Breaking New Ground—Stories from Defence Construction Breaking_new_ground | Page 125

Administrative Officer Brigitte Trau has also seen her
share of changes in the 21 years that she has been
at DCC, moving through jobs such as junior secretary,
secretary and administrative assistant to her current
position. “There have been many learning opportunities
given to me by some of DCC’s best,” she says. “Having
worked in the President’s Office, Contracting and now
with the Operations Coordination team, I have worked
alongside many DCC trailblazers. My most memorable
DCC experience, however, was working in Afghanistan
with the Roto 7 team from May to November 2009.
DCC’s work in the field and our interaction with the
CF really opened my eyes.”
But it isn’t simply the scope and geography in which
DCC works that is changing. Even the ways in which
we communicate and store those communications are
changing, as Danielle Richer, Manager of Corporate
Administrative Services, explains:
were not complete, because documents were saved on
hard drives. In early 2000, I started a review of DCC’s
filing system and issued the first Records Management
Manual, also updating a Records Disposition Authority
with National Archives from the 1960s. Now, in 2011,
we continue to evolve, as we are going to an electronic
filing system.
In researching these stories, the theme of Defence
Construction Canada emerged again and again from
everyone involved with its early days—the warmth, the
concern for mentoring, and the emphasis on fairness,
integrity and dedication to the job at hand. While
technology and growth may have lessened the immediacy
of this atmosphere, it is one of the key management
approaches on which the organization was founded,
and deserves to be recognized.
In the 1980s, the Corporation’s files consisted mostly of
carbon copies of letters on onion paper and glossy faxes
that faded within a few years. The records management
office was large and contained all the Head Office
files… Then came the computers, electronic documents
and e-mails. At this point, we realized that paper files
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