Page 42 - FCW, January/February 2021

FCWPerspectives
The long road to
electronic records
management
A deadline looms for switching to all-digital records, but the pandemic and other developments are presenting new challenges
Office of Management and Budget Memo M-19-21 requires all federal agencies to move to fully electronic records management by the end of 2022. Issued
in June 2019, M-19-21 also instructs the National Archives and Records Administration
to stop accepting paper records after Dec. 31 of next year — giving agencies added incentive to hit the deadline.
As agencies approach the midway point of this march toward truly digital records, FCW gathered a group of records management executives and other stakeholders to see how their efforts are progressing. The discussion was on the record but not for individual attribution (see Page 42 for the list of participants), and the quotes have been edited for length and clarity. Here’s what the group had to say.
Progress made and
problems outstanding
Every participant said her or his agen-
cy was making headway in convert-
ing to electronic records management
(ERM), though just how much varied widely. COVID-19 and the workforce dispersal it prompted have affected M-19-21 efforts, they said, but tradi- tional government challenges were having a much bigger impact.
“The biggest part of it is that there’s not really a dedicated budget to doing any of the records management pieces in the department,” one official said. “So we have to piggyback off of the programs.”
Fiscal 2022 will be the first year the budget implications are made clear to mission owners, another participant said, adding: “I suspect that’s going to play into the risk balancing act that we have to do. The worst-case scenario is that we preserve the things and try to deal with it next time.”
At one agency, a reorganization moved the records management team and forced a repeat of time-consuming discussions to get leadership on board. “We’ve become sort of the red-headed stepchild for compliance,” the affected official said. “Every time we move our office around it, it’s like we lose a year or two in progress.”
Several participants said the push for better metadata is the top priority in 2021. M-19-21 instructed agencies to have their records in electronic form “to the fullest extent possible” by the end of 2019, while the 2022 deadline is for managing “all permanent records in an electronic format and with appropri- ate metadata.”
“I’ve spent a lot of time in the last couple of months going through our holdings to sort out what needs to be digitized and where we need more metadata,” one official said. “That’s about the various fields of mission- specific meta tags as well as all the attributes that NARA is looking for.”
A particular challenge for another official is bringing records manage- ment to systems built around data- sets rather than documents. “What used to be collected in forms is now being put into databases and recon- figured for reporting, trending and approval and all that,” the official said. “We need to think even further upstream of not just what data is being captured in these systems, but who is designing these systems to solve prob- lems. And that pushes records manage- ment into that information governance of asking: Why are we designing this?”
That brings ERM into the realm usu- ally managed by CIOs, CTOs and now
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January/February 2021
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