Despite hurricanes, ARMA members celebrate the profession.

Not one, but two, hurricanes fortunately failed to keep attendees away from New Orleans, the site of ARMA International's 2002 Annual Conference and Expo. Isadore and Lili may have dampened the city, but they couldn't dampen spirits at the international event. Despite a wet, windy beginning, more than 2,000 conference attendees and another 2,000 Expo-only attendees made it to the Big Easy to help celebrate the profession with ARMA.

Most attendees agreed that the quality of this year's education sessions was top-notch. In fact, many conference-goers said this year's educational content was the best ever. Preconference sessions, which comprised three tracks--RIM fundamentals, technology trends, and legal--were well received with more than 240 attendees. The full-conference educational sessions were equally popular, especially the timely cutting-edge sessions on topics such as Sarbanes-Oxley and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). In some instances, there was standing room only and attendees had to be turned away at the door.

The keynote presentations proved both educational and entertaining. Intellectual capital guru Nick Bontis talked about "Winning in a Knowledge Era." He said it is easy to distribute knowledge today, but most of that knowledge isn't valuable. According to Bontis, we need to learn to control various degrees of knowledge as well as meet the challenges of the not-so-distant future: by 2010, cumulative codified information will double every 11 hours, organizations waste billions each year due to knowledge duplication, and people/employees are treated as expenses when they should be treated as assets.

Privacy Council's Gary Clayton espoused the importance of information management in protecting privacy. In "Privacy: It Is Your Business," he...