Required to Keep a True Record of Public Servants' Work on Our Behalf
In my last post I floated the idea of the U.S. federal government
creating a new cabinet-level "Department of Information Governance"
headed by a Chief IG Officer who would report to the president. Key
considerations in my rationale included:
1) There are 15 cabinet-level departments in the Executive Branch which all rely heavily on information yet Information is not represented at the cabinet level;
2)
Information is so valuable today it has been called "the new oil" and
our government structure should recognize and reflect this fact;
3) Politicians and bureaucrats are destroying email records to hide corruption and ineptitude;
4)
The history of our nation is not properly being recorded and preserved
as indicated by a State Department Inspector General's finding that in
2011 more than 99.99% of email messages were destroyed and not
preserved. And it was worse in 2012.
Some have said that
cabinet-level Information Governance (IG) is simply not politically
viable and would never work. A pipe dream.
Certainly nothing will work if no changes are made.
There
are two near term presidential directives that federal agencies must
comply with regarding electronic records. The first is to manage and
preserve all email electronically by 2016; and the second is to manage
all federal records electronically by 2019. There are big strides that
many agencies are going to have to take. They are going to need some
"encouragement" or at least some help in getting there.
We have
had a seemingly endless string of email snafus in the federal
government, some which have costs lives, some which have cost money,
some which have cost reputations, and some which have cost
vulnerabilities in the security of the U.S.
All because of one thing: wiggle room.
There
must be no more wiggle room for politicians and bureaucrats. The law
must be changed to state that it is illegal to use personal email to
conduct the public's business, and there should be stiff penalties for
violation. If a government employee cannot get to their mobile device or
desktop to send an official email that is for government business, then
they should call a colleague and have them send the email. If they
cannot call a colleague and cannot get to a government-owned mobile
device then they perhaps have been kidnapped or incapacitated. In those
cases, there should be an exception to the "business email for business"
rule.
So the laws and regulations must be tightened to ensure records are captured and preserved.
And now for the big one.
A FEDERAL EMAIL ARCHIVE
A
copy of EVERY email sent to or from a .gov or .mil address should be
captured in real-time and archived in a central repository in a highly
secure environment.
This email archive should be owned and run by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
After all, shouldn't our National Archives have a national archive?
This
step will be a big one toward elevating NARA's role and giving NARA the
resources to properly house and preserve records, and to assist
agencies in meeting the 2016 and 2019 presidential directives. This step
will also significantly raise NARA's profile and power within the
federal government. They have been one of the "Rodney Dangerfield's" of
federal agencies for too long. Time for some respect. In my view, NARA
should be elevated to a cabinet-level agency.
The critical effect
of implementing a federal email archive will be to drastically improve
the accuracy of email records and to provide a more complete accounting
of the history of business done on the public's behalf. Hopefully, it
will also force more transparency into government.
Implementing a
national email archive will also help federal agencies to more easily
comply with the presidential directive to manage all email records
electronically by 2016. In fact, it might be the only way to get it
done. One fell swoop rather than by individual agencies in jagged
piecemeal steps which will result in inconsistencies and conflicting
technologies.
The politicians and bureaucrats will resist. They
will have all the reasons why a national email archive should not be
kept, but, of course, for all the wrong reasons.
They will say it
will cost too much, without realizing the tremendous value that could be
tapped by leveraging that mountain of federal data using Big Data
analytics and tools. There are insights that will be found using
predictive analytics that we cannot predict now. There may be vast
improvements in government services and operational efficiencies. In
fact, there should be.
The politicians and bureaucrats will simply
hate the idea of a secure, unalterable, audited record of business
email messages. Imagine -- the People spying on the Government? Keeping
all their emails. Outrageous! How dare we demand transparency and accountability from our public servants!
No more wiggle room.
Robert Smallwood is Managing Director of the Institute for IG at IMERGE Consulting, which can be found at www.IGTraining.com.
He teaches comprehensive courses on IG and E-records management for
corporate and public sector clients. He is the author of 3 leading books
on Information Governance: Information Governance: Concepts, Strategies. and Best Practices (Wiley, 2014); Managing Electronic Records: Methods, Best Practices, and Technologies (Wiley, 2013); and Safeguarding Critical E-Documents (Wiley, 2012).
Follow Robert on Twitter @RobertSmallwood and if we are not connected - please feel free to reach out!