Archiving, What to Keep, What to Purge, and How to Tell!

Transcription

1 Archiving, What to Keep, What to Purge, and How to Tell! Federal Agency Case Studies Catherine Teti Managing Director, Knowledge Services US Government Accountability Office E-Discovery, Records & Information Management Conference Thursday, March 4, 2010

2 Management: Challenges Facing Agencies Risks associated with not appropriately managing s: Storage capacity: volume will outpace capacity at an unsustainable rate. Litigation Holds: Identification and isolation of relevant documents is not possible without appropriate management. E-Discovery: s stored past their scheduled retention period may be swept up in discovery. Records Management: Agency records may not be identified and captured. March 4,

3 Management: What to Keep in Mind is just another format it should be filed and kept based on its business content. Making end users aware of the business benefits of managing is essential. Most s are either superfluous or works-in-progress. Legal, IT, RM, and the end users should all be stakeholders in the creation of a new management strategy. Strategy must alleviate the burden on the end user. March 4,

4 GAO s Current Approach Employees save all s that are records in the electronic records management system. Staff are responsible for ensuring that all records that pertain to business operation are captured. Employees are permitted to save personal reference s on their hard drives in an unlimited archive. Auto-archiving feature allows staff to save all s to the archive without active management. All s of selected senior executives are reviewed, captured and retained. March 4,

5 GAO s Current Approach Strengths and Challenges Strengths Records are captured into ERMS by end users. Decisions about records are tied to the business process. End users are able to easily save and search for s that are essential to their work. is filed with related content that have different formats. Challenges Relies on end users to ensure that pertinent s are saved. Users are saving s that could be destroyed according to the GAO records schedule. Lots of duplicates! Huge archives! End users do not have another archiving option other than saving to their hard drive for non-record s. March 4,

6 GAO Approach Moving Forward Policy Revision GAO is migrating from Groupwise to MS Outlook providing an opportunity to update the management policy. RM and IT are working together to create a new policy: s must be saved into ERMS within 90 days if there is a continued need for the information. Records as well as non-records can be saved in ERMS. Users will no longer have the option to archive s to their hard drive. backups will only be used for disaster recovery. March 4,

7 GAO s Approach Moving Forward User Involvement RM and IT staff have worked with end users who have large archives and asked questions: What is in the users archives? Why are they keeping this information? Is all the information needed for their work or just nice to have available? Huron Consulting Group studies have shown that: 80% of s are superfluous 15% are works-in-progress 5% are essential to agency business March 4,

8 GAO s Approach Moving Forward Options Considered Currently looking into auto-classification to save s directly into ERMS. Creating a filing scheme that ties to the GAO records schedule to allow end users to easily save s into high level, business process categories. Categories are based on big bucket retention schedule. There is a category for works in progress content. Users can file the content however they want, but they will still be assigned to a high level category. March 4,

9 Other Agency Examples Air Force All AF information is managed the same way. All information is treated as an asset, regardless of format or media. A retention period is assigned at the point of creation -- whether it s record or non-record. All content is auto-classified. Tool automatically extracts metadata and links to the records retention schedules. Transparent to the end user. All search functions search the Metadata Repository. Allows for enhanced searching capabilities. March 4,

10 Resources - Interagency Federal E-Discovery Working Group Group of Legal, IT, and Records Managers from federal agencies that discuss e-discovery issues and challenges that face the government. Compiled a list of e-discovery cases affecting or involving local, state, and federal government, all which is available on the FEDWG Wiki page: Discovery+Cases Currently working on the top 40 government e-discovery case list. March 4,

11 Contact Information: Catherine Teti Managing Director, Knowledge Services Chief Agency Privacy Officer US Government Accountability Office (202) March 4,