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There are headcount challenges, that executive added, but what agencies really need are records officers who can “understand the technology and be able to dig through it, as opposed to just giving it retention rules.”
“We are understaffed,” another participant agreed, but “more importantly, we don’t even understand the scope of technology that’s out there. There are so many things that are combined now with different kinds of formats together, and we can’t figure out how to actually save all that so that
it could be wrapped up in a work file or in some other method. So we’re challenged every day by the stuff that comes in the door.”
Yet the most important gap, the first executive said, may be in “the respect that the job requires” and giving records management a voice in the development of business processes and systems.
A third official suggested
that many records management teams have painted themselves into that corner. “We’ve used the same tired formulas of how to bring records management into the limelight of finding a champion — somebody who’s going to champion our cause, at least until they get promoted or move on,” that participant said. “And we’ve built a big structure of what \[U.S. Chief Records Officer\] Laurence Brewer called a very shallow structure of support, where we depend on custodians and liaisons that it isn’t part of their job, but we’re constantly training them. And so we build up a bureaucracy, a shadow group of people that this isn’t their main business. And all of our records management resources
go toward training, supporting, monthly meetings, follow-up.” When his agency’s champion retired, the official said, “we lost all our money.”
The agency has since switched to more of a consultancy role, the official said. “Give us a call and we’ll figure it out case by case. And so we’re actually solving problems and building up that grassroots support for ongoing resources and identifying opportunities where we can insert ourselves at the records management level to help them
associated with it on the front end.” Yet with this year’s telework surge prompted by COVID-19, Microsoft saw its Teams collaboration suite go “from 31 million users to 44 million users to 75 million users in six weeks. There’s going to be a hell of a governance mess downstream.”
“Inevitably, as we shift to the cloud and particularly as applications shift to the cloud, the pace of change accelerates,” another executive said. “And I think that carries with it some risk of obsolescence and challenges in
terms of third-party solutions that plug into cloud solutions because they’re not iterating at the same pace as the platform is. I don’t have an answer to that other than it’s something that worries me in terms of how that ultimately fits together.”
Even when a given application is nearly ubi- quitous, there are comp- lications. The group discussed the pros and cons of relying on Office 365’s built-in records management capabilities, for
example. Several were skeptical that they were sufficient for their agencies’ requirements, and one noted that not all those capabilities were authorized under FedRAMP when first deployed.
Others, however, pointed to the broader ecosystem of tools that are available to do real records management within Office 365. “There are other players and partners that do exist out there to fill some of those gaps,” one said.
Ultimately, another official noted, “it’s a community of systems that support a business process. I think, as a community, we’re still struggling with how to catch up with the rapidity and ever-changing landscape more than we had been before. And we don’t have the luxury of time.”
Dedicated funding
for electronic records management has
been difficult for most agencies to secure, although multiple participants said OMB is working to address that in the next budget cycle.
with policy definition and fixing information pain.”
Too many tools?
Complicating that resource challenge in terms of staff and money is the rapidly growing suite of communication tools agencies use. Too often, participants said, the adoption and deployment of those tools is happening before Federal Records Act requirements are accounted for.
One official pointed to the SharePoint experience as a cautionary tale: “People spent millions and millions and millions of dollars cleaning up SharePoint over the course of a decade because they hadn’t thought of governance issues
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