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Obama Orders Federal Agencies To Digitize All Records
Lucas123 writes "President Obama this week issued a directive to all federal agencies to upgrade records management processes from paper-based systems that have been around since President Truman's administration to electronic records systems with Web 2.0 capabilities. Agencies have four months to come up with plans to improve their records keeping. Part of the directive is to have the National Archives and Records Administration store all long-term records and oversee electronic records management efforts in other agencies. Unfortunately, NARA doesn't have a stellar record itself (PDF) in rolling out electronic records projects. Earlier this year, due to cost overruns and project mismanagement, NARA announced it was ending a 10-year effort to create an electronic records archive."
When all the records are locked in 8x11 filing cabinets, sealed in Manila envelopes?
And the FOIA headache!
Destroying those records is hard, and some turn up - years after they were declared not to exist!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Looking at the NARA article, as soon as I saw that some big IT contract was given to Lockheed Martin I saw all I needed to know about this initiative.
In 1000 years or more, they'll have no idea what we were up to at all. At lease some paper records have a chance of surviving.
Does that include the Declaration of Independence? I suppose it would be much easier to change in digital form...
So, you condemn Obama for things he doesn't do (e.g., reduce costs), then condemn him for doing things (e.g., reducing costs).
Gotcha.
Check your premises.
You say it like this is a bad thing. What has the downside of Wikileaks been so far?
Yeah - as noted, the man can't win. Ask any corporate bean counter about the cost savings (that is, stopping spending money) by going digital.
Also - remember - he's the President. He doesn't make the budget. (That's tied up in the Super Committee.) And unlike the previous President, he hasn't been ruling by fiat, executive order and signing statement.
Check your premises.
If you look at the executive order itself:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/74042394/Managing-Government-Records-November-28-2011
you'll find that while formats aren't called out explicitly, it basically instructs the archivist to come up with a comprehensive system within a limited amount of time. It's a pretty high level set of business level requirements; basically, these business level requirements translate to, "give me the system level requirements docs and specifics within four months." I can't imagine that such a system wouldn't include the proposed formats.
Check your premises.
This would be a good time to write your congresscritter to point out the problems with undocumented file formats as well as Apis and network protocols.
There are plenty of formats that could be used that are open and vendor neutral.
If congress doesn't require that in it's funding authorization, many of our public records will be stored as word dos or in ms SQL databases.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Let's be blunt... this is 2011. The task he set forth will be tied up in bureaucracy for a minimum of a year. There will be arguments such as "Where will we get the budget to do this?" and there will be arguments like "Who will do it?" and such. Even if the program gets started, the company who will provide the obviously custom system will underbid the others involved to land the contract and once the contract itself IS started, then whoever won the contract will then stop part way and claim "The agency misinformed us as to how much would need to be digitized and therefore we need more money." at which time the project will be placed on hold pending an audit to which time it will be made known that there was corruption involved in choosing the given vendor.
:(
Agencies who have thus far opted to NOT digitize their records have done so for many reasons. And even though they're being forced to digitize now, they'll find many different methods of making the process cost substantially more than it should have and drag the process out over extended periods. Let us not forget that most of these documents can only be handled by certain staff with high enough clearance given their confidential nature. If the expose writers are to be trusted, there are entire rooms of records of paper where only one highly trusted person is allowed to enter.
Let us also point out that many of these records have been written in cursive which unlike block is a screaming nightmare to handle automatically. That means that the people who hold the clearance to view the records will need to manually enter these records themselves. There will be issues of encrypting the records so that only certain individuals will have access to them. While Obama would like to make it so that there could be some central database per organization, I'd imagine that there will be many individual, sealed networks to guarantee security.
With all these issues, let's be blunt...
1) The agencies will fight it... outright AND through bureaucratic means.
2) The agencies will say "Sure... we did it" and since many of the records are highly classified, no one can actually contradict the statement... so it most likely won't happen. When a given record is asked for they'll claim "oh...we must have missed that box"
3) It will take decades to complete as there are rooms of records where only a single individual is likely to have access and I'm guessing their typing speed isn't 100wpm.
4) Obama is on his way out. Even if he survives this coming election by some miracle (he sucks as much as the next guy, but people know he sucks and are more likely to trust someone else with less of a known suckage) by the time the project is likely to start, it's almost certain whoever takes over will pull the funds from that budget within hours of getting into office.
5) For data security sake, the agencies will most likely have to design the systems themselves using whatever crap engineers they manage to find with high enough clearance that's willing to actually code document management systems. And truthfully... this isn't a TV show... if the agencies have "Super Hackers" on staff, they're probably just as lame as the self promoting idiots you find everywhere else.
So, I'm willing to say... this will cost a tremendous amount to talk about... but will go nowhere. Sad
Yeah, software would be easy to design if it weren't for all those pesky stakeholders.
Whose purpose, exactly, does it serve if the stakeholders are disappointed?
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.