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Get caught up with our other 2019 NARA Readiness Report posts:
- New Survey Reveals Why Federal Agencies Aren’t Transferring Records to NARA
- Survey: Federal Agency Progress Towards the 2019 M-12-18 Deadline
Agencies are undoubtedly moving towards the impending NARA deadline with their own priorities regarding what needs to get done when. That said, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t certain trends appearing throughout the industry.
We reached out to over 150 federal government officials to get an idea of what stage their digitizing efforts were at per part of the process. Below is only a glimpse of our findings; access our full 2019 NARA readiness report for more insights.
Report Preview:
With the 2019 M-12-18 deadline in mind, most respondents indicated their agency is furthest along to completion in email management. Digitizing hard-copy records and migrating records to a cloud application are further behind.
Impressions:
Paul Olenick: Email was one of the first workloads that government agencies started migrating to the cloud so it makes sense that email management is the area agencies would be furthest along in M-12-18 compliance.
Updating information governance practices and procedures is an area where we’ve seen agencies struggle. Sometimes agency file plans or procedures are so old that they’re gathering dust. Now is the time to revisit and revise!
Alyssa Blackburn: The completion line draws your attention in the graph above but it’s interesting to note that 15% of respondents are unsure of the M-12-18 compliance status of their social media management. That’s 3X the other areas. Makes sense. Social media is one of the newest workloads to which record managers have been introduced. It’s a great
example of why record management regulations have to be updated for the digital era.
John Peluso: One red flag is that less than half of respondents have completed migrating records to a cloud application. From the NARA survey, we know this is a huge struggle for agencies. There has been a steady decline since 2016 (from 64% to 56%) in agencies that report that they’ve documented and approved procedures to enable the migration of records and associated metadata.
Want more in-depth relevant statistics and expert analyses? Click here for the full 2019 NARA Readiness Report.
