Previous page: The limits of technology
Human motivations
Information management practices in government are inconsistent, says Langhout. There are few issues around documents known to be destined for the archives. "Legislative documents, cabinet submissions: in areas where we know documents are required forever, there is a higher level of practice."
In other areas, incentives are in place to inspire good practice. "Program records are also well kept because we know there are program audits," she says. But there are issues in other areas. "The administrative machinery of government produces a lot of material, and we're not good at picking the wheat from the chaff there."
Langhout points to policy development as one example of an ambiguous area that tends to be overlooked. "We might have a dozen initiatives in a year, some of which turn into decision documents, and others are research that gets put aside."
These files belong to the analyst, who may or may not maintain them well. "If there's analyst turnover, the material may stay in a shared drive for a couple of years, and by then the institutional memory is gone."
The file may be stored somewhere, but without knowledge of its contents, it's lost for all intents and purposes. Stories abound of new staff redoing research or other work that has already been done by predecessors, she says.
Lack of standards contributes to the problem. "Take something as simple as file naming. If everybody's doing it differently, it's hard for people coming in later to figure out which documents are important," she says. "Part of the solution is providing guidance so people all do it the same way, so there's less dependence on getting information from the person who had the file before and more ability to use conventions to identify what's important."
While policies may need to be established in some emerging areas, there are established retention schedules for most types of documents, she says.
"But adherence to policy is not what we would like it to be." Major cuts in the public sector in the past two decades play a role. "We have zillions of copies of stuff, but it's less work to store it than to figure out what we need to keep," says Langhout.
"Many ministries have good intentions, but not the resources to put better practices in place - until there's a problem," she says, noting that huge resources were invested in tracking the paper trail in the Walkerton contaminated water inquiry.
Langhout believes these information management issues will become an impediment to modernizing government services if they aren't resolved. "The pressure is on us to use information across many different areas in order to respond to the public's needs," she says, noting Web mechanisms to communicate targeted information to citizens will be key in the future.
"It's how we make use of the information available to us that helps us re-organize our service delivery to produce better results. In the modernization agenda, it's imperative to recreate a Service Ontario organization that becomes the retail expert for the government."
Amazon.com uses information successfully, she says, because it has a simple goal: profit. "They know if they get more information about books out, they'll get more people to their site and they'll sell more books."
The public sector may have more complex goals around tackling social ills or promoting economic development, but Langhout believes a profit-like reward system could be built around improved information management that delivers results.
"Where efficiencies are federated and produce more effective services, there should be a provision to reinvest some of those savings, so there is an incentive system for program areas to get better. While staff may get pats on the back and good performance reviews, there's no incentive structure for the program itself."
The archivist's perspective
Two camps need to join to solve the information management problem efficiently, says Illuminata's Webster. "We need to put together IT people, who are good at automating processes, with records management people, who are adept at classifying information, so we don't rely solely on humans to do it. This is just starting to happen in government and the private sector."
And this is long overdue. System implementations over the past few decades have primarily focused on getting information into systems, says Paula Johnson, director of administrative records at the University of California in San Diego (UCSD). Managing the information once it's collected has been ignored until recently, so records management experts have not been part of the process in developing infrastructures that manage information throughout its lifecycle, she says.
"Providing secure access to information over time, being able to migrate it as IT architecture changes, determining the best storage media - this is where our profession is frustrated, as we're not called in."
Continued: Access, security and privacy
Related content:
Integrating IT for collaboration
Information will exceed storage capacity, says IDC
Storage, It is really about filing cabinets
Information management comes to the table
EMC protects, preserves priceless documents
icon.
