Thanks to e-government, agencies have more to keep track of. Electronic records management helps decide what to archive—and what to toss
As the business of government, like that of the rest of the world, is increasingly done digitally, the task of managing official records becomes increasingly important. It isn’t just the volume of information that’s changing; oversight required to manage electronic records is also increasing.
“Government records officers have a huge challenge,” said L. Reynolds Cahoon, CIO for the National Archives and Records Administration. “As more federal records are created electronically, they need to work with analysts and business process designers to build records management right into the business process[es] as they’re being designed.”
Agencies at all levels face similar problems. Financial accountability regulations, Privacy Act requirements, and even requirements for accessibility to government services under Section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act are making not just retention but also creation of records an important architectural consideration. It’s one that needs to be taken into account in an agency’s enterprise architecture.
No extra help
And records officers have to adapt to this new world without much hope of more hands coming to their aid. “We don’t see these organizations ramping up and hiring more people to handle records management,” said Frank McGovern, a product marketing specialist at FileNet Corp. of Costa Mesa, Calif., and a retired Air Force records officer. “You’re starting to see repositories with over a billion objects. How do you manage that?”
NARA remains a leader in establishing best practices in government records management. It is the managing partner of the Electronic Records Management e-Government initiative. As part of the initiative, the Environmental Protection Agency is working on a process for evaluating commercial, off-the-shelf solutions.
The software industry has moved away from standalone tools for records capture and is now creating records management platforms that integrate into the fabric of enterprise systems. “Vendors are componentizing their records management systems so they can be more deeply embedded,” Cahoon said.
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