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E-Government: March
1-2, 2000 For
the Record (And Its Manager) This paradox derives largely from the nature of the beast itself, experts have noted. There are simply far more records than there is automation available. And there is certainly no budget that has ever approached the breadth of the requirement--even though you can bet whatever the shortfall is that the federal Paperwork Reduction Act will be re-authorized later this year. Add to these factors an environment that has been ruled by contradictory court decisions and the muddled policies that naturally follow; slow-to-emerge and sometimes conflicting technology standards; and the cash drain Y2K remediation created; and, well, you might wonder-- Is federal ERM an unsolvable problem? Not necessarily. A special two-day Technology Excellence in Government (TEG) seminar focusing on "E Government," took up these and other issues related to federal ERM in early March. The seminar looked not so much at the foggy atmospherics that have shrouded the topic but, rather, at real-world solutions to the automation and policy tasks agencies face as they continue converting cumbersome paper records management to better electronic systems. Making
the "Hand-Off" On the matter of requirements, the conference took a comprehensive view of how ERM requirements might be organized and articulated. Richard Medina and Carol Chosky, senior analysts at Doculabs Inc., traced the evolution of ERM from its origins in electronic document management (EDM) systems. Medina noted that ERM demands today have expanded as the process itself has gone from a standalone function to an enterprise computing function to "a fully web-enabled e-business function." Chosky said that while many organizations are struggling to determine how they can capture all email traffic in records systems, others are already classifying voice mail as well as email in more advanced ERM systems. Of course, at the low end of the records management spectrum there is no shortage of agency operations that still rely ultimately on paper records with limited electronic support. Chosky noted that documents or interactions begin to migrate into full status as official records when they are "declared" to be such. The critical point where automation enters the picture is at those junctures where such records are "handed off." To be effective, IT requirements must be carved from how this process of hand-offs really works, Medina said. In fact, document management does not provide a happy legacy for records management interests to draw on. According to a 1997 finding, more than half of all document management implementations to that point were failures, Medina said.
IT With "Push" Systems now available were described as being rich in a broad range of functionality that includes automatic and "intuitive" record classifying, full integration with document management, compliance with the prevailing National Archives-supported Defense Department standard (5015.2-STD), application programmer interfaces for customization, vendor-supplied training support, and Web-ready systems. One vendor even offers ERM to agencies through a new Internet portal that might be seen as an interim step to the eventual out-sourcing of the ERM function. Higher levels of security are now being factored into ERM systems to better ready them for the vulnerabilities of the Internet, another industry spokesman said. As a neutral third-party company that consults to both industry and agencies, Doculabs recommends that agencies implement ERM in conjunction with integrators and integration projects. Medina said ERM requires "sophisticated information technology that can push the capability out to users." He also noted that system management must be factored at multiple junctures that can range from legacy mainframes all the way out to browsers and the Net. The demise of many document management systems of the past was attributed finally to what Medina called "prototype paralysis," the inability to scale the model of an automated solution to the realities of the task. If ERM is to succeed it will have to be built on IT that is fine-tuned to the intricacies of the records management business process. The TEG seminar, "E-Government: Integrating Electronic Records Management into Enterprise Information Management," was presented by The Council for Excellence in Government, the Digital Government Institute, and Government Computer News. It was sponsored by iRIMS (formerly PSSoftware Solutions) and Tower Software. |
