Previous page: Digital preservation for eternity
The limits of technology
Paper records had an in-your-face visibility that imposed discipline. "There was limited room in the warehouse, and as new boxes arrived, you had to do something with the old ones," says Wiseman, pointing out that paper enforced retention schedules. But that physical requirement is gone with digital records.
"You now have all this invisible information accumulating."
Lack of process discipline is at the core of the problem, says Rose Langhout, head of I&IT strategy, policy and planning at the Ontario Ministry of Government Services (MGS). "We bought into a whole bunch of technology and assumed it would take care of things," says Langhout.
Technology exists to solve the five per cent of the problem that it can, adds Wiseman, but 95 per cent of it revolves around human process and policy issues. Even software that tackles some components can get tricky if people don't look beyond costs to management issues.
For example, network analysis tools routinely find hundreds of copies of the same file, notes Wiseman.
"De-duplication software exists that can eliminate multiple versions of files and have them all point to a common storage place in a way that's invisible to the user. There will probably be a significant investment in these tools as an alternative to storage in the future, but it may actually be cheaper to buy storage."
There are also IT policy issues to settle around formal and informal documents, he says. For formal digital documents that have equivalents in the paper sphere, there are established retention policies. But e-mails, voicemails, instant messages: these new informal communications are in a gray zone today.
"At a simplistic level, you can say they're not corporate records. However, legal cases are increasingly finding that e-mails in fact are, and cases are being won and lost based on e-mails sent years ago." Voicemail may well become future legal fodder as storage costs drop further, suggests Wiseman.
"Few voicemail messages are stored today, but they have exactly the same characteristics as e-mail, so why are expectations different?"
Many telephony networks enforce discipline by automatically deleting voicemails after a period of time, and Wiseman says some government organizations are doing the same with e-mails. Their policy is to view e-mail as equivalent to hallway conversations, not corporate records, and to delete them periodically.
"So if it's something that should be retained, it's the recipient's responsibility to ensure the e-mail is moved out of the e-mail system, which is not considered a corporate repository. But only a small number of jurisdictions have done this."
Another emerging area of concern is tracking information made available on government Web sites. "What is the information provided to the public through our Web site and what did it say at a specific point in time in the past? There are some new information requirements coming out of this," he says.
For example, if a Web site that informs the public about road conditions announces they're good on a particular day, and if someone has an accident, then IT staff may need to reproduce the Web site's contents later.
Many government organizations are implementing content management systems to facilitate information management both offline and online, but these don't obviate the need to hammer out policies and procedures around retention schedules, access permissions, version control, and so on, says Wiseman.
And IT has no magical ability to make people follow rules. "If I want to impose discipline on my organization around how information is stored, the technology for that is available. But getting people to use it is ultimately what it's about," he says.
"Even with a well articulated storage framework, it doesn't mean people will store it that way. Having the digital equivalent of the Dewey Decimal System won't ensure the books will be on the right shelf."
Nor can IT make people share resources. Server virtualization and consolidation are good ways to manage storage resources more efficiently, says Wayne Jensen, executive director of Workplace Hosting Services, the shared services provider for the B.C. government. But some departments are reluctant to share servers with others, he says.
"Some customers still have a sense of ownership of assets that were transferred to Shared Services B.C. and in holding on to this ownership they are not concerned with the broader perspective of resource sharing across government. There are cultural problems around virtualization that need to be overcome."
Continued: Human motivations
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