Awash in electronic data, US agencies turn to vendors for help with White House-ordered records management reform

http://ow.ly/7Xcke

An article by Robert Hilson posted on the aceds.org website.

This article discusses the recent mandate that Federal Agencies received requiring them to overhaul their records management systems.

The article states, "The Presidential Memorandum that President Obama issued on November 28 lays out rules, procedures and deadlines that the entire federal establishment must follow to overhaul their records management systems. The directive gives hundreds of vendors and consulting firms a hope of landing some of the many large government contracts that will flow from the end of the “paper and filing cabinet” era, as the president called it."

The article further goes on to discuss the fact that 480 agencies from 3 government branches are faced with the tasks of creating electronic archives for their records, "The Memorandum orders federal agencies to digitize paper records and improve management of emails, social media, and cloud-based information, and marks a government-wide effort to emphasize sound information governance amid a rapidly amassing store of data. E-discovery factors prominently, as the effort aims to “[support] agency compliance with applicable legal requirements related to the preservation of information relevant to litigation….”

The article provides some insight into the complexity of the tasks involved, "The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is largely responsible for implementing the president’s directive. It estimates that it has absorbed into the national records collection an average of 475 million pages of paper records annually in the last decade. This does not include electronic information, which NARA estimates has reached 142 terabytes, or the equivalent of roughly 35,500,000 four-minute MP3 files.

Faced with this huge undertaking, government agencies will likely use outside vendors. According to Paul Wester, NARA’s Chief Records Officer, in Washington, DC, most agencies already contract out various technology and business development tasks, and the practice will continue."

In addition, the article touches on eDiscovery aspects of this massive undertaking. The article states, "The Presidential Memorandum outlines processes such as converting paper documents to digital ones, but developing better information governance platforms is the goal of federal agencies, says Dean Gonsowski, Vice President of E-Discovery Services at Clearwell Systems, in San Diego. He says the government is moving away from a “data hoarding” mentality in favor of information governance strategies that will eliminate data that should have been purged by routine deletion practices long ago.

“If you’ve never started [deleting], you’re that much further behind,” Gonsowski says. “A lot of organizations just haven’t deleted a single document.”

The article goes on to discuss certain service providers that have already received government contracts.  In addition, the article mentions that de-duplication rates are extremely high in the data that the government agencies possess, often due to the policies to preserve all records.  Moreover, the article speculates that more service providers will be receiving contracts in the future to assist with the government's needs, although appropriations may create a challenge to pay for the needed services.