government

The team that tapes POTUS’s papers back together for legal preservation

A group of records management analysts in the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House has the most unusual assignment – taping together documents that President Donald Trump rips up as part of his unofficial “filing system.”

Armed with rolls of clear Scotch tape, Solomon Lartey and his team sift through large piles of shredded paper and put them back together, Lartey told Politico, “like a jigsaw puzzle.”

Sometimes the papers would be split down the middle, but other times they would be torn into pieces so small they looked like confetti, according to the Daily Mail.

from Emily Goodin U.S. Political Reporter for DailyMail

 

IT Theft in businesses

Media headlines are meant to attract attention and this recent one certainly caught mine.

“All firms are vulnerable to IT theft”

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The business impact of the recent earthquake and aftershocks

Some interesting snippets coming out of the aftermath of the recent earthquake and aftershocks.

Forsyth Barr were caught out in Christchurch in 2011 when they couldn’t get back into their building to access paper documents that were not in electronic form.  As a Forsyth Barr director said” you have to assume you will never get back in.” Forsyth Barr arranged for computers and a place for their staff to work but couldn’t replace the original documents stuck in their condemned building in Christchurch. They did however put a plan in place that worked for them this time when their Lower Hutt office was closed after the 14 November earthquake.

Some legal firms in Christchurch only had paper copies of wills and lost them in 2011. How embarrassing!

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New Information and Records Standard for New Zealand

The new Information and Records Standard from Archives New Zealand sets the scene for lifting records and filing out of the pre-digital age of paper files and filing clerks and into 21st century thinking about what constitutes information and how we think about it.

It gives us the opportunity to consider how the information held in records and archives fits with the other information held or used by your organisation.

Why?

The new standard includes ‘information’ in its title. 

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GOVIS 25 years on

In June 2016 GOVIS celebrated its 25th anniversary.  GOVIS started in 1991 when a few Information Systems Managers from small government agencies got together after a seminar one day and found each was looking for a way to communicate with other managers in similar situations.  None of us had any peers in our organisations and so we lacked the ability to discuss our ideas and issues about IT in our agencies with colleagues who understood what we were talking about.

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