Workshops reinforce online message

Workshops reinforce online message

The Government Online 2000 forum will be complemented by six workshops, scheduled both before and after the conference.

The workshops will explore in greater depth some key issues of migrating agencies' services online. The two pre-conference workshops, held on April 17 at the Hyatt in Canberra, will focus on developing a strategy for integrating existing services into a new online environment.

The first workshop will provide a practical look at securing electronic delivery processes. Attendees will learn to devise strategies to maintain security in their online infrastructure, so that they may progress with e-commerce activities.

The second workshop will examine how to develop an overall plan for electronic service delivery. The discussion will canvas the issues involved in working out what an agency intends to gain by moving its services online. By breaking the issues into business problems, users may be able to discern their individual business imperatives to deliver services via the Web.

This theme also underpins one of the four post-conference workshops, all of which will be held on April 20 at the Canberra Hyatt. The first workshop aims to help users determine the changing expectations of customers, and how they can best meet this demand.

The second workshop will examine how agencies can measure the performance of an implementation, as a means of calculating a return on their investment.

Workshop three will focus on engineering structural change by developing enterprise knowledge portals to allow the organisation to better manage its information. This is an important step in preparing to integrate services for online delivery.

The fourth workshop will look at the human factor of an implementation - the staff that will have to manage the back end of new projects. Many staff may have to change the way they work with the introduction of electronic service delivery, and by managing internal culture an agency can help smooth this transition process and avoid resistance to new initiatives.

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