Australian Computer SocietyNote: These are the "slides" of the talk, intended for display to an audience in 18 point font on a 640 x 480 video display. The text of the talk is also available.
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The Australian Computer Society is the professional association in Australia for those in the computing and information technology fields. It was established in 1966. The Society has over 14,000 members and on a per capita basis is one of the largest computer societies in the world.
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Blue Ridge visted Queensland for Exercise Tandem Thrust 97
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The increasing penetration of computer networks into government agencies means that more and more essential documents are not only being created and stored on computers, but are being transmitted electronically within and between agencies, thus spending their entire lifetime in electronic form.
Traditional records management techniques have been addressed largely at the management of paper files. It is now time for these techniques to be extended to the management of electronic documents, otherwise we risk the loss of valuable corporate memory through the inaccessibility or inadvertent destruction of valuable documents, and the confusion of the corporate record through the unnecessary retention of non-essential documents. Foreword to "Improving Electronic Document Management: Guidelines for Australian Government Agencies", OGIT, 1995
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The finder is used to locate and to retrieve information. Web search engines are developing to provide the attributes of the finder:
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The keeper is concerned with the safe-keeping of documents:
Web server systems are rapidly taking on the attributes of a "keeper".
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No software will ensure integrity of your business critical information, only well trained staff can do that.
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With trained staff, Internet software might be all you need:
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An intranet is an internet which is not connected to the Internet.
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.
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An Extranet is a part of your intranet made available via the Internet:
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Document management should not get in the way of your business:
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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!!
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