World Wide Web Warriors

Knowledge Management at The Australian Department of Defence

Tom Worthington

Special Advisor Defence Internet/Intranet Policy

Monday 29 June 1998 - Sydney
Electronic Document Management 1998 Conference

Announcement & Summary

Issues with the management of "Mission Critical" information using internet technology are examined. Examples of use of e-mail and the web at the Department of Defence are given. Details of several government reports on electronic document, e-mail and web use for government agencies are discussed. It is argued that organisations should look at simple internet technology and staff training, before investing in custom computer applications.

About the speaker

Tom Worthington next to Australian made vehicle at Rockhampton Airport Mr Worthington is Special Adviser for Internet/Intranet Policy, with the Australian Department of Defence and Immediate Past President of the Australian Computer Society. Tom wrote the ACS Communique on IT higher education in 1998, launched the ACS/PAGE on-line postgraduate program in December 1997 and was a steering committee member of the Discipline Research Strategy for Information Technology.

Tom is a member of the Australian Computer Society, voting member of the Association for Computing Machinery, member of the Internet Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Computer Society. He is a member of the Council of Standards Australia.

Information Age magazine lists Mr. Worthington as one of the 10 most influential IT&T; people in Australia in 1998. His work since 1994 has been on the policy and practice of implementation of the Internet, including appearances before three Senate hearings. He established the first web home pages for the ACT Government, the Special Broadcasting Service, Australian Information Industry Association and the National Press Club.

To Book

Contact AiC Worldwide, ph: (02) 92105727, E-mail: djarvis@aicconf.com.au

Draft of 1 June 1998: The content of this talk will be developed here. The printed version for the proceedings and "slides" will also be available. This document is: http://www.acs.org.au/president/1998/past/edm98w3.htm Suggestions and comments welcome: tom.worthington@tomw.net.au

Contents

Prescript: A Very Large Web Server

In March 1997 I visited the USS Blue Ridge by helicopter (1) off the coast of Queensland, during Exercise Tandem Thrust 97 (and a cyclone).

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." (2)

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 a transition period, between the use of paper and electronic documents. That transition has been accelerated by the Internet, but will still be a painful process. This is not just a matter of information management, but a change in the way organisations operate.

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. It is possible to conceive of doing business differently, or different business, without years of delay in implementing a new computer system. However, the essential ingredient is still to know what your business is and how to use the technology to achieve it. The limiting factor is now the ability of the staff to use the system and of the management to conceive how work could be done differently.

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 Your whole organisation could become "virtual"; with no buildings, staff or equipment. In a sense, Defence has always been a virtual business, relying on people with particular skills, assembled for a particular task and operating over vast areas, using whatever communications the technology of the day provided.

I am not an expert in military command and control, but have looked at some of the ways in which the world wide web and internet technology are, or may be, used in the defence of Australia. The inspiration for this comes from the work of Australian universities in implementing the Internet over the last few years. That work inspired the implementation of the Internet and web in federal government agencies.

A series of Federal interdepartmental committees have reported on aspects of electronic document management, use of the Internet and internet technology. These point the way for the use of this technology for Defence:

At the time (1995) it didn't seem that internet technology had much to do with managing official government documents. However, in the three years since then it has become obvious that the same technology used for creating, storing, finding and distributing documents on the Internet can also be used for business purposes. Those business purposes can include running the country or defending it.

My less Internet-aware colleagues used to tolerate (barely) my enthusiasm for internet technology. What they saw were non-commercial applications, university experiments and a "free information" ethos. What they failed to see was a global experiment in how to create, store and find information on a large scale.

Issues with electronic documents on a large scale which have only just begun to be faced in organisations, to do with securing information in a heterogeneous shared environment, have been discussed (if not solved) on the Internet for years. There are technologies and more importantly techniques for using the technology, which can be applied in the work place.

It sounds almost too simple, but documents can be stored on a secure intranet, indexed and accessed in much the same way they are on the Internet. This can be used in an office, or on a battlefield.

The Internet and the web have attributes which particularly suit it to military use.

Managing "Mission Critical" Information

The report Improving Electronic Document Management: Guidelines for Australian Government Agencies discussed the need to manage electronic documents throughout their life cycle. Procedures should be implemented to manage each electronic document throughout its life from creation to disposal.

Metadata

Meta-data must accompany each document. This contextual information (6) is not evident from the document in its electronic form. In a conventional registry system, as used for a government agency's paper file registry, the meta-data is held in a central system.

The web demonstrated another approach: to embed the meta-data in each document (7) . The meta-data is harvested using a web crawler and found using a search engine.

The committee preparing the Architecture For Access To Government Information, had considerable debates about the merits of a central database approach, versus distributed web based approach. In the end we decided that both approaches could be used.

Whole of Government Secure Intranet

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 (8). The Department of Defence was announced as the lead agency for the initial infrastructure phase of the project, 18 December 1997 (9). 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 (10).

Email and the Web Into Business Processes

With trained, disciplined staff, simple Internet facilities can be used for document management, groupware and work-flow.

Document Management: Web documents need not be flashy graphic rich, tastefully designed works of art. Routine circulars are circulated on the Defence intranet.

Groupware is provided free with the Internet in a simplified form. Defence makes considerable use of e-mail for circuiting documents for comment.

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, in many cases it is simpler to just have the form e-mailed around and manually completed.

Document Management on the Web

The novelty of producing web pages wears off, after the first few hundred. The first public Defence home page was prepared using little more than a text editor. In place of sophisticated web management software, the traditional computer programming disciplines of version control, test and production databases and archiving were used.

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, this is no longer sufficient and the current Defence web master is overseeing the transfer of the existing web pages to a more managed environment.

One way to avoid management problems is to think about how documents will be maintained before they are created. What changes are likely in the structure of the organisation? What happens when senior staff mentioned in the pages change? What is done with the web pages for an event, after an event?

Once a set of web pages, with particular addresses and directory structures, have published they are very difficult to change. Although software may allow the web site to be restructured, the customers will have the old addresses recorded in their system (be they the general public or internal staff).

Data analysis techniques, usually associated with the design of databases, can be applied to web directory design. With this, the design can be normalised, to group information into logical structures. This will also remove duplication in the information and reduce interdependence. As with databases, the design may then need to be denormalised, to increase system efficiency and, in the case of web pages, to make them more readable to the user.

The expected frequency of update will effect the design of pages. It should be decided which are static pages, linked to new content and which are dynamic pages, where the content evolves. This will reduce the maintenance effort, as well as confusion for the reader.

Document navigation: ensuring the Integrity of Business-critical information

No software or computer system will assure the integrity of 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.

It needs to be decided what the web will be used for and web servers partitioned your accordingly. An organisation is 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.

The Defence Department puts internal organisational material and public web pages on separate servers, to ensure the security of the system. There is a risk that the public server will be attacked via the Internet and documents copied, destroyed or altered. Classified documents are kept on separate servers within the organisational firewall.

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, separate servers can be used. While in theory an organisation is one happy supportive family, in practice intra-organisational rivalries can make maintaining a web service difficult.

Infrastructure for the Internet and intranets

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.

An Extranet is a part of your intranet made available via the Internet. I dislike the term extranet even more than intranet, but suspect we are stuck with it as well.

Not all employees are in an organisation's buildings on the corporate internal computer network. An extreme case of this is deployed military personnel. They require access to internal resources via a public communications network, while still keeping the information private.

Defence uses encryption devices to provide secure access to internal systems from remote locations. There are firewall and gateway security manuals, available on-line from the Defence Signals Directorate (11), the government computer security advisors:

Conclusion

It is important to keep in mind that document management is not an organisation's primary business. Enough document management is needed to facilitate business needs, but 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. This is particularly the case with military systems. A combination of simple technical sophistication, plus the good sense and training of staff is required.

References


See also

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