A well-structured records management program is essential for compliance, efficiency, and risk mitigation, but there are clear signs that indicate when outside assistance may be helpful or even necessary. If your organization struggles with growing backlogs of unorganized records, frequent compliance violations, or difficulty responding...
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming records management across government agencies, offering the promise of automation, efficiency, and improved compliance. As one technology leader told CIO Magazine, “There is not much that isn’t being impacted or at least assessed to see how AI can be adopted....
We’ve written previously about the many ways U.S. government agencies are pilot testing or outright starting to use AI in records management. However, for records managers still trying to understand or build the business case for adopting AI-powered tools, it might be helpful to do...
Records management in government is a pivotal function. Without properly maintained records, government agencies would be unable to function, much less successfully execute their mandates. Unfortunately, records management is also an incredibly challenging and increasingly complex task, especially as the sheer volumes of government records,...
The digitization of government records isn’t always as simple as slapping a piece of paper onto a scanner. Many records require special handling because the nature or condition of the record makes them particularly delicate or fragile. This can range from century-old records inscribed on...
Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into records management can vastly improve efficiencies, streamline workflows, and ensure better compliance. However, the complexity and unevenness of AI implementations can be daunting, especially in a field where data security, regulatory compliance, and precision are paramount; and investments in AI...
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has long been the custodian of the nation's most precious historical documents and records. In recent years, NARA has been at the forefront of a significant shift as federal agencies across the country have raced to meet...
Administering IT assets and technology investments is a critical yet resource-intensive process. Here, we’re talking about the administrative side of IT—planning, deploying, maintaining, and eventually decommissioning IT assets—rather than the day-to-day use of the technology. This administrative aspect is essential for ensuring that IT infrastructure...
The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a critical benchmark for technology vendors providing services to U.S. government agencies. It provides a standardized approach to security for the cloud products and services used by federal agencies, involving rigorous assessments by third-party assessment organizations...
Government agencies around the world are leveraging AI technologies to enhance their operations, improve the efficiency of public services, and better manage data and records. We wrote last year about some of the ways government agencies are harnessing AI in records management, where we discussed...
The final deadline for federal agencies to begin submitting all temporary and permanent in electronic format has come and gone. The date set by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)—June 30, 2024—is now well in...
In our first article in this series, we looked at a serious challenge facing government agencies: falling success rates in producing records in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Between 2010 and 2022, these requests went from successfully yielding records about half the...
Open government is a doctrine which holds that citizens have the right to access the documents and proceedings of the government to allow for effective public oversight. In its ideal form, open government promotes transparency, accountability, and public participation. Transparency, in particular, is crucial as...
In the complex and always-changing landscape of federal records management, the need for comprehensive training has never been more acute. Despite a common perception among managers that they are well-versed in the fundamentals of records management, a disconnect remains between confidence and competence. A revealing...
As government bodies increasingly digitize their records under the direction of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), it’s imperative to make electronic records both accessible and user-friendly. Accessibility in the context of federal electronic records refers...
In the digital era, federal agencies are increasingly turning to cloud solutions for records management. This shift represents a significant departure from traditional, on-premises data storage, but it shouldn’t be surprising. “Cloud storage … can improve access to and sharing of records and data, increase...
In the complex world of government records management, the ability to track who has accessed and what has happened to individual records is invaluable. An audit trail—a step-by-step record that chronicles the life cycle of a document or record, capturing every interaction and modification made...
Disaster-proofing your records management program is critical to ensuring business continuity and records retention in the face of catastrophes and emergencies. Yet government agencies are typically unprepared in this area, with only ad hoc and piecemeal strategies that make the process of protecting records against disasters...
Sometimes, organizations are their own worst enemies when it comes to records management. We may want to blame overly complicated regulations (“it’s not our fault”) or underperforming employees (“it’s the workforce, not the organization!”), but sometimes the problems with records management actually do occur at...
Most people tend to think about records management as a boring, tedious task. Not so! When records management goes wrong and important records turn up missing, headline-worthy scandals can ensue. As USA Today reports, “Biden and Trump documents expose wider problem: Missing classified records not...
What Is Era 2.0? The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) had initiated efforts to modernize and upgrade its Electronic Records Archives (ERA) system to ERA 2.0. NARA uses ERA to preserve and manage U.S. Federal electronic records. In fact, since 2008, it has handled over...
Ethical records management serves as the backbone of a reliable and, ultimately, trustable information system. By contrast, loss of trust can disrupt the flow of reliable and accurate information within an organization, compromise decision-making processes, and lead to legal implications and penalties. In the case of...
Government agencies are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to update records management processes. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), for example, has indicated interest in using AI systems to auto-fill metadata and to respond to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. “The National...
Federal records managers must understand a huge range of laws governing records management in the federal government to ensure compliance, accountability, and the preservation of vital information. Understanding the complex legal framework prevents potential violations, protects sensitive data, and facilitates smooth responses to public inquiries...
Electronic records management comes with a key challenge that analog records rarely face: what’s the best format for the record for long-term storage? When it comes to something like paper documents, the question doesn’t even really make sense: you just store what you’ve got. With digital...
As the number of federal records continues to increase, and agencies are required to create and maintain electronic versions of a larger portion of these documents, it’s important to choose “sustainable formats.” In other words, what happens to a record slated for long-term storage if...
A good records management program is worthless if no one uses it as intended. Worse, there’s more at stake to non-compliance than just running into inefficiencies and increased errors. Non-compliance can also run afoul of legal mandates that govern how certain records and certain kinds...
Managing government records is a complicated task. Records managers at governmental agencies must design and execute a complicated array of processes to ensure creation, use, storage, and disposition of records follow all applicable laws and regulations. Now, agencies must also shift into electronic records management...
Over the years, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has provided the federal government with a wide range of records management services. One of their most important and helpful services is running, in cooperation with other federal agencies, a collection of massive Federal...
All the way back in 2019, OMB/NARA memorandum M-19-21 set an aggressive objective to ensure that virtually all Federal records would be created, retained, and managed in electronic formats with appropriate metadata by December 31, 2022. However, no one could have predicted the Covid-19 pandemic...
One upside to electronic records management is the potential to reduce labor and increase accuracy. In fact, one of the core objectives of any organization engaging in a digitization project is reducing administrative burden while enhancing record quality. To that end, electronic records management opens...
The Section 508 amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 mandates that federal agencies make their technology accessible to people with disabilities. It’s part of a longstanding commitment of the United States government to reducing discrimination against people with disabilities. As more agencies shift to...
What is the relationship between records management and compliance with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests? In short, it’s complicated. Obviously, good records management is critical to meeting formal FOIA requests. It’s how staff can even find the information that’s being requested. Unfortunately, according to research...
Every record has a job to do, and errors compromise their ability to fulfill their purpose. For example, some records provide mission-critical information. In these cases, inaccuracies and errors will reduce their ability to meet objectives and mandates. In other cases, record-keeping is about increasing...
Once upon a time, organizations had to host and manage all their physical computing equipment themselves to run necessary software applications and store data. That has completely changed: today, almost every organization in the world uses “the cloud,” a network of interconnected servers located in...
Protecting Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Protected Health Information (PHI) is no small task for organizations and their records management teams. Government agencies in particular deal with PII and PHI all the time, because they often include mission-critical information. This kind of data could be potentially...
With NARA placing more emphasis than ever on electronic records management – and already beginning to eye the next set of target goals – many agencies are looking to make sure their existing or proposed Electronic Records Management (ERM) platforms can meet the needs and...
Records management is challenging even with just the normal types of documents and records most organizations generate. Add in records that contain information that must be protected – because they contain protected personal information, trade or state secrets, or other confidential content – and the...
Federal agencies have been ambitiously pursuing a digital agenda for several years now, working hard to meet federal mandates and modernize their records management to make greater use of digital technology. Along the way, they have faced numerous challenges. One of those has simply been people....
Ultimately, the goal of any records management workflow is to ensure your organization can facilitate its work, produce desired business outcomes, and reduce costs and risks as much as possible. The ultimate disposition and destruction of unneeded documents is a crucial part of that process. Indeed,...
What does the future hold in store for records management? Right now, merely converting to digital records at all is pushing many organizations to the limit of their capacities. But technology never stops moving, and all sorts of interesting innovations are offering the potential to...
Eighty percent of businesses want to reduce paper from their normal workflows and business processes, according to research from Xerox. It’s no wonder: paper is becoming harder than ever for organizations to wrangle. Research and consulting firm Gartner reports that the annual growth rate of the...
One of the biggest obstacles to making a successful transition into electronic records management has nothing to do with digitization technology itself. It’s people. Whether you’re fighting to get staff to start handling records in a new way or struggling with insufficient staff population or...
FADGI – or the Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative – has some important implications for federal records management. Representing an effort by a group of federal agencies to simplify and standardize records management guidelines, FADGI establishes baseline quality measures that records managers can use when...
Many digitization projects suffer from a common point of confusion: that electronic-format records management, data management, and information governance are essentially the same thing, and any system or tool that solves one will solve all. This is not true. These three aspects of managing information...
Before converting to an Electronic Records Management (ERM) system, one government office administering a federal lending program had accumulated over 3,000 standard record center boxes of files on site. There were so many, they had to stuff the files into actual offices. But if you...
The digitization of records management is a huge undertaking even for records management specialists; it can be even more challenging for end-users. How the organization fits a digital solution into the users’ daily workflows can make or break how well the switch to an electronic...
Resistance to change is a powerful human habit that can severely inhibit the adoption of new technologies and processes. In fact, federal agencies are running headlong into this challenge in their scramble to meet the 2022 deadline for submitting records in electronic format to the...
It's not too late for government agencies to still meet the electronic records management deadline set by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), even if they’re a little behind schedule … with a little help. Specifically, federal agencies have until the end of this...
The security of government records and data has never been more important or more threatened than right now. Cybersecurity attacks at the end of 2020 – when a foreign government used compromised cybersecurity software to target multiple federal agencies and private organizations – highlight the...
Under federal law, federal agencies must “notify [the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)] of any actual, impending, or threatened unlawful removal, defacing, alteration, corruption, deletion, erasure, or other destruction of records in the custody of the agency (see 36 CFR Part 1230 for...
Is electronic records management worth the effort? Advocates argue that digital records make electronics records management faster and most cost-efficient while facilitating increased productivity. But are those claims smoke-and-mirrors, or are they grounded in evidence and fact? Let’s look at some hard numbers. Read the full...
Electronic records management can undeniably generate huge benefits for organizations. They make it easier to find records, improve productivity by as much as 30%, and yield cost savings by managing information “as an asset, rather than a liability,” as we have previously described here. But technology...
The reports are in! Records management officials at federal agencies throughout the U.S. government have submitted their annual Senior Agency Official for Records Management (SAORM) reports to the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Though NARA is still processing and assessing these reports, they already...
Is electronic records management truly more cost-effective than its analog alternatives? That’s an argument we’ve made before, and it’s one that’s substantial enough that it’s worth unpacking further. A white paper from the Federal Records Management Council (FRMC) on the cost benefits of digitization details...
The ongoing digitization effort throughout the U.S. government poses many challenges for government agencies and the organizations that work with them. The Department of Labor (DOL), in its 2020 Senior Agency Official for Records Management report, puts it perfectly. In response to a question about...
“There never are enough resources,” says one federal records management specialist of the drive to convert to electronic records management. Federal agencies are under the gun: they are facing an ambitious (and unfunded) mandate to make an almost complete transition to electronic records management by...
Failures related to records management can be very serious. When records are not managed properly, agencies and other organizations can fall out of compliance with federal or state laws, make themselves vulnerable to legal action or some form of oversight like an audit, and may...
Social media presents unique issues for federal records managers trying to figure out how to collect, manage, and preserve these digitally complex records. As far back as 2011, the government has been assessing how to best handle social media records. A 2011 study conducted by the...
Cyberattacks targeting the U.S. government are growing in frequency, sophistication, and severity. In 2020, for example, a massive attack successfully breached nine agencies and hundreds of private companies that work with governments around the world. So, it makes sense that government personnel would take steps to...
When it comes to records creation, management, and oversight, many work-related technology platforms are a double-edged sword. These platforms – which can be anything from productivity suites to communication technologies – typically offer features that make it easy for users to modify, customize, and create...
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has set an incredibly ambitious deadline for the federal government’s digitization effort: all records must be submitted in digital format by the end of 2022. And unfortunately, this mandate did not provide for a dedicated budget or...
Records schedules are a key element of any governmental records management system. Essentially formalized instructions for the disposition of records, they guide agencies in how to handle records and how long to keep different kinds of records. Be aware that records schedules can create complications for...
Records destruction is an integral part of any records management process. Not every record will be destroyed – many will be archived indefinitely – but others have a natural lifecycle that ends with the destruction of that record after it becomes obsolete. In fact, retaining some...
The 2022 deadline set by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration for government agencies to submit all records in electronic format continues to inch ever closer. Already challenged by the ambitious deadline, many agencies are feeling the time crunch. The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly not...
We’ve previously discussed how good records management fosters transparency. Today, we want to take a deep dive into one of the positive effects of transparency: trust-building. As with transparency, good records management will cultivate trust because users and stakeholders can have confidence in the authenticity,...
In records management, transparency is often overlooked as a success factor, yet it is a critical and necessary ingredient in any effective records management program. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) itself stresses the importance of transparency. Laurence Brewer, the NARA’s Chief Records Officer,...
With the M-19-21 memorandum issued in June 2019, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) put federal agencies on notice: by 2022, they must be managing all permanent records in electronic format, with metadata, and they must be managing all temporary records in electronic...
Effective records management is a challenging task. Records managers often have to balance a complex array of logistical, budgeting, operational, and legal requirements. Ideally, electronic records management (ERM) systems should help. They can automate many tasks, speed up the records management process, and increase overall...
When faced with legal or regulatory action, government agencies and other organizations may find themselves fielding information requests in preparation for an audit or litigation. This process is called discovery. It’s when the parties involved in a legal or regulatory matter try to find and...
No one likes audits, but they’re a fact of life for government agencies and private organizations alike. Whether the audit is being conducted internally or by a regulatory body, they consume time, effort, and budget. Worse, if the organization cannot produce the required information, auditors...
Unprecedented numbers of federal workers have found themselves working from home since the COVID-19 pandemic struck the United States. Further, even as government staff begin returning to their offices, many may continue to telework, according to the RAND Corporation, a think tank and government advisory...
Business continuity and disaster planning is critical for every organization that wants to remain open and operating in the aftermath of an emergency situation. We can’t necessarily know what emergencies will befall us, and the disaster may not take the form we expect. After all,...
With so many government workers teleworking due to the COVID-19 pandemic, records-related security concerns are especially pressing right now. Beyond the admittedly helpful ability to access electronic records remotely, is it still safe and secure to do so? The answer to that question depends largely...
Records administration is a complex and challenging task for any organization, and that’s without worrying about unauthorized or inappropriate users interfering with records. In fact, users with unnecessary access rights create more than just security and privacy risks, they can complicate or even damage the...
Procurement has never been easier for government agencies looking for help with records management. The Government Services Administration (GSA) has already done all the hard work in formulating its GSA Schedules – also known as Multiple Award Schedules (MAS). These schedules are “long-term governmentwide contracts with...
Since 2014, over 440 breaches of government data in the U.S. have exposed nearly 169 million records, according to a study from technology research website Comparitech. That figure doesn’t even touch on data breaches that remain undiscovered, nor on other security issues that can impact government...
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration’s (NARA) recently updated guidelines for federal records management include a provision ending the use of agency-run storage facilities for analog records. Specifically, Section 1.3 of OMB/NARA M-19-21 mandates that federal agencies must close any agency-operated Records Storage Facilities...
With the new recently issued guidance from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) dictating that ALL records – including both permanent and temporary – be managed in electronic format by the end of 2022, does the concept of Unified Records Management (URM) still...
At the beginning of the year, we laid out a step-by-step roadmap for what Federal agencies need to do to comply with the deadline set by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) for managing all permanent electronic records electronically by December 31, 2019. With...
In our Fifteen years ago today, Steve Wilstein first shed light on the Steroid Era - Sports Illustrated winstrol pct sensex, nifty fall as pharma stocks underperform: check top gainers and losers guide to evaluating electronic records management (ERM) systems we mentioned that “all records...
Records management is not easy and if done poorly or haphazardly can consume an enormous amount of time, human capital, and budget. Records schedules help. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) defines a records schedule as “mandatory instructions for the disposition of the records.”...
To date, federal agencies are required to submit only email permanent records exclusively in electronic format to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). However, by the end of this year, agencies should be managing all permanent records in electronic format – and that includes...
As the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) pushes federal agencies ever closer to managing all permanent records in electronic format, another dimension of record-keeping is taking on newfound importance: metadata. Agencies that want to comply with NARA’s requirements for managing and submitting all permanent...
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) will no longer accept analog records from federal agencies after December 31, 2022. Indeed, NARA is doing its best to go all-in on electronic records retention. It’s strategic plan for 2018-2022 includes digitizing “billions of pages of records...
According to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), "Temporary records are those records that NARA approves for either immediate disposal or for disposal after a specified time or event." Temporary records are no easier to manage than permanent records, and in some ways, they may...
The foundational law underlying federal recordkeeping, the Federal Records Act (Title 44 of the U.S. Code) was enacted in 1950 to “govern the collection, retention, preservation, and possibly destruction of federal agency records.” The FRA has been amended multiple times, most recently in 2014 and...
With the urgency imposed by NARA on federal agencies to store and manage permanent electronic records in a native electronic format this year, many agencies may find themselves tempted to assess potential solutions according to what’s easiest (cheapest, fastest, least work) rather than what’s best....
March 13, 2019 – Duluth, GA – Peniel Solutions, LLC (PSL), a leading provider of records digitization services, is pleased to announce that it has been granted approval as a Schedule 36 General Services Administration (GSA) vendor to provide services under contract 47QSMA19D08PC through 2024....
Federal agencies are facing pressing document management mandates from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Specifically, NARA has been tasked with guiding federal agencies toward meeting the Managing Government Records Directive, using existing technology where feasible. That means they must be managing all permanent...
In 2013, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) provided "Guidance on a New Approach to Managing Email Records" known as the Capstone approach. NARA intended the Capstone approach to provide a systematic and simplified way for federal agencies to manage email records, and many agencies...
At last, we have hit the year that federal agencies are expected to fully complete their transition to managing records electronically. Per the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) itself: “By December 31, 2019, all permanent electronic records in Federal agencies will be managed electronically...