US Federal Government & the Argument for Auto-Classification

There was an interesting confluence of events last week.

1. On Nov. 28, President Obama released a MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES that gives government agencies four months to come up with a plan to improve records management by moving to electronic records management systems "where feasible."
2. On Nov. 30, we announced the availability of OpenText Auto-Classification, the first Auto-Classification solution for Records Management with built-in transparency and defensibility.

We did not plan for these announcements to coincide, but it was definitely good timing. Beyond the obvious additional focus on Records Management the Obama memo has created, a significant argument could be made that the Federal Government will have to adopt Auto-Classification of content in order to be successful in its Records Management programs.In fact, there are at least three arguments:

Argument # 1 for Auto-Classification - We can’t afford not to

Argument # 2 for Auto-Classification - Legacy Content

Argument # 3 for Auto-Classification - The Cloud made me do it

Argument # 1 - We can’t afford not to

The memorandum says, "When records are well-managed, agencies can use them to assess the impact of programs, to reduce redundant efforts, to save money, and to share knowledge within and across their organizations. In these ways, proper records management is backbone of open Government."

So, with all of these obvious benefits, why is the memo needed at all?

Why aren’t federal agencies addressing Records Management on their own without prompting from the Whitehouse and NARA? The truth is, the US Federal government has been largely unsuccessful in managing electronic records, even though more than 90% of all records are now created electronically. In fact, about 95% of federal agencies fail to meet the statutory requirements for maintaining their records according to a NARA self-assessment survey.

Federal Government Agencies are finding out what many organizations struggling with litigation and compliance requirements have known for some time. Records Management is hard! Especially when the scope is expanded to include the plethora of content creating applications and document types that are being used today.

The survey notes a number of issues in the electronic records management programs in in many agencies and noted that these agencies:

• Do not ensure that e-mail records are preserved in a recordkeeping system;
• Do not monitor staff compliance with e-mail preservation policies on a regular basis;
• Have policies that instruct employees to print and file e-mail messages;
• Consider system backups a preservation strategy for electronic records, not distinguishing between saving and preserving electronic records;
• Consider compliance monitoring to be the responsibility of IT staff; and
• Are rarely or not at all involved with, or are excluded from altogether, the design, development, and implementation of new electronic systems.

In this list of issues, we see a number of indicators as to why Records Management is hard in US Federal Agencies. We see is that it is difficult to declare email as records, there are out-dated policies and no enforcement and a lack of archiving. It also indicates that Records Managers lack the ability to impact the selection of applications to ensure that they have Records Management, or Record Declaration capabilities. (BTW - Government Records Managers shouldn’t feel too bad as Forrester’s Brian Hill points out, this is pretty consistent with what is going on in private sector too.)

Many of these issues are a result of the difficulty in rolling Records Management out to the knowledge workers that are creating the records. These knowledge workers require:

1. Applications where records can be declared and/or captured
2. Training on how to classify records and the associated change management
3. Monitoring and enforcement

The reason why Auto-Classification will be critical to making Records Management affordable is that the costs associated to training, change management, monitoring and enforcement will be at least an order of magnitude larger than the cost of the technology.

Auto-Classification addresses many of these costs by taking the knowledge worker out of the equation. Auto-Classification evaluates electronic content as it is captured, and using analytics and rules, can associate an RM classification. Auto-Classification reduces the requirement for training and change management, and most importantly, adds consistency and the ability to monitor and enforce records classification that is just not possible when we depend on knowledge workers to classify content.

Auto-Classification also addresses the single biggest fear associated with Records Management programs, which is the fear of failure. Having end users declare records, especially with high-volume, ad-hoc content like email requires significant change management. This fear of failure is one of the main reasons why many Records Management programs never get off the ground. Records Managers can use OpenText Auto-Classification, in combination with our leading RM and information lifecycle applications, to develop a programmatic, transparent and defensible approach to classifying content that does not transfer the burden of records management to knowledge workers.

Later this week, I will address

Argument # 2 for Auto-Classification - Legacy Content

Argument # 3 for Auto-Classification - The Cloud made me do it