Government Agency Challenges: Managing Digital Communications Records

State, federal and local government agencies need to keep important records (including digital communications) for a long time, to stay in compliance with public records laws, open meeting, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and various state sunshine laws. If an agency has email, social media, web and other digital communications related to business activities, records must be available to anyone who asks for them.

Agencies also need to keep digital records in case they’re involved in an investigation or lawsuit; the data may be required for an e-discovery request, or used as evidence during a trial.

Despite these requirements, record-keeping systems within government are often inadequate. Agencies typically grapple with three significant digital communications archiving challenges:

• Time and Effort Involved in Responding. Public record and FOIA laws require public records to be stored so they can be produced when requested. An inability to properly follow through on these requests can result in increased costs and loss of productivity when the agency (or a third party) has to take time to scour records, fumbling for relevant information. A court can even become involved to fix the situation if an agency refuses to supply records, further increasing its chance of facing legal fines, sanctions, and more lost productivity.
• Capturing All Relevant Communications. Some public records requirements were written when paper files were the main form of government communication. This causes problems when agencies try to interpret and apply the requirements to modern-day digital communications records. For example, social media and mobile messaging have complicated the ability to meet records retention requirements. Every time an agency fails to acknowledge and retain a new form of communication, employees can easily bypass archiving systems, either inadvertently or intentionally. The National Archives and Records Administration requires government agencies to ‘articulate clear processes, policies, and recordkeeping roles and responsibilities to ensure social media records are identified, managed and captured.’ A failure to follow this can result in regulatory or legal problems.
• Cost and Effort to Manage Digital Archives. New social media and mobile communications platforms have also spurred fast growth in the volume of content that government agencies must retain, creating more work for IT administrators. When the volume spirals out of control, IT gets stuck spending time (and government money) managing storage needs. As content volumes increase, longer backup times and trouble with data restorations after a server crash also become more common.

What can you do to address these record-keeping challenges?

First, your agency must determine how much digital communications oversight is required by law and regulatory rules.

Second, you’ll need a policy that outlines which digital communications channels and mobile devices are allowed or prohibited by your agency. Will your agency allow LinkedIn and Facebook posts, but prohibit text messaging on employee-owned smartphones? Be specific about where, when, how (and on what devices) employees can communicate to the public, or with each other.

Third, an archiving solution is essential to preserve digital communications, and help your compliance and IT teams manage records requests. Consider a system that’s designed to handle:

• The volume and variety of communications channels used by your employees.
• New content types as technologies evolve.
• Automatic assignment of retention periods to digital records, so your employees don’t have the burden of deciding which records stay or get deleted.

Also, cloud-based solutions are a good choice, since they can help budget-constrained agencies streamline the number of IT personnel needed to manage and maintain on-premise equipment. And, while many agencies purchase software that just sits on a shelf until the time and resources to properly implement it eventually align, a cloud solution is easier to get up and running right away.

If your agency is obligated to comply with laws and regulations—pull your stakeholders together, develop a smart digital communications policy, and implement archiving technology. Together these will help you oversee the sheer number of email, social media, web and other digital communications channels used by your employees, and automate much of the record-keeping needed to respond quickly to open records laws.