Herding Cats or Training Seals?
Which, in the case of the Air Force, must require a high level of domain expertise, I suggest. “Strangely enough, we don’t really need to know the specifics. Sure, we need to know the acronyms, and what the major commands within the Air Force are. But a lot of times, I walk out of training sessions, and I still don’t know what they do! But they say, ‘Wow, you really answered the mail for us...’ We just need to convince them they’re not operating very efficiently, and that doesn’t take very much work!” he laughs.
The pressure to “work better” is different for a military organization. “If Congress asks for something, it’s very important for the Air Force to respond quickly,” agrees Doug. “Or else, Senator McCain will stand up and say, ‘You must be hiding something.’ That’s good from a citizen’s perspective, but the Air Force has a real challenge with its records management. If someone leaves, or dies, or gets struck by lightning...they can lose quite a bit. They’re trying to turn the ship, but it’s hard.”
Turning the ship seems to be the common theme among governmental agencies. There’s a lot of baggage to handle. “When I came into the business, I looked at the Air Force and wondered how they got anything done. But I’ve come to realize that a lot of the bureaucracies are in place for a good reason. Take IT security, for example. If I wanted to get something installed on an Air Force server, it would require a little bit short of an Act of Congress. They have so many stringent requirements to meet before they would EVER run an application on one of their servers. It was frustrating when I started,” says Doug.
“But I can understand what happens when something is insecure, or information is lost. It seems over the top compared to a Fortune 500 company. But on the other hand, they’re protecting some pretty important stuff...”
An Agent for Change
The distinction between a government organization and a commercial one was also a key subject in my chat with Jan Rosi. As president of TOWER Software North America, Jan is well known in the records management industry. But thanks in part to a proximity to Washington (TOWER NA is based in Reston, VA), Jan’s company is also a key vendor to the public sector.
She has seen a lot of change. “Government is like a business—it’s an organization with objectives,” Jan says, “but those objectives are around policy development. Government organizations also have two clients—one is the government itself, and the other is the citizen. They have a responsibility to deliver services to both of those clients,” says Jan.
Jan agrees with Doug, however circular and redundant it may sound, that those who work in public service really feel the need to act as public servants. The only difference is: it’s harder now. “Citizens have a higher expectation of service,” says Jan, citing faster response, more accessibility and easier contact as part of that greater expectation level. “Before, when it was a paper trail, citizens could accept that it was bureaucratic and laborious, and response times of weeks or months were OK.”
Not now. And therein lies the fundamental friction between what can be done and what should be done. “In government, business-as-usual is the accepted attitude; change is not rewarded,” says Jan.
That’s too bad for us, because change is happening at all levels, whether our public servants like it or not. One of the major causes of consternation is a dynamic very familiar to commercial business, but foreign to most of the old-school government types: competition. “Senior leaders in government are increasingly concerned with competition, whether it’s on a global, state or local level. That’s where their revenue is derived: taxes. If they don’t have solid businesses in their state, province or even country, they will not have the funding to continue to operate,” says Jan. “It used to be that Virginia competed with Maryland to attract and retain business. Now Virginia competes with China,” she says.
Stepping up to that challenge requires an entirely different view of technology and business efficiencies. “There are new quote-unquote business drivers that would be very familiar to a commercial business owner, but they are unknown to government workers,” says Jan.
But that’s not the end of it. “They are spending taxpayer money, so there is a high level of accountability. Government is actually very good at managing information, because government has to be accountable to Government. They’re often asked: ‘Why did you make that decision? Where and by whom was that decision made?’ And not just that, but ‘Where’s the documentation to prove it?’ In business, the drive is to make decisions fast, and if the decision is successful, nobody has to justify it.”
Jan suggests that this high level of scrutiny—not quite reached even by the SEC or other business regulatory bodies—sets government apart in terms of transparency. “Transparency in the public sector has been a demand driver, much more so than in the private sector,” Jan says. “...except in the intelligence agencies,” she adds, laughing.
So what impact has this need to make government accessible had on the information management business? I ask, trying to bring us back to the subject of this White Paper. “Take FOIA, for example,” says Jan. The Freedom of Information Act allows citizens to request access to certain non-classified documents. Agencies are required to respond within prescribed time frames. “Citizens demand greater responsiveness to FOIA requests—they send an email and expect an answer within the day!” says Jan. “The increasing volume of information is making it more difficult to get, so it’s an increasing cost. Astronomical, actually.”
But, Jan says, FOIA has actually had a positive impact on government document and contact management purchases. For one thing, ECM puts information into a “central repository” so all information can be found more readily. But most importantly, ECM comes with workflow built in; a FOIA request is a custom-made example of a process that can take advantage of workflow. “This request has to go to Bill Smith,” Jan explains. “It has to come back within 24 hours. It needs to be sent by email. It has to have three levels of approval... it’s a perfect candidate for workflow. You know where the document is; you know who’s got it; you know how long it’s been there...it can’t go into a black hole in legal or somewhere. It’s the public sector version of e-discovery.”
We turn our conversation, again, to the challenges faced by governmental agencies, and the knowledge-drain factor comes up again. “Government has a large population who is going to be leaving; there will be a huge exodus of staff,” Jan agrees. “And because government is largely about information, there’s going to be a huge knowledge gap that just walks out the door. Agencies are concerned about that, but I do not know whether they are aware there are solutions,” worries Jan.
“They’re taking it on a case-by-case basis,” she thinks. “Bill goes...oh, what will we do? Then Jane goes...oh, now what will we do?”
ECM systems, says Jan, can help organizations retain that knowledge, but “government’s biggest challenge is that it is very resistant to change. And ECM is a big change.”