Australian Computer Society
How the Internet and Intranets Help Expedite Business Document Solutions
AIC Integrated Document & Workflow Management Systems Conference
Tom Worthington
President of the Australian Computer Society
12:10pm Friday 12 December 1997
Note: 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.
Contents
About the speaker
Tom Worthington is current National President of the Australian Computer
Society. Away from the ACS Tom is Manager Defence Internet/Intranet
Policy, Australian Department of Defence and made Kangaroo 95 the first
military exercise on the Internet, in August 1995.
Tom chaired the interdepartmental committee
which prepared guidelines for Australian Government agencies on
electronic document management.
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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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Introduction
- Revolution in the way organisations operate: the Internet
- One aspect is document management with Internet technology
- Some organisations will be "virtual", with just electronic documents
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:
- Support a wide variety of user skills and knowledge
- Support fixed attribute, free-text searching and higher-level retrieval:
- Capable of operating over distributed keepers
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The keeper
The keeper is concerned with the safe-keeping of documents:
- who can read and/or copy;
- make the documents accessible to all
who need them;
- enforce version control;
- provide an audit trail
- work with other keepers and finders
Web server systems are rapidly taking on the attributes of a "keeper".
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Apply document management principles to Web documents:
- Version control, test and production databases, archiving.
- You can't just delete old web pages or move them
- Design web sites to be maintainable
- Apply data analysis techniques: normalise the design,
- Decide which are static pages, linked to new content and
which are dynamic pages, where the content evolves.
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No software will ensure integrity of your business critical information, only well trained staff can do that.
- Use tools
- There is no substitute for training, experience and a deep knowledge
- Web pages need to be tested before being put into "production"
- Think of the reader
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- Partition your web servers according to use and organisation structure: While in theory your organisation is one happy supportive family, in practice intra-organisational rivalries can make maintaining a web service difficult.
- Do not put internal material on a public server
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With trained staff, Internet software might be all you need:
- Document Management: Use basic web pages linked to WP, spread sheets and legacy applications
- Groupware: use electronic mailing lists, list server software, newsgroups web conference systems.
- Workflow: Use e-mail
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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:
- Provides access to internal resources via the Internet, while still keeping the information private.
- Occasional use: have someone e-mail you material
- Have public, but unannounced, web pages: risky strategy
- Next step up: put a user id and password on the system
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Document management should not get in the way of your business:
- Enough document management to facilitate the business
- A very secure and sophisticated system which delivers no document is of no value
- It may be better to go for technical simplicity and rely on the good sense and training of your staff
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See also
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Comments to
Tom Worthington MACS, President of the Australian Computer Society tom.worthington@tomw.net.au.
Blue Ridge visted Queensland for Exercise Tandem Thrust 97
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