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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


Announcement & Summary

Tom Worthington, will detail how the Internet and low cost intranet technology can be used for business document management.

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.

To Book

Contact AIC Conferences, ph: (02) 92105777, E-mail: commsaic@magna.com.au
This document is: http://www.acs.org.au/president/1997/outsrc/workflow.htm

Draft of 16 November 1997: The content of this talk will be developed here. The The printed version (16 November 1997) for the proceedings is available and "slides" are also available. Suggestions and comments welcome: tom.worthington@tomw.net.au

Contents

Prescript: A Very Large Web Server

In March I visited the USS Blue Ridge by helicopter (6) off the coast of Queensland, during Exercise Tandem Thrust 97.

USS Blue Ridge  Arrival on USS Blue Ridge

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.

Captain Julie Keesling1 Rack mounted workstations2 Rack mounted workstation close-up3 JOCC in use4
  1. Captain Julie Keesling at a Windows 3.1 workstation
  2. Rack mounted workstations
  3. Rack mounted workstation close-up
  4. Joint Operations Control Center (JOCC) in use

Introduction

We are in the middle of a revolution in the way organisations operate. That revolution is the Internet. One aspect of that change is what form documents exist in, within organisations and how those documents can be managed.

What I want to tell you today is that you can do a lot of document management with simple, cheap Internet technology, some forethought and some training for your staff. Rather than purchase an imaging system to scan in letters and store faxes, but instead you can just encourage people to send you e-mail. There are specially designed data base based electronic document systems, but the web server you already have might do. You can buy sophisticated search software, but the simple web search system you have for free might do all you want.

This is my second AIC conference this week. on Tuesday I talked to the AIC Outsourcing Government IT Conference in Canberra about using the Internet in Outsourcing (1). In that talk I suggested that the Internet could cause many service based organisations to become "virtual", with no buildings, staff or equipment and only existing on the Internet.

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. (4)

In 1994 I chaired an 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. While the Internet has come to public prominence since then, the issues of document management have not changed much. I will use that report as a framework for looking at Internet based document management. The first section of this talk, Document management issues is based on the report.

Dagmar Parer from Australian Archives, who you heard from yesterday, chaired another committee about eighteen months later on 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 (Dagmar is on this committee as well).

By now the use of the Internet and web has gone from being perhaps acceptable, to being essential. In the next year the Internet will go from essential, to being the core of many businesses and industries.

Document management issues

Evidence

Both public and private organisations are held accountable, based on evidence. The move from traditional paper documents to electronic media is posing problems. Traditional records management disciplines that have been applied to paper documents are not necessarily being applied to electronic documents. This can result in:

The personal computer and the Local Area Network made keeping documents in electronic form easier, but managing them harder. The Internet, by making us part of a global electronic community makes the job easier. The Internet and the web provide some simple standards, for authenticating, keeping, indexing and preserving documents.

Types of document

With this division, it might be acceptable to rely on the e-mail system to keep working and personal documents.

The document life cycle

A good registration procedure will support:

A quick and dirty way to achieve these is with e-mail:

The registered document

In paper documents certain contextual information is evident (e.g., from a letter head, a file cover, or from the order of the documents within a paper file). The equivalent in an electronic document is the header of the e-mail message or HTML. There are draft standards for meta-data in HTML headers (5)

Availability

Documents may be lost through systems failures and physical disasters such as fire or water damage, civil disturbances and user ineptness or negligence.

Documents may also be lost for all practical purposes because they are not capable of being found. Make the backup and recovery of documents easier by using common, compact formats. E-mail messages and HTML documents with a minimum of graphic files are very space efficient, easily backed up and indexed.

Security developments

If you have a need to store and send documents securely, look at the options available from your e-mail and web server systems. You may already have an option for encrypting e-mail messages. Web servers provide systems for identifying individual users and providing access only to selected documents and encrypting external connections (so called "extranets").

The finder

The finder is used to locate and to retrieve information. Important attributes of any software implementation of a finder are that it:

Web search engines are developing to provide the attributes of the finder:

The keeper

The keeper is concerned with the safe-keeping of documents, so that they are neither lost nor changed, access is controlled, and the source of the document is verifiable. Important attributes of a keeper are that:

Web server systems are rapidly taking on the attributes of a "keeper".

Document Management on the Web

After the first few hundred web pages the novelty of producing them wears off. 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 can't 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:

Document navigation: ensuring the Integrity of Business-critical information on the World Wide Web

No software or computer system will ensure 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 years 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 un reliable 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?

Web Site Management

First of all decide what uses you are going to make of the web 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.

If you are going to have internal organisational material, which is not for the public, do not put it on the same server as you public web page, 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 systems where just about every file was indexed, not just the web pages.

Where there are separate collections of information, or they are produced by distinct 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.

Zero Cost Document, Groupware and Workflow Systems

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. You can make text, WP, spread sheet or an other sort of document available from a web page. You can have an existing non-web based, text only, dumb mainframe application 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. There are low cost and free web based conference systems.

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 don't have a complex application, you might just have the form e-mailed around and manually filled in. Some e-mail applications now include simple workflow functions.

Document Management and Intranets

I dislike the term intranet, but suspect we are stuck with it. Technically an intranet is an internet which 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.

Extranet Opportunities

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.

Information Management and Risk Reduction: the Internet an Asset and a Liability

It is important to keep in mind that document management is not what business your organisation is in. 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 can't 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.

References


See also

Comments to Tom Worthington MACS, President of the Australian Computer Society tom.worthington@tomw.net.au.