Regards
Jenny

The online induction module sounds like a great idea.

I think the Yahoo Group is probably your best chance of getting a response from anyone who has done something similar.
https://au.groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/lgrm/info

Sorry there isn't a bit more generic information on the Records Management page for you to incorporate into your induction process.

Regards,

Wayne.

Thanks for introducing yourself, and thanks for the positive feedback about the site.

I've created a lot of the site's content, so it there is a lot of asset management and engineering related information, because that's my background. I do all I can to encourage people with different areas of expertise to contribute their knowledge as well, but the site is probably a bit light on for records management info at this stage. I hope you get some value out of it all the same.

Regards,

Wayne.

Recent research by Australian's Rob Curnow and Karen Spehr (as quoted in their book 'Litter-ology' published in 2015) has highlighted the fact that people generally tend to litter more in public places that already look 'dirty'. Conversely, these same people are far less likely to discard their litter in places that are clean and well maintained. This 'clean equals clean' observation regarding littering habits is something that Brisbane City Council have obviously cottoned onto in their approach to reducing litter in their CBD areas.

Irresponsibly discarded chewing gum in public places is not seen as a major problem by the vast majority of Australian councils. Despite growing recognition of gum as a serious issue in overseas countries (such as Britain), gum does not feature in the Australian National Litter Index and consequently this unsightly and unhygienic blight on our national landscape is completely ignored by most local governments. As a result, many of our most important business precincts, public areas and tourism destinations have the type of 'dirty' appearance that attracts rather than discourages poor littering behaviour at significant cost to both our image and our communities.

Brisbane City was the first council in Australia to recognise this problem and its costs. However it also realised that conventional methods of gum removal are largely inadequate, costly, noisy and very wasteful in terms of water usage, etc. Consequently in 2007 the Council moved to commission the development of a completely new, purpose-built Gum Removal Vehicle. (The GRV is currently marketed by SAVi City Cleaning.) It also took action to incorporate chewing gum into its regular litter counts.

Since 2009, through the combined action of removing gum (using the high-tech Gum Removal Vehicle) to create cleaner public places and the inclusion of gum in litter counts, Brisbane City now boasts a reputation as one of the cleanest cities in the world.

It about time we all realised that unless we tackle the issue of discarded gum in our business precincts, walkways and other public places, littering will remain a major ongoing cost for us all.

http://singularityhub.com/2015/07/07/its-no-myth-robots-and-artificial-intelligence-will-erase-jobs-in-nearly-every-industry/

In 5 years the site has notched up over 750 members and 900,000 page views and as an added bonus it does very well in Google Search rankings, with many pages being the No.1 result for searches.

By many measures the site is doing much better than I imagined it might when I set it up, but one thing I don't think the site has managed to do so far is to convince the management of many Councils of the value of wikis as internal and external collaboration tools.

I passionately believe that Councils need to become more collaborative, and that the use of wikis is a very good way to both encourage collaboration and organise corporate knowledge.

I am going to make it my personal goal to trying and convince many more Councils of the value of wikis and collaboration over the next 5 years, and I hope what I have done with the site so far, is only the start of something much bigger.

My vision is pretty simple - I can sum it up in a couple of points:

1. I want to make all asset and asset related information available to everyone within our organisation via an encyclopedic interface.

2. I want to develop a culture where all where all asset management related knowledge is freely, openly and enthusiastically exchanged with other Councils in order to reduce duplication of effort within our Council and across the Local Government sector as a whole.

With regard to point (1) I'd like to add that I think that documents with rigid structures are very limiting - and the the way of the future is to store information in a modular way, and to aggregate it back up to suit a need or satisfy an external requirement. For example it should be possible to generate a live graph in HTML format with a unique URL showing the condition profile of your road network using your asset management system. This graph could be simulataneously embedded in your Asset Management Plan, your Road Management Plan, and on your Council Encyclopedia page about Road Condition.

A person interested in road condition would search the Council Encyclopedia, but at the same time the AMP and RMP would be automatically updated. (It may be necessary to create PDF snapshots of some documents for various purposes, but on the whole I believe live documents are much more useful.)

Anyway that's my vision. What's yours?

Thank you for that link. I have had a look at the presentation before and thus how I found your site. From what I have seen you have lots of experience implementing wikis and lots more.

Apart from the presentation do you have any documentation, business cases or live examples of a working BCS.

In your experience was the SharePoint wiki meeting your needs? Did it have the functionality that you wanted?

Carl

I have been involved with three different internal wikis, and summed up my experiences in the following presentation. Hope it helps a bit, and I am happy to have a chat to you about it if you are interested.

http://www.lgam.info/how-to-build-a-council-encyclopedia

I have just stumbled across this forum and think its a great idea that we share knowledge across councils.

I'm about to undertake a review of our BCS tool. We currently use a excel spreadsheet that has lots of lines with different business rules and becomes confusing for staff and our customers (internal).

I have done some research and am thinking one of the following:

- Thesaurus (121) - Buy some software like this and integrate it with a website

- Website - Using Robohelp or similar software - we currently use this in a few other departments however the software is quite old and as technology progresses I'm sure we will move on from it shortly.

- Wiki - This is where I can see the project going, however haven't had much experience with wikis. We have just launched SharePoint 2010 and was thinking we could build it in that platform.

Does anyone have an examples of internal or external wikis or BCS's they use/implemented?

If anyone could comment, assist or add some of their experiences, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks. Carl

I think one way of progressing all of the above is to split the AMS Spec into two parts.

Part 1 - a spec for an online database
Part 2 - a spec for developing AM functionality for the database

To my way of thinking the database should have the following properties:

• A web-based interface
• Ability to record a transaction for every change made to the database
• Ability to rollback the database to any point in time
• Ability to add new fields and tables to the database as required
• Ability for users to easily create and save queries and reports
• Ability to pass data to the system via a URL
• Ability to automatically assign a unique URL to any query or report generated
• Ability to generate embed code for every saved query and report
• Ability to assign varying permissions to individual database users

The database could be hosted on Council servers, but I think a cloud-based solution would have advantages, including the possibility of sharing the system and the associated development costs with other Councils

I need to flesh out this proposal a bit, but I thought I should write my initial thoughts dowm before I forget them.

Stages?

1. Write specification for online database
2. Call for and evaluate tenders
3. Populate database
4. Experiment with system - write own queries and trial
5. Embed the queries into a wiki or Council Encyclopedia
6. If necessary document what additional functionality is required, and find someone that can do the additional development.

Notes

One of the current othodoxies is that an Asset Management System should be integrated with other Council systems. I think a better way of thinking about this is that all software systems should be developed in a way that makes them easy to integrate with all other systems. I suspect that making a system web-based and capable of passing information via a URL might be a good way of managing this, but I would be interested to hear what IT people think about this.

I am starting off by creating a presentation explaining the benefits of building a Council Encyclopedia, and I am also going to do my best to write a Council Encyclopedia Business Case.

I am also pretty keen to try and find a few other people who think this is a good idea, and will help spread the word.

If you would like to help out please let me know.

I would be really interested to hear from anyone who has attended a similar workshop and come away with an "idea" or "tool" that they have found really useful, and have used it over and over since then.

If you have an idea or tool that you find really useful, what is it?

It is the linkages between pages and concepts that make the site powerful, and the fact that anyone can easily find the information they are looking for.

What do you all think?

Do you agree or disagree?