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Records Management: Government Beginning to Follow Its Own GuideLines
It seems a little bit ironic that the government can create requirements around records management, while government agencies have lagged behind the corporate world in coming up with strategies around records management.
Last week at the AIIM International Exposition and Conference in Boston, representatives from the Interior Department, the IRS, and the Nuclear Regulatory Agency discussed RM initiatives that they are undertaking in their agencies.
At the Interior Department, the philosophy is to focus not only on the mechanics of RM’s file plans and schedules. There is also a major effort to examine and improve the process and the culture around RM. To do that they’ve adopted concepts from the Software Engineering Institute’s Capability Maturity Model (CMM). All employees of the department are required to have some level of RM training, and the training will happen within the first 60 days after joining the department.
The IRS admitted that they are still behind the curve on RM with “no well-coordinated approach”. They’ve made progress over the last four years, transforming an organization with 630 separate and unlinked systems. The agency has acquired 60,000 licenses of enterprise Document/Records managment software that include workflow and case management capabilities. Emails and attachments are now being archived and are able to support e-Discovery. The agency has also integrated RM capabilities into their form publication and financial systems.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission also started to gear up their records managment program about five years ago. They also started with a commercial document and records management system. The initial system served as a prototype to demonstrate the value of such a a sytem to the organizations upper management. More than anything, getting a system in place allowed the engineering team to set the right expectations around what the technology could achieve.
