As federal agencies face down a rapidly approaching deadline for managing records in electronic format by December 31, 2022, a reprieve may be in sight. In comments made at the 930GOV conference in August, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Chief Records Officer Laurence Brewer indicated that NARA and the Office of Management and Budget [...]

Increasingly, today’s information management is about taking advantage of opportunities inherent in the information rather than just formulaically following pre-existing rules designed principally around compliance. To be sure, risk mitigation is always going to be a major concern, but modern information management can help mitigate risks while also doing so much more. In some ways, [...]

Ultimately, the goal of any records management workflow is to ensure your organization can facilitate its work, produce desired business outcomes, and reduce costs and risks as much as possible. The ultimate disposition and destruction of unneeded documents is a crucial part of that process. Indeed, holding onto records unnecessarily can be counterproductive, making the [...]

What does the future hold in store for records management? Right now, merely converting to digital records at all is pushing many organizations to the limit of their capacities. But technology never stops moving, and all sorts of interesting innovations are offering the potential to improve or even – in some cases – revolutionize records [...]

Eighty percent of businesses want to reduce paper from their normal workflows and business processes, according to research from Xerox. It’s no wonder: paper is becoming harder than ever for organizations to wrangle. Research and consulting firm Gartner reports that the annual growth rate of the amount of paper produced by the average business is [...]

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 [...]