Surveys continue to show weaknesses in federal records management

AMS used Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for its corporate intranet and its business partner extranet, so it considered adding custom capabilities to that environment to enable records management. But in 2009, AMS found that SharePoint Server 2010 offered many of the records management capabilities it needed, including retention policies, legal holds and managed metadata for tagging records. With the SharePoint solution they developed, employees submit Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations directly from the program they are working in to a repository called the AMS Electronic Records Center. Employees can also submit PDF files as records. (E-mail is archived separately.)

Slow progress

Bailey liked the fact that employees could do the records retention work right out of their Office suite without having to do any new navigation. Yet the transition to the system has been a slow process, he says. A few records managers have left, requiring the new ones to get up to speed on the project.

"Even though we had a technologically viable solution, we had record categories built around a paper world and the categories didn't all necessarily fit," Bailey explains, "so we had to tweak those. That has been time-consuming."

He believes it is important for the CIO to work closely with the records manager. "Five years ago, the AMS records manager was not under the CIO's chain of command," he says, "but records management really involves technology issues so you've got to align those positions."

SharePoint and KnowledgeLake

The Department of Agriculture's Risk Management Agency's solution is also built around SharePoint. It manages the capture, maintenance, categorization and disposition of electronic records. Software from KnowledgeLake allows employees to attach metadata descriptions to documents of all types, including e-mail, and keeps the documents in their native format, says Erin Tecce, the agency records officer.

Tecce adds that it takes one to two minutes per document to do the metadata work. "And then it is easily searchable," she says. "When they fill out the five mandated fields, a person searching for that document no longer gets just a folders view, but more like a Google search results list."

Another advantage of the new system is that if employees are teleworking, their files are now available to them wherever they are working.

Some employees did not want to accept that they had to do the retention work, Matthews says, "so we just have to continue with training, and convince them that whether they file something in a cabinet or do it on a computer, it will take about the same amount of time."

Five NARA recommendations for executive action

Here is a partial list of recommendations from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to build the capacity of the government's records management function.

• NARA should require that each agency create a multiyear plan detailing how it will achieve compliance with records management policies and regulations, establish performance goals and benchmarks for evaluating success, and set specific resourcing commitments that they need to accomplish those objectives. The plans must be included with agencies' annual budget submissions to the Office of Management and Budget.
• NARA and agencies should explore, test and, if effective, deploy automated solutions to manage records and information throughout the federal government.
•  Under the direction of their records management officials, agencies should establish an agency records council that assists in the management of agency records.
• Agencies must continue working toward the goal of fully scheduling their electronic information systems.
•  Agencies must require staff with records management responsibilities to attend basic electronic records training on an annual basis.