Consultation

We have our most junior people working in RM in most organisations. It is not seen as a sexy as writing policy or even as service delivery and the only time that senior execs engage with records mgt is when the Harradine report came around or when we had to go to court or was subject to external review. RM is not seen as a value-adding activity and until we can ’sex it up’ and acknowledge the role RM can play, particularly within a ECM or business transaction space, we will continue to limit the scope of the return we could gain from our record keeping capabilities.

Innovation is a two part process – creative thinking and implementation of the idea. The governance and risk management should be applied at the implementation process (at business case development) not at the creative thinking process. See Winning through Innovation by Tushman and O’Rielly.

My observation is that innovation is a process and a capability that needs to be developed by an organisation. I particularly likek the quote by Dr Robin Wood ‘‘The single biggest missed opportunity for leaders of for-profit and non-profit organisations is the failure to capitalise on the collective genius of the people in their organisations and communities’.

Like any other organisational capability, it requires leadership, governance, resources, training, procedures and supporting technology. The greatest barrier to innovation in the APS is not providing people with permission to fail safely.

For innovation, we also need to look at the spaces we have people working in and how conducive that is to creative thinking and implementing good ideas.

We should also be looking at how we deal with complex challenges and not apply a strategy only suitable for complicated situations as implementing Gov 2.0 is a complex rather than complicated situation.

I am disappointed to hear that govt does not have a culture of compliance with information and records management policies and best practice. Surely the Archives Act should be brought to bear. I’m amazed that we have almost now forgotten the Palmer and Comrie reports and the impact they had on RM at Immigration!

potential for a ‘garbage in, garbage out’ scenario. Haven’t we had enough of failed data warehouses? It would be good to see some examples of where this has delivered benefits.

Govt should be responsible for developing the marketplace (as it does for water and CO2) for govt information. This should include the necessary principles, rules, standards (metadata) registration, licensing?, platform, specs, training, advice, support, protocols, sanctions, etc.

There was considerable discussion (and confusion) on copyright issues at the Canberra forum yesterday. This seems to be a bit of a storm in a teacup. After reading the copyright guidelines on the AGD site (again) which states “Copyright does not protect ideas or information as such but only the original expression of ideas or information” I think that the current arrangements are reasonably robust to cope with Gov 2.0 and we possibly just need to provide some good examples/case studies and guidance. Charging for information is the big issue.

There was considerable discussion (and confusion) on copyright issues at the Canberra forum yesterday. This seems to be a bit of a storm in a teacup. After reading the copyright guidelines on the AGD site (again) which states “Copyright does not protect ideas or information as such but only the original expression of ideas or information” I think that the current arrangements are reasonably robust to cope with Gov 2.0 and we possibly just need to provide some good examples/case studies and guidance.

I agree that there is minimal capacity left in many govt organizations to enable web 2.0 and so applaud the govt for freeing up resources for specific projects. The hardware and software costs are minimal and the infrastructure in many agencies is often sufficient. What we need to focus on is building the skills knowledge and experience of, not our IT people, but our service delivery and policy people. IM should become a core APS/EL competency and management of intellectual capital should be a component of the SES framework. All agencies have a CIO – but most of these are CTOs and focus on the infrastructure and applications. Few agencies have an information architect (CIO) to drive strategies for the management of the organization’s information.

I don’t think that the imagination of the citizens needs capturing – they just need the opportunity to participate.

There are at least 3 agencies (DHS, Innovation, Health) that are about to embark on implementing an EDRMS. Rather than a passive search and case study, how about partnering with one of them to focus on the introduction of record keeping of Web 2.0 technology. DHS has some outstanding IM/IT/RM experts in this space and would be an excellent partner. Otherwise, I think you are going to be disappointed in your search.

Suggest contacting the Business Intel Unit (CSDI program) at DHS as they have just undertaken an exercise in gathering the procedural and technical issues in sharing information across 12-15 APS agencies. (Peter Harper has access to the study) as I expect that the issues will be the same. Also, Legal, Media Comms, IT and Security teams teams are not the stewards/owners of the information and services that the public want. They are more likely to be the gatekeepers than the entrepreneurs within Govt. Suggest you seek out pockets where agencies have been able to succeed, despite the bureaucracy, and determine why and how, rather than an investigation on ‘why not’.