Read a summary of the 2009 IIM ACT Conference and follow the links to various presentations.

Abstract of presentation by Tony Corcoran To IIM ACT Conference 2009

Abstract of presentation by Margaret Chalker To IIM ACT Conference 2009

Despite the potential benefits, many enterprise portal projects have been plagued by poor up take within the intended user group. These failures can be traced back to a variety of organisational and technical root causes. Some problems, such as usability, are common to many other enterprise applications and can be solved through well established methods. However, the lessons of experience point to three particular success factors that are critical when selecting and implementing enterprise portals.

Increasingly, the business of modern government requires greater knowledge of its policy context, faster and more reliable decision-making, faster and more effective implementation of its policy objectives, and greater accountability and transparency in its decisions. Business Intelligence (BI) is about making factual information useful in delivering smarter, more accountable and more transparent government. This introductory paper discusses key drivers in government BI, as well as key principles, tools and methods, benefits, costs and challenges for effective BI.

While knowledge management has recently been a key concern for organisations, there is significant anecdotal evidence that organisations are unsatisfied with their organisational intranets that have been created based on the promise that information technology itself can manage organisational knowledge. The proposition is that organisational information systems will be more effective if their design is informed by an understanding of human information behaviour broader than merely rational decision-making behaviour.

This article is a follow-up to "Interoperability-not just a word for the technical".

This paper will be in three parts. In the first part I will address the question of what is metadata and what can it do and relate this to the role that metadata plays in enabling good recordkeeping. In the second part of the paper I will describe three metadata-related projects in which the National Archives is involved: the Australian Government Locator Service metadata standard; the Monash University-led SPIRT Recordkeeping Metadata research project; and a project to produce a recordkeeping metadata standard for Commonwealth Government agencies. Along the way I shall explore and explain the linkages between these three projects. Finally, I shall discuss how these metadata standards may be deployed, focusing on how they will effect the business processes of government agencies, most particularly in an intranet environment.

Information Management - Application System Developers (Summary) As IT/Information Mangers this group have to focus on delivery of systems which will improve the way the organisation does its business. Application developers (and DBA's and Business Analysts) work very carefully to ensure that they deliver a system that meets the business requirement. Business requirements can change faster than they can be documented and sometimes the business is not sure of their requirements. The other key problem facing developers is business requirements which are rapidly changing. Information managers face even more hurdles. To do this sensibly the organisation should build a system which collects this information once and re-uses it across all applications and functions. Having faced this challenge the information manager then suggests to the organisation that they should invest in a corporate approach to information and build systems which address these larger corporate issues. So despite their best efforts at being good information managers they are constrained by the same issues that all of the other information managers face – the organisation generally does not understand information issues and does not understand the value of information as an asset. The next article will look at the information providers, those tasked with taking a variety of information sources and turning the data into something useful. Integrity - Verifying or helping to verify data integrity

Information Management - Info Generators The final strata of IM professionals are the people who take data from the systems that others have built to generate information. Over the Information Management Series, published in the previous Newsletters, we have provided an overview of the wide range of skills needed to manage information. With issues such as immediacy, the desire of users to have more control over their data and, the increasing ease in which data could be manipulated, organisations needed to rethink the management of data/information. It also became apparent that the best way to protect and manage corporate data and provide reporting capabilities was to duplicate the data into a reporting data base. Initially only selected data was imported into these reporting data bases. The complete reporting collection was known as a data warehouse and the selected sub-sets of data became known as data marts. The weaknesses of this approach became apparent when data marts were generated using different techniques and different time frames, leading to the inevitable “my data is better than your data” arguments. Most large corporations now have data warehouses or a reporting repository. About ten years ago, accepted wisdom was that the data warehouse was simply the repository and all information should be generated from subsets or data marts. All the people, processes and procedures are in place to allow organisations to control their information.

Information comes in many forms, from books and journals, corporate records, discussions over coffee, spreadsheets, emails, and your organisation’s systems. As Information Managers we should be aware of the impact of a well-told story. Librarians are information professionals who manage information and services to meet people’s information needs. Archivists are also in the business of managing information. They manage information by ensuring safe storage, cataloguing and retrieval of documents and items. With the advent of Information Technology we now have more opportunities and challenges to manage our corporate records. Technology also creates new challenges for the modern information manager. An information manager (records manager) can assist by Identifying sources of information and classifying these sources to eliminate the inappropriate data, ambiguity, and duplicates of same data. The information manager can also help legitimise data and ensure an audit trail exists. That is people use technology to find information it is there skill that interprets and places the information into the correct context. Over time a good information manager will gather evidence and stories about how understanding systems and the management of information helped the organisation. As an information manager you have to be an active part of the organisation and actively interact with all the other information managers across the organisation. Authors: Steve Neilsen works in the IT industry and has a keen interest in Information Management and Robine Polach, works as an ‘Information Architect’ and is President of IIM.

INFORMATION MANAGEMENT – This is a series of articles aimed at IM professionals to help in gaining an understanding of roles, data, and its management.

How often as an Information Manager have you come across diagrams in UML or some other modeling language?

Information management policies enable the organisation to re-assert itself in the management of its documented memory. Information management policies relate to the management and use of information objects, or the explicit knowledge, of an organisation. One of the key questions that arise in respect to information management policies is whether there should be one policy, a set of policies, one policy with underpinning guidelines or an over-arching policy supported by a set of sub-policies. Whatever structure is selected it is important that policies have policy statements that summarise the policies themselves and that can be easily understood and quoted. Some of the proposed sub policies in the diagram could fit under one or more elements and may also have a complimentary sub policy in the Information Technology Policy Framework e.g. e-mail. For this reason scoping of each policy / sub policy is really important and all relevant parties should have input to the development of the related policies.

The view of all writers, Bearman, Cook and Catherine Baileys is that. “the focus of appraisal needs to shift from determining the value of the actual records for research purposes to assessing the functional-structural circumstances which led to their creation; in fact, an examination of the importance of their context of creation, or their provenance.” (C Bailey p94)