Page 43 - FCW, August 2020

Participants
Brett Abrams
Electronic Records Archivist, National Archives and Records Administration
Claire Barrett
Chief Privacy and Information Asset Officer, Department ofTransportation
Lisa Haralampus
Director, Records Management Policy and Outreach, National Archives and Records Administration
Cynthia Hilsinger
Chief Knowledge Officer, Defense Health Agency
Glinda Hodgkin
HA and DHA Records Management Officer, Defense Health Agency
Edward Horton
Senior Advisor and Former Chief Administrative Officer, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
John Mancini
Former President, AIIM, and President, Content Results LLC
Jeanette Plante
Director, Office of Records Management Policy, Department of Justice
Dave Simmons
Senior Records Officer, General Services Administration
Scott Swidersky
Vice President of Enterprise Content Management, Konica Minolta Business Solutions USA Inc., and President, Quality Associates Inc.
Bob Valente
Project Manager, Office Management Category, General Services Administration
Note: FCW Editor-in-ChiefTroy
K. Schneider led the roundtable discussion.The June 30 gathering was underwritten by Quality Associates Inc., but the substance of the discussion and the recap on these pages are strictly editorial products. Neither QAI nor any of the roundtable participants had input beyond their June 30 comments.
toward two distinct M-19-21 deadlines: converting legacy records from paper to digital, and ensuring that current and future business processes produce digital records from the start.
“There are probably not enough resources in the world” to address each of those aspects individually, one participant said. “We have broadened our perspective” to establish governance, workflows and record schedules that can apply across the board.
“Although it seems like they’re disparate projects and at some level there are, it’s a big Venn diagram,” another official said. “There are a lot of things that you need to do for digitization that you also need to have
to evolve to new technologies. So I think it is a mistake not to look at where there are common efforts that will address both.”
“It’s not going to be everything,” that official cautioned, and scope creep continues to be a concern. “I think there’s some rightsizing around expectations that has to happen. Just because the technology is out there, Congress was never going to give us the budget to meet their expectations in terms of reproducibility of all the flotsam and jetsam that we’ve created. We have to start having that honest conversation. Otherwise, we’re doing both sides of the house a disservice.”
Making digital records part
of IT modernization
Technology is part of the equation, though, and participants predicted long-term success would depend on better integrating electronic records management into their agencies’ broader IT modernization strategies.
“It’s my dream to seek sources of funding from the Technology Modernization Fund,” one said, “because a lot of what we’ve been discussing is how we process information, which is by definition records management.” Modernization should involve more than upgrading the pipes, the official argued, and extend to “how we manage processes for creating and contextualizing and storing information from soup to nuts.”
That goal goes back to piggybacking on other initiatives and having a true seat at the table, another official said. “It’s not records management and budget per se. It is finding the business need and attaching yourself to that need and getting a slice of the pie. And I think that is happening in modernization efforts. You just have to know that the modernization effort is happening.” n
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