“Government records officers have a huge challenge,” said L. Reynolds Cahoon, chief information officer for the National Archives and Records Administration. “As more federal records are created electronically, [records managers] need to work with analysts and business process designers to build records management right into the business processes as they’re being designed.” It isn’t solely a government problem. Increased oversight and regulation of corporations in the post-Sarbanes-Oxley world are making electronic records management a high-profile problem in the private sector.
Look no further than Morgan Stanley & Co. Inc. for a lesson in the perils of poor records management. In May, the New York investment bank was found guilty of fraud and slapped with a $1.5 billion judgment — primarily because it could not produce subpoenaed e-mail messages. Under Securities and Exchange Com- mission regulations, financial companies are required to retain e-mail and instant messages for three years. Morgan Stanley already had been fined roughly $10 million five years ago for not having proper e-mail retention policies.
Government agencies at all levels face a similar problem. Financial accountability regulations, Privacy Act requirements and even requirements for accessibility to government services under Section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act are making not just retaining records but also creating them an important architectural consideration. It’s an issue that an agency needs to consider in its enterprise architecture.
And records officers must adapt to these new requirements without much hope of more hands coming to their aid.
“We don’t see these organizations ramping up and hiring more people to handle records management,” said Frank McGovern, product marketing specialist at FileNet Corp. of Costa Mesa , Calif. , and a retired Air Force records officer. “You’re starting to see repositories with more than a billion objects. How do you manage that?”
NARA is a leader in establishing best practices in government records management. It is the managing partner of the Electronic Records Management e-Government initiative. As part of the initiative, the Environmental Protection Agency is working on a process for evaluating commercial solutions.
No longer standalone
The software industry has moved away from standalone tools for records capture and is now creating records management platforms that integrate into the very fabric of enterprise systems.
Vendors are crafting their records management systems into components so that they can be more deeply embedded, Cahoon said.
The move to integrate records management with enterprise architecture is consistent across the public and private sectors.
“Instead of buying a records management software package, [organizations] are looking to buy a suite of software that does Web collaboration, team forms and basic document management,” McGovern said.
Kathleen Kummer, head of the government business unit at Open Text Corp. of Waterloo , Ontario , said she sees it much the same way.
“Enterprise suites are kind of the trend,” she said. “We still also offer a standalone product, but from a technical architecture perspective, we’re moving toward a service-oriented architecture based on reusable components.”
Open Text is one of the earliest adopters of JSR 170, a Java Community Process proposed standard for accessing content repositories in Java 2 Enterprise Edition, independent of system type. The standard API will help Open Text and other records management platforms integrate directly with applications based on J2EE, including major enterprise software platforms such as PeopleSoft, Oracle Applications Server, SAP and IBM’s WebSphere and Domino programs.
Making records management as automatic as possible is the key, McGovern said.
“We use workflow to automate a lot of records management tasks. National Archives puts out a lot of requirements for vital records programs,” he said. “If you depend on the records officer to occasionally remind people of those policies, how effective can that be? But you can automate those policies through workflow. When you depend on end users to decide what’s a record, they make mistakes.”
FileNet’s software uses a “zero-click” approach to capturing records, based on a combination of application events, metadata within documents and integration with enterprise processes to capture records with no additional work on the end user’s part. E-mails, for example, are retained automatically based on rules at the server level, so users are not required to drag them to an archive folder.
Systems can be configured to automatically notify record owners when documents are slated for destruction. E-mails can be automatically captured, based on metadata in their headers or on where they are addressed, and stored in the repository. Business transaction documents created by enterprise resource planning systems can be captured as part of the business process.
Lubor Ptacek, director of product marketing for Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC Corp.’s Documentum division, said Documentum’s platform goes even further with automation. Its system also can be trained to automatically classify content, indexing it based on an organization’s record taxonomy.
“We support both automatic and aided classification,” he said. “The aided portion is important, because it usually takes a year to get to full automation [and] to tune the rules.”
Retention format issues
In most modern electronic records management and enterprise content management systems — the heart of most records platforms — metadata is collected on records either from their tags or from other information collected at the time they are created. It is then stored in a relational or Extensible Markup Language database.
Most systems store records in their original format or in a specified archival format such as Portable Document Format. But the longevity of file formats is a major issue for federal records.
Many federal records must be retained permanently, but the technologies tied to their creation are ephemeral. There are more than 14,000 different file formats in use today in the federal government, according to Cahoon. And agencies are digitizing literally billions of paper records.
NARA is building the Electronic Records Archive under a contract awarded last August to Harris Corp. of Melbourne , Fla. , and Lockheed Martin Corp. The challenge is this: The new system must be able to present documents without relying on the applications in which they were created.
Delivery of the system is at least three years away, and what platform-independent format it will use remains to be seen. One candidate is the Portable Document Format/Archive, a standard recently ratified by the International Organization for Standardization.
PDF/A is a bare-bones, platform-independent version of PDF based on Version 1.4 of Adobe Systems Inc.’s public-domain specification. PDF/A was developed with help from government agencies that have large-scale document retention needs, such as the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Courts.
The courts moved to PDF/A as their preferred electronic archiving format after discovering that older PDFs were no longer readable by many Acrobat Readers because of the proprietary LZWDecode compression they used.
But because it is a stripped-down version of PDF, PDF/A may not meet everyone’s needs all the time. And according to NARA officials, although PDF/A might be fine for agency storage, it doesn’t meet NARA ’s standards for transmitting records to the archives.
“The stuff they had to take out of Adobe to guarantee readability removed a lot of functionality,” said Paul Chan, vice president of marketing at PureEdge Solutions Inc., an XML electronic forms vendor in Victoria , British Columbia .
The Army and Air Force are using PureEdge’s software to create forms for their business processes. The functionality and business logic behind the forms are written into them with a declarative programming language. Because the forms are pure XML, it is easier to search on the metadata in them.
NARA hasn’t yet endorsed an archival format, but agencies should keep an eye on the agency’s work in formulating e-record guidelines. Without such help, according to Cahoon, records officers might find themselves overwhelmed by the size of their management task.
Autor: S. Michael Gallagher
Quelle: Washington Technology, 05.07.2005
