Page 43 - FCW, January/February 2021
P. 43

chief data officers, the official added. “So we’re in the middle of working with them through their IT process- es. But I’m comfortable with where we are.”
“Comfortable” with the progress to date was the general consensus of the group, though no one predicted 100% compliance by the M-19-21 deadline. “We are not going to be totally elec- tronic by the end of 2022,” one par- ticipant said, “but we will be well on our way.”
Making the most of existing
building blocks
Most agencies were trying to purge paper from their operations long before M-19-21 mandated it, so impor- tant tools are already in place in many cases. In particular, the government’s widespread adoption of Microsoft Office 365 — and rapid rollout of Teams when COVID-19 hit — has opened up new opportunities to weave ERM into day-to-day operations more seamlessly. But participants pointed to complications that must be addressed.
Office 365 offers “a significant amount of flexibility in terms of adjust- ing to the various sizes and missions of the department,” one official said, but “there is no one-size-fits-all records management application that would satisfy all those needs.”
Another pointed out that an agen- cy’s ERM capacity with a given tool depends on its specific licensing agree- ment, and many of the technologies developed for private-sector IT envi- ronments “had to be brought up to snuff to be deployed.”
In addition, the rush to enable more
virtual collaboration has added new obstacles to ERM. “We had a nice roll- out planned for Teams, and records management was being built into that whole process,” one official said. “All of a sudden, that got thrown out the window as Teams was just immedi- ately pushed out to everybody when they went home in March.”
Another official echoed those com- ments, saying: “Our Teams rollout was rapid and not well-planned. It sort of filled the gap, but it was stated at the outset that this is not a platform of record, and everybody in the agency who uses this platform has to drag any- thing of value that they want to main- tain as a record into their own system.”
The first official predicted that fast rollouts will be the norm. “Records management is going to be in there as part of that rollout, but we’re going to have to find the gaps and fill them in as we’re going along down the path of deploying these things.”
Compliance as a byproduct
The group warned that a big risk of playing catch-up rather than integrat- ing from the outset is having ERM feel
like a poorly designed imposition on day-to-day users. Too often, one official said, IT shops “seem not to care about the user experience.”
Records management leaders must fill that gap, another agreed, saying: “IT is really good at providing the tools and the technologies to our staff, but they’re not really good at telling them how to use it. So we have set ourselves up as the help desk in the organiza- tion — not related to any technologies we can’t solve but related to our inter- est that meshes with our colleagues’ interest, which is, ‘Can you find your information?’”
Additionally, several participants said framing the effort around ERM compliance was a fast track to trench warfare with an agency’s middle man- agement. Compliance “doesn’t get a lot of space on senior leaders’ plates in our agency,” one official said. “You’ll be dealing only with lower-level people.”
“We’re trying to get leadership to see that their problem will be solved by an information and data manage- ment solution,” another said. “And oh, by the way, we’ll get compliance as a byproduct.”
January/February 2021 FCW.COM 41


































































































   41   42   43   44   45