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 [...]

The security of government records and data has never been more important or more threatened than right now. Cybersecurity attacks at the end of 2020 – when a foreign government used compromised cybersecurity software to target multiple federal agencies and private organizations – highlight the stakes. But security is easier said than done, especially for [...]

Under federal law, federal agencies must “notify [the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)] of any actual, impending, or threatened unlawful removal, defacing, alteration, corruption, deletion, erasure, or other destruction of records in the custody of the agency (see 36 CFR Part 1230 for the full statute). Upon such notification, NARA creates an “unauthorized [...]

Is electronic records management worth the effort? Advocates argue that digital records make electronics records management faster and most cost-efficient while facilitating increased productivity. But are those claims smoke-and-mirrors, or are they grounded in evidence and fact? Let’s look at some hard numbers. The number of documents and records in the U.S. alone is staggering [...]

Electronic records management can undeniably generate huge benefits for organizations. They make it easier to find records, improve productivity by as much as 30%, and yield cost savings by managing information “as an asset, rather than a liability,” as we have previously described here. But technology has its own pitfalls. The speed with which records [...]

The reports are in! Records management officials at federal agencies throughout the U.S. government have submitted their annual Senior Agency Official for Records Management (SAORM) reports to the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Though NARA is still processing and assessing these reports, they already shed light on a pressing question: how prepared are [...]