Staff at federal agencies are unprepared for proper records management

The federal government is falling behind private companies when it comes to records management, according to recent data from the National Archives and Records Administration. Currently, a majority of federal agencies have no system in place to analyze their information management, and of those that do, 30 percent admit they have not updated their policies since 2006, according to the report.

This demonstrates that the federal government is simply not keeping up to date with technological advancements. A large number of government bodies are still utilizing outdated procedures, many of which had been abandoned by public corporations by the turn of the century.

NARA discovered that 80 percent of agencies print and manually file incoming and outgoing emails, a problem that can be solved with a simple automated email archiving service. After gathering the information, the administration ranked the bodies on a scale of 1 to 100 in order to determine how far behind a federal agency lagged in comparison to the nation.

Some of the worst record management scorers, according to the report, are the Congressional Budget Office, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Census Bureau and the Defense Contract Management Agency. The overall worst agency was the Postal Regulatory Committee, which the NARA gave a score of 3 out of 100.

In a world where the benefits of document management are well authenticated, it may be time for government agencies to get on board with enterprise content management.

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