- Australian e-commerce predicted to more than double from $61 million in 1997 to $1.3 billion in 2001.
- Business web sites in Australia doubled between 1996 and 1998
- Annual
revenues have doubled or better in recent years for several Australian
Internet systems and knowledge suppliers
- 1.7 million Australian households (25% of total) online by November 1999, an annual increase of 37%.
- Around six million Australian adults (44%) accessed the Internet in the year to November 1999, a 13% rise.
- E.D.I (electronic data
interchange): It pre-dates the modern Internet but used extensively for
business transactions like banks transferring information between each
other.
- TCP/IP: The protocol of the
Internet, intranets and extranets
- XML and XFDL: The new Internet
coding “extensible mark-up language” and “extensible forms definition
language”.
- PKI:
Public Key Infrastructure, cryptographic procedures which could be
used across a network.
- SSL and SET: Data security programs like Secure
Socket Layers and Secure Electronic Transactions, which was emerging as
the industry standard.
 Australian Capital Territory |
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The RMAA ACT e-Commerce seminar
Face
it: e-Biz is here to stay and it’s making records!
Principal, The Caldeson Consultancy.
They said it all. Electronic transactions are the stuff of the future. The Web is a multi-billion dollar revenue source to business. The Australian government aims to be doing almost all its business electronically by the end of 2001.
By then, Australian e-business will amount to over $1 billion a year. E-commerce offers a perfect opportunity for archivists and records managers to address serious record issues.
And they warned harshly. Expansion of e-information seriously challenges the modern recordkeeper. There is no certainty about who will be capturing the records. The recordkeeping profession is not properly reading the opportunities e-commerce offers.
The speakers: specialists from the top of Australasian industrial, commercial, academic, legal and public service sectors. The event: The March 2000 annual seminar of the Records Management Association of Australia (RMAA) branch in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). The subject: e-Business Transactions: Providing accountability through effective recordkeeping.
It was the subject of the moment, delegates were told. Within the month, all over the world, the information industry was talking about it. The biggest IT exhibition in the world, CeBIT 2000 in Hanover, Germany, had just heard papers like “E-mail support: a logical consequence for successful e-commerce”.
A London pharmaceutical information forum, an Amsterdam business information conference, a Japanese seminar, an information management workshop in Wellington, New Zealand, and political conflict in Washington, D.C., all centred around e-business challenges.
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"Stress RM's importance"
Many of the ACT speakers picked up the challenge theme. Steve Stuckey, the Assistant Director-General for Government Services at the National Archives of Australia, gave the strongest possible warnings, saying:
“The role of records managers and archivists is more than to act as noble soothsayers of the virtues of accountability. It is important continually to highlight the prominence of our recordkeeping requirements for e-commerce and it is crucial that those noises are in the right forums with a message that will be heard.”
Styling himself an “imperialist, a strong proponent of a monolithic recordkeeping industry”, the Assistant D-G cautioned: “Records managers and archivists need to be realistic about their status as a small and marginalized professional group and the constraints this places on advocating a message. We need to be visionary and creative about how we get the message not only heard, but also delivered with the right focus. We need to have cost-effective solutions that marry the outcomes we seek, with the outcomes government agencies seek in the delivery of electronic services.”
He gave the clue to achieving this, saying: “More broadly, the rise of electronic transactions offers the perfect opportunity for archivists and records managers to reassess our approaches in promoting our concerns and expertise to strategic legislative and policy levels of government. We need to consider realistic responses that still retain the main focus of our message to address serious records issues, but at least have some hope of success.
“We can do this by marketing our expertise and promoting the acceptance and uptake of recordkeeping systems at the senior levels of government but with the understanding that standards and practices we advocate are about implementation issues.”
Fundamental re-evaluation
 Barbara Reed |
Sydney records management consultant Barbara Reed, a leading Monash University School of Information Management Studies lecturer, had strong words for the profession, too. She told delegates that as electronic service delivery became increasingly all-pervasive, the old, passive notion of information was changing.
The process began in the 1980s and 90s, she said, when, despite vilification and amazement from their peers, Australian recordkeepers “undertook a deeply introspective look at what records were as the digital revolution approached us”.
“This fundamental re-evaluation of the constitution and role of records has paid dividends over the last five years, as we have been able to define with clarity and certainty what records are and how they need to be protected.
“Australians have been prominent in the re-definition of records functionality and requirements. Our coherent theoretical basis has united many collaborative community projects resulting in strongly adopted standards on records management which are now being translated into the international standards environment.”
She had a warning, too. She counselled: “The world of managing electronic transactions as evidence of action is merely visible to us through a gap, which is currently open only a little way, but which is widening daily. We had better be ready for it. To be ready for it, we need to have some idea of where we might be going, even if the road maps need to be radically overhauled on a continuing basis. The ubiquity of electronic business is coming very fast. We’d better get used to it.”
No doubt about urgency
Delegates were left in no doubt as to the urgency of the subject. Australian public and private sectors are both plunging into e-commerce with world-leading enthusiasm and expertise, speakers said.
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The Federal Government wants to improve the way it does business and is committed to giving strong leadership through the adoption of new technologies, Gary Allan, General Manager of the Business Improvement Group in the Office of Government On-line (OGO), told the seminar. He detailed Canberra’s plans for e-marketplace trials, electronic payments, single point supplier registration and tender discoverability, marketing, communications and taxation.
“Governments around Australia have online procurement
on the agenda. Our strategy will be consistent
with the Framework
for National Cooperation on Electronic Commerce in Government Procurement,
which was agreed last year by the Australian Procurement and
Construction Ministerial Council, a body with representatives from all our
government jurisdictions.”
He said that the Australian Government is
committed to online procurement and wishes to become a leading-edge user,
commenting: “We will not re-invent wheels, and will capitalise on existing
initiatives under way in business, in other governments and within the Federal
Government. However, we will innovate
where necessary, for instance by establishing new electronic trading
communities. Implementation has begun. “
Australia’s big Internet
use
The e-Commerce Adviser to the Australian Trade Commission (Austrade), Helen Monro, told delegates
that Australia ranks third in the world, after the U.S. and Finland, in per
capita use of the Internet, “and is recognised as being at the leading edge of
e-commerce”. She came up with some
pretty remarkable statistics about growth in Australian e-business.
 Helen Monro |
Ms Monro said the race for e-business raised big questions for information managers. She classified these as:
“How do we establish trust in online business transactions? Which national or international rules apply to transnational trade? Where is the point of sale? What legal coverage applies? Which taxation regimes and intellectual property rules? Where does the business record need to be maintained, by whom and according to which criteria? How to provide the necessary level of offline client support in Australia and overseas, services like e-payment records, policies for returns and servicing, complaints, compliance with regulations on labelling, and content.”
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The legal pressures
A solicitor
with the national law firm Dunhill Madden
Butler, Brendan Ding,
highlighted e-commerce legal implications for recordkeepers. He detailed the measured processes of
legislation that, in Australia, was slowly bringing home to both the public and
private sectors their responsibilities for accountability, access and security,
privacy and openness, and evidential integrity of information.
He said: “The
law and the legislature which controls it are now coming to terms with the
opportunities and risks associated with the information age. Despite the long lead time, the government
seems finally to be getting close to dealing with the major issues of the
electronic age.”
He picked
up the changes faced by recordkeepers, saying: “ The ability of
organisations to capture, collect, sort, store, retrieve and reuse ever
increasing amounts of information and data is one of the most important changes
which is occurring in the modern world. The emergence of the Internet and the
increasing amount of information that is available online is multiplying exponentially
the challenges for modern record keeping and information managers.”
Two
technologists, Nigel
Carruthers-Taylor, senior business analyst at Solutions6 – Implementation
Services, and the company’s principal consultant Roger Hogg, set out some of the
enabling technologies offering a “great opportunity if records managers would
grasp the concepts”.
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 Nigel Carruthers-Taylor |
“Must get involved”
And another technologist turned salesman, Tower Software’s new Marketing Manager Geoff Moore, gave good advice. He
told delegates:
“The development of
e-commerce systems requires that adequate records management functions are
included in the delivered system. This can be achieved by adding RM
functionality to e-commerce applications with custom built controls or by
integrating the e-commerce with existing records systems.”
And he had his own warning for recordkeepers. “If records staff is not involved in the development and implementation of e-business applications, including email, then there is the potential that the systems will be implemented without records management discipline. In some places, they already have been.
“Records staff needs to make management aware of the records management requirements of e-commerce. The records medium is changing but the need to manage records remains.”
 Delegates engrossed in e-Commerce papers at the conference |
Which is pretty much in a nutshell what the
seminar was all about.
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 Michael Steemson |
For more information, email to:
Michael Steemson,
The Caldeson Consultancy.