Launching SATOMGI at the Archives
On the morning of Wednesday, 20 June, the ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science helped to launch a major new ANU educational initiative in managing government information. More than 50 senior public servants and business people involved in records management and personnel development gathered at the event which was jointly hosted by the National Archives of Australia.
The program, known as SATOMGI (short for a Systems Approach to the Management of Government Information) is a cross-campus initiative involving the ANU Centre for Science and Engineering of Materials (CSEM), the Crawford School of Economics and Government, the Department of Computer Science and the ANU College of Business and Economics. The National Archives are a major partner in at least three of the courses on offer.
| Pictured (L-R) Mr Ross Gibbs, Dr Zbigniew Stachurski and Professor Robin Stanton |
Mr Ross Gibbs, Director General of the National Archives of Australia, welcomed the launch of the program saying there had been a need for this type of course for some time and he is delighted to see that ANU is showing an active lead in this area. He thanked the Vice-Chancellor for his enthusiastic support of the program.
Mr Gibbs noted that a soon-to-be-released high level government report that reviewed record keeping concluded that all Commonwealth agencies needed better record keeping protocols and approaches, and that there are many deficiencies in current practises.
He observed that the National Archive is keenly aware of failures in document keeping processes and pointed out that the most common failure is the over-reliance by people of personal information storage systems, combined with people not participating in department-wide efforts to secure information.
As the lead academic in putting SATOMGI together, Dr Zbigniew Stachurski, Director of CSEM, also spoke at the launch pointing out that information management must be viewed as a systems challenge, an area in which engineers are well experienced.
SATOMGI is expected to be running in the next six months.
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