IT Systems Analyst Gary Agira

If Gary Agira’s story were a movie, the story would include the Ugandan IT Systems Analyst navigating government bureaucracy, stubborn workers, and perhaps most dramatically, a national registry and warehouse overflowing with 34 million government documents—to bring them all into the digital world. It’d be a charmingly idiosyncratic story, but still a universal one: document management as a metaphor for progress, with Agira’s unwavering belief in the power of technology as he moves a nation and a workforce into the digital age.

But this isn’t a movie, and the real Gary Agira is the IT Systems Analyst for Uganda’s Privatization & Utility Sector Reform Project (PUSRP). The PUSRP is the department of the Ministry of Finance and Planning charged with the epic task of overhauling the way the African nation archives, stores and perhaps most profoundly of all, actually works with records to support the divestiture and reform of 42 public enterprises. It’s all part of an initiative to move Uganda’s economy forward.
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When it comes to supporting the aircraft that help soldiers protect citizens, no detail is too small to record. That’s why the US Army’s Cargo Helicopters Project Management Office (CHPMO) maintains exhaustive records on every design feature, maintenance procedure and safety analysis performed worldwide on the CH-47 “Chinook” helicopter. With 400 staff members generating new records every day, and with thousands of records series to follow, managing all these records is no easy task. Full story »

For 18 months, Haidar Attia has been hard at work setting up a new IT infrastructure. He has purchased 500 new PCs, nine new servers, new network hardware and a private switch for his data network. He has bought a physical security system, installed voice over IP and deployed a new e-mail system. Now he’s rolling out new business applications. The work is ordinary, but because Attia is the IT director for the Iraq Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Baghdad, there is much at stake.
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There are reasons some fishermen in the United States value their commercial fishing permits more dearly than their boats.

Boats can be replaced. Lose your permit, and you lose fishing rights that can date back generations. Full story »

More than 200 staff members at the sprawling Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center near Bloomington, IN, are using Laserfiche to store acquisition, payroll, transportation and property records. Full story »

The long term goal is nothing less than the elimination of paper at the prestigious Centers for Epidemiology and Animal Health, a Fort Collins, CO-based unit of the US Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) division. The immediate target is a pilot project to publish 30,000 reports, articles, analyses and related mathematical models on international agricultural trade to a password-protected intranet site, using Laserfiche WebLink. Full story »

Founded in 1945, the mission of Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM, is “to enhance the security, prosperity, and well-being of the nation.” Since 1996, that mission has included close cooperation with the Russian National Institutes in Moscow regarding safety-related information on plane crashes and nuclear studies. Full story »

The GOP has been around for a long time. There’s a lot of history and tradition there, which brings with it a number of historical documents, confidential letters and public records. In short, a lot of paper!
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The Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC), an independent agency of the Federal government, primarily sets postal rates but also deals with customer inquiries and complaints. The government looks to the commission on matters of postal fees, mail classifications and other postal issues. The PRC is constantly holding hearings and investigating complaints, which means a lot of people need access to information in its possession.
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It didn’t happen all that frequently, but once or twice a year, engineers at the Stinger Product Office in Huntsville, Alabama, home of the Army’s Stinger anti-aircraft missile, would go to the files looking for an old test report-and it wouldn’t be there. The reason:

“Engineers change jobs, and get new assignments, just as everyone else does,” David C. Kennedy, P.E., an electronics engineer there, said recently. “When an engineer leaves, nobody knows what was kept in his personal files. Office file space is limited, both for classified and non-classified material. Decisions have to be made, on what to keep and what to discard.
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