Page 42 - FCW, August 2020

FCWPerspectives
42
August 2020 FCW.COM
A CDM model for records
management?
One participant suggested that the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation Program — where the Department of Homeland Security and the General Services Administration have established an approved product list, governmentwide reporting requirements and even centralized funding for cybersecurity tools — might be mimicked for electronic records management.
“While I’m not looking to have NARA sponsor the same way that DHS does,” the official said, the idea of “leveraging the CDM model of how we buy tools and integrate them and have an integrated suite of
tools is something that we are heavily invested in.”
Legacy archives vs. future data
Ultimately, the group agreed, fundamentals are more important than specific technologies.
“What I’ve seen in looking at my compatriots in other agencies is they spent incredible sums of money to deploy a technology,” one participant said. “And those solutions have not been nearly as effective as they have been sold as because some of the fundamentals hadn’t been done — like understanding your record schedule and the organizational and institutional changes around processes and capabilities that
really need to be in place to feed the right records. And those have not been put in place in advance of the technology, meaning that what you get is management saying, ‘Well, we spent $5 million on this thing and it wasn’t any good.’”
“My rule is no technology is going to last longer than three or five years,” another official said. “It’s going to change. And with that, you go into the realm of a higher level of policy and data structures and naming conventions automatically because you start to think: How am I going to take what we currently have and migrate it to the next tool, whatever it’s going to be?”
Additionally, agencies are sprinting