This article is from the June 2002 Issue of Update.
As we move closer to a knowledge-based economy, governments around the world have recognised that they must modernise the way they conduct their business, and the way they organise and deliver services to the citizen, in order to retain competitiveness on the world stage.
In the UK, progress towards e-government has been much in the news over the last couple of years, as departments and agencies tackle the difficult task of making government services available electronically by the target date of 2005. Most would agree that it has been harder than first anticipated. However, there have been some significant successes with portal-based and e-enabled transactional services on the internet, and it seems clear that this is the direction in which government must move.
Much of the media attention has focused on the customer-facing view of e-government, but a supporting infrastructure is also important to the sustainability of the venture. Electronic services will produce electronic records of transactions, business activities and decisions, and these records must be reliably captured and stored, and access to them retained over perhaps many years, to make the e-government service sustainable in the longer term.
For example, behind a portal service built to enable members of the public to submit an electronic tax return, there must be facilities to capture an authentic record of that return, and to ensure the information content remains accessible and complete for seven years, through any changes in technology. The record must then be destroyed as part of a managed and audited process, according to established business rules. During this time, the information content of the record may be needed to answer enquiries or to help with a business decision — perhaps even to be produced as evidence in court, where its continued reliability as an accurate and complete record may be subject to legal challenge. Legislation also requires that inappropriate use of the information be prevented during its lifetime.
The challenge for electronic records management (ERM) is to enable the capture and flexible use of the information in electronic records, to provide support for modernisation and new ways of working, while retaining the reliable structure and stability of the corporate record knowledge base over the whole record's life cycle. We seek the same quality of outcome as a paper records management system aims to achieve, but the means must be quite different.
Targets for ERM
The Modernising Government white paper set a range of targets, one of which was that central government departments and agencies must have the capacity to store and retrieve their newly created records (rather than documents) electronically by the year 2004. The distinction between records and documents is an important one: a formal corporate record is evidence of an activity or decision, or the result of a transaction. It needs to be subject to more stringent information management disciplines than electronic documents normally are, even in a document management environment; ephemeral or working documents do not have the same status or management requirements, though it may be convenient to manage both together.
This target for ERM effectively puts an end to the 'print to paper files' policy. Once the ERM capability is in place, the formal record is electronic and the paper version a copy. In today's working environment, the 'print to paper' policy is increasingly ineffective anyway as staff become more and more used to working electronically. Email is taking the place of the formal document, information is shared on local network drives, and there is direct publication from the desktop to intranets and websites. Less and less material ends up in paper files.
Unfortunately, electronic material is most often not well managed electronically. Email servers become full, and all messages over a certain age are deleted automatically, whatever their value. Individuals develop personal filing structures on local and network drives which are difficult for others to use, and they take this knowledge with them when they leave. Documents that should be kept are lost and documents that should be destroyed are inadvertently kept. Database records are updated without consideration for any potential need to retain previous versions.
The move towards corporate electronic records management requires not just implementation of ERM software facilities to manage the data, but also implementation of policies, procedures and user practices designed to meet organisational needs. Together, these imply an extensive cultural change in attitudes, behaviour and working practices, which can be encouraged but not mandated — a big challenge for any public sector organisation.
E-records programme
The Public Record Office is the lead agency for records management in UK central government, and has responsibility for overseeing achievement of the 2004 target and beyond. As this is part of a broader modernisation, the PRO works closely with a network of e-government champions and other organisations, to locate and ensure the visibility of ERM in the modernisation agenda, and to get things moving. The e-government context for ERM is set out in a policy framework.[1]
The PRO has published a 'route map' to corporate ERM, which sets out a framework of milestones and dates for integrating management of legacy data, and planning for new e-business systems, into an overall development and implementation structure. As well as monitoring and reporting on progress on the basis of this route map, the PRO produces a range of guidance in the form of practical toolkits.[2] Topics include, for example: developing a corporate policy for ERM; conducting an information audit; developing transition strategies; managing records on websites; and developing a business case.
The PRO works closely with some of the key departments to further individual progress on the ground, but it is not able to get involved directly in more than a few of the many relevant projects across government. Its main influence is in developing the infrastructure and momentum within which others will act, in leveraging existing opportunities and investment, and in helping to distil and make accessible transferable knowledge and skills.
Influencing the software market
One success has been in influencing the software market for EDRM (electronic document and records management) systems in the UK. In 1999, the PRO led a group of government departments in defining and publishing generic functional requirements for electronic records management in UK government. Intended, on the one side, to help government departments in determining their own specific business requirements and to encourage greater commonality, on the other it was aimed at the commercial software industry. The PRO built a formal evaluation and compliance testing scheme on the basis of these requirements, to encourage the development of appropriate software for ERM systems, that could be added to a list of approved systems.
At that time, the market for ERMS was fairly immature in the UK, with few products available, often coming from Australia and the US. There are now a growing number of UK-based suppliers, energetic competition in creating innovative products. The only other comparable scheme is run by the US Department of Defense, where the situation is rather different. The PRO requirements and scheme have been taken up by local government and others in the UK, by other European governments, and by international organisations.
Common standards
These common elements of ERM infrastructure help to build a foundation of common standards which supports interoperability between systems and processes, enabling 'joining up' of government. Within the criminal justice system, for example, several different organisations — such as the Court Service, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Serious Fraud Office, and so on — take responsibility for various aspects of the system, and they need to exchange information with each other. As the courts move towards electronic handling of evidence and judgements, it will be vital to be able to exchange electronic records between these organisations, routinely and efficiently, without loss of information or prejudice to their integrity. In addition, many of these organisations will need to supply some types of information to public access information systems, to promote access to justice.
Government as a whole has made a strategic commitment to browser-accessible IP-based public sector information systems, and the use of XML in particular, to ensure interoperability between them. The generic requirements for ERM are currently being revised and updated to include these and other developments. This includes creating a standard set for electronic records management metadata, which will integrate with the government resource discovery standard. The first published version of the metadata element set which makes up this standard (known as the e-Government Metadata Standard)[3] is becoming mandatory for all public sector information systems.
Business change not IT project
While various forms of software are important vehicles for putting corporate ERM into place, it is important to realise that this is essentially a business change process and not primarily an IT project. Those organisations that fail to recognise this, and to act upon the implications, doom their projects to failure. Just as the development of electronic service delivery is about changing the way government does business, rather than doing the same thing but online — 'innovation not automation' — so electronic records management is about changing the role of records management in, and its relationship to, the organisation. Long the poor relation, ERM now moves into the centre of information resource management, but in so doing changes its nature.
Rather than automating the administration of paper, this move will unlock the content of records previously inaccessible in unwieldy paper folders, and make electronic records a central resource for corporate knowledge. ERM will have to be fully integrated with knowledge management and decision-making systems, and has a particular role to play in supporting evidence-based policy-making — making policies that can be shown to work. In essence, it is a major platform for internal modernisation of government, where the changes predicated on modernisation of external service delivery are rolled back through the rest of the organisation. Success or failure will be determined here.
For the records manager, there is a fundamental change — from management of the artefacts towards design of the environment in which the end-user operates. These are the people who create records on a day-to-day basis, and who will take the key decisions on whether a record is captured and classified correctly. If it is not, then the record is effectively lost — no one else will have time to tidy up afterwards.
Government information policy
One of the major drivers towards corporate ERM across government is the recent legislation in revised data protection and freedom of information. This will require information not only to be captured into formal management systems and retained for business use, but also to be subject to access regulation procedures and rules, and to be disposed of by managed destruction according to established business rules. FoI and data protection require government to know what information it has, and to manage it appropriately. Retaining records that should be retained, and destroying what should be destroyed, and carrying this out in an auditable and accountable fashion, will be essential.
Progress in UK government
How much progress are government departments and agencies making towards these goals? It's certainly true that, as with the other modernisation targets, the full implications of what was being attempted took some time to be realised. But, although things may seem more complex now than they did at first, there is widespread commitment and activity across government. ERM-enabled electronic services are in preparation or nearing completion — for example, the casework elements of the Planning Portal currently being launched — and there is much detailed activity on preparing for and implementing corporate management of corporate information. It is too early to say what the position will look like by 2004, but it is clear that any organisation which has not made the transition by that date will be hard put to remain in the mainstream of government information.
And that, of course, will only be the beginning. Achievement of the 2004 target will ensure the capture and storage of electronic records, but there remain immense problems for long-term sustainability of digital material. Organisations will need to keep simple personal records, for example, accessible if required, for up to 7-100 years.
There will be an increasing blurring between the internal corporate record and external publications, as seen already in material posted to public websites. Central to the success of this whole area will be development of a whole-of-government information architecture. This must be capable of satisfying two important requirements. First is the need for stable but evolutionary categories of records as 'organisational knowledge assets', forming the corporate memory of the organisation that produces them. These records must retain their value as the organisation changes structure and takes up or discards functions. Second, there is a need to reuse records as information assets that can support innovation and change, and rapid organisational development, both in the individual organisation and across the whole of government.
References
- www.e-envoy.gov.uk/publications/frameworks/erm2/index.htm
- www.pro.gov.uk/recordsmanagement/
- www.govtalk.gov.uk
Stephen Harries is Head of the Electronic Records Management Development Unit, Public Record Office (stephen.harries@pro.gov.uk).