E-records management on the rise

When should an e-mail sent to or from a government official be considered an official record?The answer can be tricky, according to J. Timothy Sprehe, president of the consulting firm Sprehe Information Management Associates Inc., Arlington, Va. With agencies such as the Energy Department sending and receiving as many as 1 million electronic dispatches a day, according to Sprehe, determining the right ones to keep is a growing concern."There's no question many e-mails contain record material. The question is how to separate the wheat from the chaff," he said. For instance, an e-mail about a luncheon date may not be considered a record, and hence should not be kept, but a one-word reply, such as "yes," from a high-ranking agency official would qualify. It varies from case to case, Sprehe said. With this volume of electronic documents flowing through agency systems, record retention is quickly becoming a duty for all agency employees. But according to a new report on government record-keeping practices issued by the National Archives and Records Administration ? a report Sprehe helped complete ? most agency employees are unsure of which e-documents to keep or how to store them. "Agencies are grappling with the idea that they now have electronic records rather than electronic documents that need to be printed out to become records," said Jon Barrett, electronic records program manager for the federal sales group of electronic records management systems provider Hummingbird Ltd., Tallahassee, Fla.The dramatic rise in e-mail use, along with the Oct. 23, 2003, deadline to comply with the Government Paperwork Reduction Act, has spurred increasing interest in electronics records management among agency heads, according to industry officials."Electronic record management systems seem to be getting a lot more attention in the agencies," said Hal Boylan, vice president of civil government systems for SRA International Inc., Fairfax, Va., which did the study with NARA.IT consulting company Input Inc., Chantilly, Va., estimates the federal document management market, which includes electronic records management, may grow to nearly $2 billion annually by 2006, up from slightly more than $1 billion annually in 2001. Kevin Plexico, vice president of public-sector services for Input, said the records management portion of the overall market could account for 50 percent of that spending. Agencies implementing electronic records management systems include the departments of Interior and Treasury and the Environmental Protection Agency, Sprehe said. The Navy-Marine Corps Intranet project, led by Electronic Data Systems Corp., Plano, Texas, includes an electronic records management component supplied by Tower Software Corp., Reston, Va. These days, 80 percent to 90 percent of federal records are "born electric," Sprehe said. That percentage will only increase as the 2003 deadline for meeting the paperwork elimination act grows closer. The law directs agencies to conduct business electronically whenever possible and keep records of those transactions."We have regulations out there. Some agencies find that they are fully sufficient for them to go on their way," said Mike Miller, director of NARA's modern records programs. Miller said gray areas do exist in NARA's record keeping guidelines, just as gray areas exist in policies for keeping paper records.Procedures for records in all mediums have long been in place, as directed by federal laws that say the information an agency generates in the course of conducting business must be saved for evidence of accountability, liability and, in certain cases, historical interest. Miller also said NARA has guidelines for saving e-mails and is drafting guidelines for Web sites as well.Moreover, additional policies have been developed by the Defense Department's Joint Interoperability Test Command, along with the Defense Information Systems Agency, which certifies products that comply with the department's standards for records management software. Even many civilian agencies will require that the software comply with these standards, said Kendell Rea, marketing director of Tower Software. Using these guidelines, it is the agency's duty to determine what records to keep. "Agencies have to establish guidelines for their own organizations for what is or is not a record," said Sally Plows, product specialist, for Open Text Corp., Nepean, Ontario.However, the NARA study, released Dec. 10, found that "government employees do not know how to solve the problem of electronic records, whether the electronic information they create constitutes records and, if so, what to do with the records."For instance, Miller said some agencies will strive to delete as much e-mail as possible, trashing all but the most vital correspondence after 30 days. Other agencies will save every single e-mail regardless of content, which Miller said may lead to retrieval difficulties later because of the large size of the archives. Sprehe said such indiscriminate keeping of e-mails may lead to legal headaches during a lawsuit. The report also stated that today, most agencies lack the technology tools for managing records, and that "employees lack guidance and knowledge concerning how to identify electronic records and what to do with them once identified.""Virtually every agency visited indicated that the official policy is that their records will be maintained in a paper format," the report said. According to Barrett, part of the difficulty has been that "traditionally, the records people who managed physical records had nothing to do with electronic data management system personnel." And so e-mail, financial records and other electronic-only documents escaped the notice of those in charge of paper archival. Barrett said he had found, based on his interactions with agencies, teams in charge of records are starting to work more closely with those in charge of documents to address the issue.Ultimately, electronics records management will become an integrator issue as management systems will be more tightly woven into business processes, SRA's Boylan said. "The government doesn't create records for the sake of creating records. They all start as the beginning of a process," Boylan said. "What we do is work with agency to look at the business processes that create the information that create the record and ... think about records management way up front."SRA has been doing consulting work for agencies such as EPA. The company will help an agency define its requirements, evaluate the commercial offerings of management software and then initiate pilot programs. Boylan said records management will eventually be integrated into an entire system design, in much the same way security is today. "Security is a requirement for every information system we build, regardless of the kind of system, and ultimately records management will be viewed in the same way," he said.Hummingbird's Barrett foresees a time when electronic records management will become a network function. Today's systems, such as Hummingbird's, have automated features, though many files are captured manually either by the end user or the records manager. A solution may involve clicking a button on a word processing or e-mail client. The document is then locked from further modifications, and the user is queried as to where in the organization's file the document should be placed. Barrett said such systems may run transparently. He said that Hummingbird partner STG Inc., Fairfax, Va., is developing software that scans e-mail and determines by keywords whether an e-mail qualified as a document. If so, it is captured. "Using this approach, you actually see records management as more of a background network service," Barrett said.