CILIP | Interview - Natalie Ceeney, CEO of the National Archives

Business opportunity, or business risk?

Information management needs to be seen as a strategic issue, a source of risk and opportunity, and part of every civil servant’s job. But joining up information and records management will be critical to success. The National Archives CEO, Natalie Ceeney, talked to Elspeth Hyams.

‘I do believe we are facing the greatest opportunity in a decade to move information management up the agenda,’ Natalie Ceeney told a conference of UK government librarians in February. ‘But also the biggest threat. If we don’t meet the challenge, others will do it for us.’

The ‘challenge’ is a complex one. First, it involves today’s workforce and their interactions with technology. There are now fundamentally different attitudes in all age groups to sharing, privacy and information.

‘This generation shares everything. In some workplaces there are things you cannot do with data, and Facebook is banned.’ But even senior civil servants ‘increasingly ignore the rules… they social-tag and create their own metadata’. Google and Wikipedia have changed the paradigms. Information managers underestimated the power of this transformation and ‘have been in a catch-up game ever since’.

The second aspect of ‘challenge’ comes from ‘changing roles and relationships’ and power politics in the workplace. Chief Information Officers are ‘mostly IT people with an information management (IM) responsibility’.

So what do information managers need to do? The message is stark: ‘The urgency of getting information management right has to be understood at all levels of government. As a profession we need to step up and say IM must be a core part of everyone’s work, just like IT. Information is at the heart of government’s effectiveness – it touches everything we do, but it’s up to the information management profession to make sure this message is heard loud and clear. ’ People who work in the civil service want to act for the good of society. Natalie also wants to act for the good of the information profession because that will produce better outcomes for society. (‘She’s one of the best things that could have happened to us,’ one senior information professional told Update unprompted, shortly after this interview.)

And, if her strategy to get information taken as seriously in the boardroom and the Cabinet as finance, law, HR, communications and IT succeeds, the status of information management (and its practitioners) can only improve.

The last unexploited resource
In her view, heavily supported by a recent CapGemini survey,1 information is ‘the last big one’ – an unexploited resource, as important as finance, IT and HR. ‘If you put yourself in the “infrastructure matters” camp, that makes it very easy to explain.’ IM represents ‘huge untapped value in the economy’.

Natalie is a forthright speaker and a powerful lobbyist – there is certainly much more ministerial engagement. The Prime Minister has described this as the ‘age of information’. In October 2007, presumably in response to the immediacy of communications via the internet, he ordered a review of the 30-year rule. Justice Minister Lord Falconer asked for a presentation to the Cabinet on information literacy. FCO Secretary of State David Miliband writes a blog, and Parliamentary Secretary for the Cabinet Tom Watson, who also blogs, is reviewing data handling. Government in general is becoming increasingly enthusiastic about ways to engage citizens in debate.

Meanwhile, The Power of Information,2 by Ed Mayo of the National Consumer Council and Tom Steinberg of MySociety, is required reading. Described by Natalie as ‘brilliant’, it has helped to speed up a revolution in the way that government engages with citizens. ‘It’s an incredibly powerful report. In the past, we looked at how we keep stuff, not how we exploit it.’ If information is one of government’s biggest assets, ‘We need to make sure it is exploited for citizen engagement and service delivery.’

What has the National Archives contributed to all of this? It is ‘at the heart of information policy – setting standards and supporting innovation in information and records management across the UK, and providing a practical framework of best practice for opening up and encouraging the re-use of public sector information’. Its ‘vision’ (and mission) is to ‘lead and transform information management’, to ‘guarantee the survival of today’s information for tomorrow’ and to ‘bring history to life for everyone’.3

Key matters such as digital continuity are co-ordinated centrally through the National Archives, which also assesses government departments’ IM procedures – an important part of managing risk. It is developing new services, guidance and advocacy tools, and trying to shape the policy agenda. This cross-departmental co-ordination is a good example of the way government is now increasingly run ‘on a horizontal, as well as a vertical, axis’.

And it has been doing a huge amount, much of it across government.

The Knowledge Council
Set up about 18 months ago, the Knowledge Council is attended by all the heads of information management in central government departments.4 ‘It’s a way to join up policy about how to manage information. And a community of best practice to make sure we speak with one voice.’ It is working on a knowledge and information strategy.

About three years ago, the first proper head of government IT set up the Chief Information Officer Council, to agree best practice and increase the influence of IT management thinking. Communications professionals had already acted on the Phillis Report.5 Legal professionals had long had their own body, and senior civil servants have benefited from Dame Mary Keegan’s efforts to raise standards for heads of finance in government departments. They are now encouraged to study for an accountancy qualification, rather than being generalists as in the past.

The establishment of the Knowledge Council marks the acknowledgement of information management’s key role in government – following other professions in government, such as IT, communications and HR, which each have a similar cross-cutting body.

So if opportunities for the information profession in government come from the professionalisation of all key infrastructure functions and the modernisation agenda, even more important is the overriding need to manage and minimise risk. There lies the key to attracting investment.

Making a business case
‘If someone comes to me and says, “Can we have three more people, because we used to 10 years ago?”, they’re not going to get them. But if they say, “The risk of not having them is that we expose ourselves to litigation, or big risk, or massive reputational damage, and by the way, if we did have these three people, we could more than cover the cost by way of these opportunities”, I’m going to look at that proposal really seriously.’

A good example of money saved by a judicious increase in expenditure was featured at the NGLIS (Network of Government Library & Information Specialists) conference by the MoD. Some servicemen sued the MoD after the invasion of Kuwait (to drive out Saddam Hussein’s illegally occupying forces) in 1991. The MoD could not contest many of these claims because it had not kept adequate records of soldiers’ experience in the field. It was criticised for this failure in the National Audit Office’s 1990-91 report. More recently it has ‘massively reduced’ legal claims by ‘embedding’ archivists with the troops in Afghanistan. Apart from confounding stereotypical ideas about archivists, the cost of that initiative has been ‘paid back, very easily’.

Arguably, almost any part of government (indeed any enterprise) needs to look at the legal risks of getting information management wrong. ‘Look at Sarbanes Oxley legislation in the US, and Morgan Stanley being fined many millions because they didn’t keep decent records.’
There is also huge benefit from getting it right, or being better than others at so doing. ‘At a records management conference a couple of years ago, I came across an oil company that had bought up the records of another oil company because they knew their information exploitation was better than that of the other company. They thought they would find oil reserves that the other company had missed. They bought the records at a knock-down price and made many millions because their information retrieval skills were better.’ In short, ‘If you look at the cost of getting it wrong and the opportunity in getting it right, I think you can justify more investment in IM’.

Natalie believes that the information profession has suffered from a lack of advocacy skills. One of the reasons, she thinks, is that there are too many people at a relatively junior level. ‘We need more people who can influence the non-professional, who can talk to the board and senior policy people, who can manage up.

‘We’ve been guilty of not talking the language of the business. It’s important to keep records for accountability, for risk and data purposes. It needs to be done in language people understand,’ she said at NGLIS. That ability to communicate effectively, to argue persuasively, has not been part of the traditional information manager’s required skill-set.

Professional boundaries need to go
Natalie has a slightly controversial proposal for overcoming the advocacy deficit. It would probably play havoc with the structure of pay and grading in the civil service, though in every other respect it makes sense.

At NGLIS and other conferences she has urged that the traditional boundaries between information professions be broken down. ‘We cannot look like individual silo professions,’ she said. ‘You don’t hear people saying, “I’m a systems designer, or an architect or a programmer. They say, “I’m in IT”. There is a place for specialists, but you need to see yourself as part of the whole.’

She would like future managers to have worked across the business. The current ‘divides’ in information are unhelpful to an individual’s career. ‘If you see only one area, and not the whole, how on earth are you going to make a senior manager, or even get promoted?’ The problem is ‘infrastructural’ – even training modules in the different branches of information management are quite distinct. ‘We should see information management as the overarching profession, just as IT is. That doesn’t stop people from specialising within it.’

She has been talking to CILIP about opening up librarianship to records management, cross-fertilisation, and working in a joined-up way. This is not to undermine individual professional experience, but a matter of long-term survival. ‘If we can do it, we have a future.’

Diversity of experience makes managers more credible to the workforce – they speak the same language. ‘We need to be more confident about people moving between different fields, not seeing careers as a sort of stovepipe you go up. If you do other things, you bring a whole skill-set to any senior management role.’

The National Archives is making a contribution to this agenda, exposing its graduate trainees (in a scheme that also promotes the diversity agenda) to different aspects of the business. (The National Archives covers everything from the harvesting of government records and digitisation projects for historic materials, to the correct conservation techniques for ancient national treasures like the Domesday Book.)

Some government departments too are recruiting librarians, making it clear that staff will rotate within the wider IM team and learn across the department.

Information management is one of the most interesting fields at the moment. ‘Everything is changing. It’s at the heart of business effectiveness. Information touches every bit of what every department does, whether it’s about legal accountability, citizen engagement, managing customers. It’s fascinating.’ So fascinating that there’s no reason why civil service policy people should not want to come and do a stint in IM.

In the long run, there is no reason why people should not go outside the business and return. That may be diluting professional skill-sets too much for some but, in the meantime, Natalie would ‘like to ban any conversation about librarians being a different profession from FOI, or from records managers’. These attempts at differentiation are really missing the point, she says. ‘The real danger is of looking in, rather than out. The debate we should be having is: how can IM influence the non-professionals out there? Not how can we organise from within.’

Practical cross-governmental initiatives from the National Archives
Pan-government knowledge and information strategy
Working through and with the Knowledge Council, the National Archives is developing a strategy that will ‘totally transform the way government works using new technology’. It will be published in the next few months as part of the ‘Transformational Government’ programme.

Information management assessments
IM assessments are just one of initiatives by the National Archives to establish IM as a core activity within government. The assessments are designed to give the departments’ IM processes a health check.

A team from the NA works together with a mixture of managers, records managers and end-users to build up a picture of how the department understands and manages its risk.

After completion, the NA team and the department work together to create an action plan to iron out any risks resulting from poor IM processes.

Digital continuity
For more than 10 years the NA digital preservation team has been leading the way in recovering digital information held in obsolete formats and now it has launched the Digital Continuity project.

The average life span of a digital document is five to seven years. This stark fact could have serious consequences for government and the public sector. In a purely paper age, files could be stored indefinitely and once they reached 30 years old they were preserved for historical purposes. In a digital age, files at five years old may be inaccessible. This is where the Digital Continuity project steps in. The National Archives team will work with government departments to create a shared service for government, which will store, migrate and preserve digital data on behalf of the departments for ongoing business use as well as for any potential historical preservation.

Guidance and advocacy
The NA has prepared guidance for accounting officers on the risks and opportunities of their information assets. It is to be published as a booklet called Information Matters by Gus O’Donnell later this year. ‘We wanted to make sure it incorporated all the lessons from the Data Handling Review.’

Web continuity project
‘The NA is not only at the forefront of information policy, we’re also getting on with doing it ourselves’.

Government information is being accessed increasingly online. Over half of all government/citizen interaction takes place via government websites. Website links are often used in a wide range of publications, including answers to Parliamentary Questions. Unfortunately, web links can be broken as a result of the continual refreshing of websites, rapidly advancing technology or even site closures.

The NA is developing a solution based on taking frequent snapshots of government websites and then routing users back to the snapshot if the departmental website no longer contains the document in question.

Your Archives: the NA wiki
Since the NA started putting material online, use of its website has risen to 60m downloads per annum, without any decline in the number of personal visits to its reading rooms at Kew. While the NA is committed to digitising its most popular content, the launch of the NA wiki, Your Archives (http://yourarchives.nationalarchives.gov.uk/), means that both staff members and users of public records can put their expertise online and share their knowledge across the globe. The National Archives is the first service in the world to set up this facility. ‘It’s a very easy example of how you can use the new tools to do something radically different.’

References
1 Global CIO Survey 2008: The Role of the IT Function in Business Innovation. CapGemini, March 2008. Available from CapGemini Consulting (www.capgemini.com).
2 ‘Government and citizen partnership.’ Update 6(9) September 2007, p.20.
3 www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/about
4 ‘New Knowledge Council gears up.’ Update 7(3) March 2008, p.5.
5 An Independent Review of Government Communications. 2004.

Natalie Ceeney became Chief Executive of the National Archives in October 2005. Previously she was Director of Operations and Services at the British Library, where she managed services, including both its reading rooms and its remote delivery services. She has previously managed clinical services in the NHS, and has led strategic consultancy projects across a range of industries at McKinsey & Co.

Updated: 28 April 2008