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Kathleen Kummer | Another View: FEA Records Management—meeting the challenge without total upheaval

By Kathleen Kummer, Special to GCN

Complying with federal reporting regulations has emerged as a significant requirement for publicly traded companies in the private sector. Much has been said about corporate compliance risks and fears but a new twist in the tale is the federal government’s effort to set tougher compliance rules for its own managers.

Now, it turns out, the regulators are also becoming the regulated, with more formalized record-keeping mandates that affect information technology investments across the government enterprise.

Version 1.0 of the Federal Enterprise Architecture Records Management Profile (FEARM), produced by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the Office of Management and Budget Architecture and Infrastructure Committee, and the Federal Chief Information Officers Council, specifies a consistent approach for governmentwide federal records management. In addition, the NARA regulations governing records management, 36 CFR 1234.10, were amended in February 2006 and part (d) specifically calls for agencies to establish procedures for addressing records management requirements, including record-keeping requirements and disposition, before approving new electronic information systems or enhancements to existing systems.

An effective records management system is critical to managing compliance-driven policies and procedures consistently across an organization. Organizations can no longer afford to have different rules and procedures from department to department.

The difficult challenge when trying to ensure this kind of enterprisewide consistency is that information is spread across multiple systems. For large government agencies, this is especially true. Information is generated by numerous applications at every government agency, each of which stores content in its own, isolated, disjointed manner. Content is frequently created in one format, archived in another and documented in a third.

How can government agencies meet the new FEARM requirements without operational or budgetary upheaval and considerable risk?

A solution lies in establishing a central repository that manages the records management rules for content from multiple systems. This “compliant repository” offers a way to consistently apply rules to content, no matter where it “lives” in the organization.

There are four key challenges when implementing such a program.

More news on related topics: Business Process Management, Content / Record Management, Enterprise Architecture, Management, IT Management



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