Records Management: Government Agencies Struggling

The Federal government budget for next year sets aside about $80 billion to fund 809 major IT initiatives across all federal departments and agencies.  That’s a lot of dollars.  Yet despite all those dollars flowing into IT, many agencies are still struggling with managing information and records.

David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States at NARA, the National Archives, has pointed to many practices at federal agencies that increase the likelihood that important historical records will not being properly saved for archival.  For example, a common practice across many agencies to to still print emails and then to manage the paper copies as records.  Ferriero noted that many of the agencies have “weak oversight and unclear guidance”.  Some also blame the limited access to IT staffers from the many different agencies and the complexity of email archiving have been part of the problem.

In the early days of email, the management of email records was included in standard processes for managing paper records.  Important emails would be printed and filed like any other paper record.  But as the volume of emails increased, the practice became more time consuming and unwieldy, and many agencies could not keep up.  There is a worry that many important emails may have been deleted and lost before there was a chance to properly capture and secure them for archival.  Some political watchdog groups have complained that large numbers of emails during the Bush administration were deleted before being able to have been archived.  It is only in the last year or two that agencies have been given the go ahead to change their email print-to-paper processes to ones that directly archive and manage the emails in electronic format.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimated that 79 percent of federal agencies are at a moderate or high risk of inadvertently destroying records that should be getting archived.  Representative Patrick McHenry, a Republican from North Carolina, commented that “We need to modernize so we have a 21st century bureaucracy, not a 19th century bureaucracy.”

David Wennergren, the Department of Defence deputy CIO, said that more than ever agencies need to be thinking of security and compliance with records management standards.  Think standards like 5015.2.