As the deadline to comply with OMB/NARA Memorandum M-19-21 rapidly approaches, it might be helpful for agencies to familiarize themselves with allowable exceptions to its mandates. While all agencies are expected to comply with M-19-21’s requirements – which, broadly speaking, mandate that federal agencies begin managing virtually all records, both permanent and temporary, in electronic [...]

With only six months left to meet the records management mandates of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) memorandum M-19-21, many federal agencies are still struggling to comply. Transitioning to mostly electronic records management by the end of this year is a big ask, especially after the complications caused by the ongoing pandemic. [...]

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 skills, if the workforce isn’t ready and equipped to make [...]

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 creating and submitting electronic records to the National Archives and [...]

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 are certainly closely related and overlap with each other, but [...]

Making the shift to electronic records management (ERM) means investing in technology, which will necessarily involve the agency’s IT department. However, not all technology investments require the same level of IT involvement. In fact, technology solutions that impose an undue burden on the IT department can create a lot of problems. IT inevitably faces a [...]

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 think having them close by made individual files easy to [...]

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 approach works. We've partially addressed this question previously when we [...]

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 U.S. National Archives & Records Administration (NARA). For example, 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 year to start submitting all permanent and temporary records [...]