The Rick Barry Workshops

      in association with
          The Caldeson Consultancy
      sponsored by the
          National Archives of New Zealand
     

    Managing the Transition to the Electronic Workplace while there’s Still Time
     

     

      The first New Zealand Rick Barry workshops were held at the luxury Quay West Hotel, Auckland, and the National Archives of New Zealand conference facility in the Wellington City centre, in March 1999. Delegates from private and public sector attended, some Government agencies and industrial concerns sending several staff to the high-pressure day-long events, which included a breakout session over a working lunch. Groups discussed and reported back on the question "Where, if anywhere, are our organisational business processes vulnerable for lack of email policy?"  
       

        The transition from the industrial age to the information and service age has been every bit as revolutionary a period as was the one from the agricultural to the industrial age, and the next few years before this transition is complete will be no less traumatic, U.S. information management consultant Richard E. ("Rick") Barry said in the introduction to his workshop series Managing the Transition to the Electronic Workplace while there’s Still Time.
       
      Desperate problems and legal risks have beset recordkeepers, IT, auditing and legal managers in other parts of the developed world as the information tsunami sweeps over them, everlastingly re-energised and swelled by faster and fatter records and communications technology.  These problems threaten New Zealand executives and other professionals -- the information manager, the technologist and the administrator. 

      The Rick Barry Workshops were presented for the first time in New Zealand. Throughout them, Convenor Rick Barry provided answers, techniques, advice and forecasts to help keep those professionals dynamic and dry when the information tidal waves sweep in. The workshops were sponsored by the National Archives of New Zealand (renamed Archives New Zealand in 2000) in association with The Caldeson Consultancy and Profile Records Management Services, Auckland.  They are supported by the professional societies, the Archives and Records Association of New Zealand (ARANZ), the Association of Records Managers and Administrators (ARMA) in New Zealand and the New Zealand Association for Information Management (NZAIM).

       
       

      The Desperate Need
     
      Ten years ago, the World Wide Web did not exist.  Today, there are an estimated one billion home pages on the Web ¹  and the number is rising sharply.   One U.S. forecaster says that Internet usage will quadruple by the year 2005 ².  Another estimates that by the dawn of the new millennium, 327 million people around the world will have Internet access, Rick Barry told delegates ³.

      When the Web went on-line, it was primarily for information exchange and advertising services.  But now, most of the medium- and large-sized organisations in the U.S. have in place, are implementing or actively considering establishing an "intranet" and/or "extranets" using Web technology to manage their own internal business processes and their business with strategic partners, outside suppliers and client organisations.

      A handful of years ago, multimedia personal computers were only for the industrial-strength user.  Today, virtually all new desktop and notebook systems are multimedia equipped.
       
       

        All these tools are now being used to produce rapidly increasing volumes
        of electronic records and evidence, whether they are regarded as records
        or not, outstripping many information technologists' and managers' capacity
        to manage information or executives effectively to use it.
       

      These tools can be harnessed effectively to carry out core organisational business processes and identify informational value as knowledge assets and record value as evidence of business processes, he said. But they still have to be managed in ways that will facilitate the proper preservation and future use of recorded information for purposes of
       
       

            • Operational continuity,
            • Business strategy,
            • Accountability,
            • Evidence and
            • Corporate memory.

       
      The Workshops Agenda

      This workshops provided an interdisciplinary forum for senior professionals, making use of multimedia presentations by Rick Barry and discussions on the following subjects:

      Recordkeepers on Trial

        • Mock Trial
        • Where is your Recordkeeping System vulnerable?
        • How will you be Subject to Attack in a Court Room?
        • Are you ready?
       

      Linking Information Assets to Core Business Processes

        • Identifying business aims of the organisation
        • Defining core and supporting business processes
        • Business Process Re-engineering
        • Building a business model of the organisation
        • Archives & Records Management implications and potential
       

      Emerging Technologies

        • The Net: Changing distinctions
        • Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
        • ‘Thin-client’ technology
        • Natural Language Processing developments
        • Computational Linguistics developments
       

      E-mail Policy: "What we've Got here is a Failure to Communicate"

        • Horror Stories
        • Purpose and Content of Policy
        • Print-to-Paper Strategy
        • Netiquette Guidelines
        • Examples from Real Life

      Y2K &: ERM: the Risks and Opportunities

        • The implications for Recordkeeping
        • Recordmaking vs Recordkeeping Systems
        • Getting Recordkeeping on the CEO’s Y2K Agenda
        • Reciords Management Solutions for Technological Problems

      Using Web Technologies for enterprise Knowledge Management

        • How organisational and work-pattern changes impact on the use of information, especially during a shift to knowledge management
        • How Web-based technologies are being used to enable these changes
        • Real life examples
        • Innovative archives and records management approaches
       

      "The Archivist was violating the law"

        • Why Judge Friedman found the Archivist of the U.S. in violation of the law?
        • Why is this important in countries other than the U.S.?
        • What did the Archivist’s Electronic Work Group recommend?
        • What lessons can be learned?
       
       

      The Convenor

      Richard E. ("Rick") Barry,
      rickbarry@aol.com

      Rick Barry is an internationally-known management consultant who has presented workshops in the United States and in several countries in Europe and Africa. Many of his publications and papers to leading academic and professional organisations on information management, electronic  records management (ERM) and related e-mail, Web and change management subjects can be seen on the website of his Washington, D.C., company, Barry Associates, at http://www.mybestdocs.com/.

      Once an information science and technology manager with the U.S. Navy  and executive secretary of a co-ordinating subcommittee on Federal Government information technology research and development under the President’s Science Advisor’s Committee on Scientific and Technological Information (COSATI), Rick subsequently held senior IT posts in the private sector and at the World Bank, including that of Chief of Office Systems. As the Bank's Chief of Information Services, he led the integration of the archives and records management functions in information services. He was involved in the integration of information and facility management strategies, including workplace-of-the-future projects and the Bank's first use of computer modelling for internal planning purposes.

      He lead the international, inter-disciplinary United Nations project that, in 1990, published the ground-breaking work, Managing Electronic Records: Issues and Guidelines, and he directed the making of the video documentary Electronic Records in the New Millennium for University College London.

      His business clients have included the United Nations, the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC), the United Kingdom's Keeper of Public Records and Public Record Office, the National Archives of Australia, the New York State Archives and Records Administration, World Bank, International Finance Corporation, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development (Paris), Tower Software, Inc. (Canberra) and the  Pittsburgh University (Electronic Records Functional Requirements Project).

      Consulting projects have included information strategy assessments, electronic document management system (EDMS) requirement analysis, e-mail usage and policy studies, the development of a metadata directory for data bases and preparation of planning documents for the implementation of distributed and centralised digital archives systems.  Among his most recent work is the assessment of  the U.S. Department of Justice’s criminal justice technology centres, including the National Institute of Justice’s WWW site, and the Electronic Records Work Group project established by the Archivist of the United States to develop new approaches for managing Federal Government electronic records.

      He has been a leading speaker at professional conferences of archivists and records managers in several countries. His professional memberships include the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Society for Information Management International, Association for Image and Information Management, and Society of American Archivists.  He serves on the Board of the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR).  Prior to the New Zealand workshops, he will be a speaker at the March Records Management Association of Australia conference on Intranets: Problems or Opportunities for Recordkeeping in Canberra and the IIR EDMS conference in Sydney.  Shortly after the New Zealand workshops, he spoke at an ARMA conference in Houston, Texas.  Rick and his wife, Linda Cox, live in Arlington, Virginia.
       
       


        Footnotes:

        1.  The U.S. International Facility Management Association.

        2.  Independent IT analyst group, Ovum.

        3. The Computer Industry Almanac.

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      The Rick Barry Workshops were managed in New Zealand  by:

                Michael Steemson
                Principal


        For further information, contact Michael Steemson at steemson@caldeson.com



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