as you may know. When you live in the sticks, as I do, you always feel like a poor relation of the colleagues who are in the large metropolises... In other words competition is great but even Telstra themselves seem disinterested in folks like us!! Please could you insert a plea for a bit more help, encouragement or subsidy or something for the rural users who may well benefit most ... The National Library now has a lot of good data on-line and cheap access to that would go some way to putting rural users on a par with their urban colleagues - who can actually visit the NLA anyway!!