The joint Australian and New Zealand IT-021 mirror committee on Records and Document Management Systems recommendation to both Standards Australia and Standards New Zealand, the national standards bodies of the respective countries, to adopt PDF/A-4 was recently completed on 23 December 2022.
2022 has been a wake-up call for Australian organisations and the government alike when it comes to data protection. From Optus to Medibank and now Telstra, we’ve seen the frightening impact the leaking of personal data can have on individuals and organisations, and the very real implications to the economy and our safety more broadly.
ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. Within two months of its release it reached 100 million active users, making it the fastest-growing consumer application ever launched. Users are attracted to the tool’s advanced capabilities – and concerned by its potential to cause disruption in various sectors. A much less discussed implication is the privacy risks ChatGPT poses to each and every one of us. Google has unveiled its own conversational AI called Bard, and others will surely follow. Technology companies working on AI have well and truly entered an arms race. The problem is it’s fuelled by our personal data.
Right now, for technological, ethical and political reasons, the world’s archivists are suddenly very busy. Advances in digital imaging and communications are feeding an already intense interest in provenance, authorship and material culture. Two recent discoveries – a woman’s name scratched in the margins of an 8th-century manuscript, and John Milton’s annotations in a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio held in the Free Library of Philadelphia – are examples of how new tools are revealing new evidence, and how distant scholars are making fascinating connections.
According to ISACA’s Privacy in Practice 2023 research report, a web of complex and ever-evolving data privacy regulations - including strengthening of Australia’s online privacy legislation - is having an impact, with less than half of respondents in Australia and New Zealand finding it easy to understand their organisation’s privacy obligations.
I lean toward the hype being overblown. Pundits are all agog with ChatGPT, language generation tool built using GPT-3. There are examples galore making the social network rounds demonstrating how ChatGPT has rustled up what looks like a sensible response to a question. It seems that the simple questions that stump Alexa every day could be passé, since ChatGPT can handle them all.
The Australian Digital Health Agency (the Agency) is strengthening My Health Record protections through a new mandatory conformance profile for clinical information systems (including those used in GP clinics, pharmacies and allied health services) connected to the My Health Record system.
According to a new report from the Capgemini Research Institute, ‘Connecting the Dots: Data sharing in the public sector’, a vast majority (80%) of public sector organisations surveyed across the world have started implementing collaborative data ecosystems initiatives, thus recognising the need for a joined-up, data-driven approach to tackle the complex challenges they are facing.
Airservices Australia has issued a Request for Information (RFI) from potential suppliers for the transformation of records management practice. The agency says it is “on a transformation journey to modernise our enterprise technology and uplift existing process, which include the modernisation of its enterprise record keeping capability.”
ABBYY’s latest release of Timeline Process Intelligence adds new capabilities to make process mining more accessible, easier to use, and understand business operations.
