Obama Hopes to Change Federal Recordkeeping
December 4, 2011
ComputerWorld’s Lucas Mearian reports that “Obama wants feds to digitize all records.” All of them? We are fascinated with universals and categorical affirmatives. What about those one time pads which are much loved by certain intelligence units? Ah, they’re excluded.
Clearance issues aside, the barriers to digitizing all federal records are substantial. To begin with, that’s a lot of content. Then there’s the history of the agency which is to put this plan into action—the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). This agency has a had trouble creating electronic records on time and on budget, and the archive it has created faces criticism for being only key-word, not text, searchable.
We hope that fixing the NARA’s procedures is on the agenda, but the Administration wants to start by streamlining and updating recordkeeping across government agencies. We learned from the write up:
Obama noted that the current federal records management system is based on an outdated approach involving paper and filing cabinets, and needs to be modernized. Today’s action will move the process into the digital age so the American public can have access to clear and accurate information about the decisions and actions of the federal government,’ Obama said in a statement.
Sounds easy, right? Each agency is to work with the NARA to evaluate and improve their records management programs. Dare we hope for standardized best practices across the federal government? We’ll see; adaptation to change has never been a forte of large bureaucracies. Is NARA delivering the findability solution Federal procurement professionals expected? We don’t know. We do know that search vendors often find themselves in the hot seat and sometimes the hot seat is an electric chair, not a Southwest Airlines’ passenger seat formerly occupied by a 350 pound consultant.
Cynthia Murrell, December 4, 2011
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