Improving Government Records Management

By Renee Oricchio

Among the many hats the CIO or IT manager wears, scribe is probably not one that comes to mind. And yet, especially in the government sector, there is an increasing need to work with archivists to preserve government records.

It goes without saying that most information today is being generated in a digital format, rather than on paper. However, a recent study by the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) describes electronic records management among federal, state, and local government agencies as the "weakest link" in regulations compliance when it comes to controlling information.

Hooked on paper
Part of the problem may be because government agencies have such a long, successful history of working with paper.

In fact, the AIIM study, Compliance: It's Real, It's Relevant and It's More Than Just Records, found more than 80% of survey respondents reported that paper records such as invoices, contracts, and correspondence were at least "somewhat under control."  By comparison, only 25% of all electronic records generated by portable devices such as cell phones and digital assistants were "at least somewhat under control." Records generated on agency Web sites faired better (60% "at least somewhat under control"), but were still significantly lower than paper records.

Barry Murphy, senior analyst from Forrester Research, says the average government agency has long-standing success with centralizing paper-based information and that it's a hard habit to break when it comes to information created in a digital format.

"Typically in government, someone generates a document electronically, prints it off to paper, and then forwards it to a centralized record-keeping department," Murphy says. "The people there, in turn, scan it back into a digital format saving it as a PDF or TIFF file." 

If that sounds inefficient, expensive, and time consuming, that's because it is. But it's also an invitation to lose or misinterpret key data along that long circuitous route from a staff member's hard drive to the agency's main server.

"Government agencies can't even figure out if they are obligated to keep a paper version of all records," adds Murphy. "There's an old bias that a paper record is more lasting." 

But is it? Murphy recalls one state agency in Houston that lost more than 20,000 paper records warehoused in the path of Hurricane Rita last year.

Lack of incentive
Every federal agency is required by law to manage records of the organization's functions, policies, procedures, and decisions. Most state and many local agencies also have such requirements. But compliance with records management laws isn't as stringent in the public sector as it is in the private sector.

"There is little incentive for compliance in general within government," says Scott Leonard, an electronic records specialist from the Kansas Historical Society, "because of the lack of penalties related to poor records management."

In the post-Enron world, the private sector is subject to massive fines and even jail time for serious cases of non-compliance. Government agencies, by comparison, are more likely to face charges of a "Class B" misdemeanor and a $1,000 fine.

"In terms of electronic records, I think there has been a tendency to relegate 'ownership' of the records to the IT department, with the assumption that the records will remain in the system forever, or exist on backup tapes," Leonard says. "Backup tapes are not retention policy."

So what would make the best retention policy when it comes to electronic records? Here are some ways to get started, one bite at a time.

• Define records In the AIMM survey, only 2% of the respondents strongly agreed that everyone in their organization understands the difference between an "e-record" and "e-information."  Along with defining what information needs to be kept as a record, there needs to be consensus on how long to save it and how to archive it for accessibility in the future.
• Round up the right players Critical to success, says Murphy, is "getting the right people at the table. That means getting IT, legal, and the records management team on the same page." In government, there's no incentive to collaborate and move fast, but it's absolutely necessary in the evolution from the paper world to the digital world.
• Get everyone on board Government agencies must move away from the old culture of funneling records to one centralized location, especially without the involvement of staff.  Each staff member must take the responsibility of understanding what information must be archived as a record and how it should be flagged for future retrieval.
• Plan for technological obsolescence Make sure that as systems are designed, record-keeping requirements are built in from the beginning, rather than waiting until the end of the information life cycle, when it is too late, Leonard advises. Electronics record management is a young discipline, and no digital format has so far been accepted as a solution for long-term archiving. PDF-A, TIFF, and even XML come closest to being the standard within government agencies. But there is actually a growing number of IT professionals and records managers pushing to save records in their native file (along with the programming code to decipher them one day). That may seem like a Tower of Babel in the making when you imagine our great-great grandchildren reconstructing a Microsoft Excel 98 document someday. But it may be the only way to save all the metadata within a document that would otherwise be lost in the translation to, say, XML.

Perhaps the most important work to be done in saving electronic records should be done in raising the awareness of government employees that "this information is a vital resource...that belongs to the citizens," Leonard says.

Renee Oricchio is a freelance writer in Norwalk, Conn. For the past 20 years, she has been writing and producing news segments about technology and business for CNN, MSNBC, Ziff-Davis, CNet and a variety of Silicon Valley-based local news outlets.