- A set of technical
specifications for creating, managing and using records management
metadata and explanations of the principles that govern them;
- Practical guidance on
implementation issues and on the use of existing metadata sets, and
- An evaluation of existing
metadata sets and initiatives linked to ISO 15489.
Challenges of e-Government and strategies for Records and Archives Management services
by Michael Steemson
Abstract
As the title suggests, the paper is a
study of the state of e-government in the world and the exciting, scary impact
it has had and is having on government information management practice and
practitioners, and its spin-off effects in the private sector. The paper was presented to the 2004 International Seminar for Urban Development Archives in Hangzhou, China. An up-dating edition of this paper, presented to an Information
Lifecycle Management conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, in July 2006, may be seen here.
____________
By world estimation, the leading nation in the
e-Government stakes is Canada. By one survey’s judgment, it has reached
over 70 per cent
of its potential use of electronic government to the point that its services to
citizens are outperforming traditional processes, the first country to achieve
this level.
The little South East Asian republic of Singapore is next with some
1,600 government services available electronically which reach 60 per cent of
the government’s potential.
Surprisingly, the United States of America, where information technology
rules supreme, comes only third, a percentage point behind Singapore and
followed by Denmark, Australia and Finland.
China’s Special Administrative Region, Hong Kong, comes seventh ahead of
Britain and other European nations.
Who says so? The Americans say
so or, to be precise, one of America’s leading international management and
technology consultants, Accenture.
Judgment is based on the achieved levels of what can potentially be
done. In the last two years, the top three nations have stayed the same. But the lower ranks have changed. In 2001, my country, New Zealand, was ranked
eighth, one ahead of Hong Kong. Now New
Zealand has dropped off the ratings altogether although it has the highest
Internet usage per head of population (75%) of anywhere in the world. New Zealand Government agencies are working
hard to regain their place among the best.
These tests are dependent on perceived notions of potential. Perhaps more practical is the level of
e-Government usage that citizens apply.
More than 70 percent of Canadians believe the Internet will improve
their links with Government but still only 20 percent of them pay their taxes
on line.
By comparison, 45 percent of Singaporeans are happy to pay that
way. The U.S. is close behind in this
process. The latest statistics from the
big U.S. audience measurement agency Nielsen Netratings, show that tax collecting
agencies attract some three million Americans on line each week by offering
step-by-step instructions, automated calculations and quick returns.
Yet another measurement, used by the London-based market information
group, TNS, identifies the size of the increase in usage over 12 months, a
reflection of the market potential rather than the size of the user base. The Netherlands heads this list with a nine
percent increase from 41% usage to 52%. Denmark is next then Finland, India,
Norway and then Hong Kong with a six percent increase to 43%.
Premier Blair campaign
In the country of my birth, Great Britain, early promise in e-Government
services has faltered, despite brave words from the nation’s charismatic Prime
Minister, Tony Blair, who has called for all British Government agencies to be
on line with their services by the end of next year. He created the office of
e-Envoy "to champion e-commerce" in the UK and "spearhead a
wake-up call to British business".
The thrust of Mr Blair’s campaign was to get services on line, come what
may.
It hasn’t worked very well. British uptake has risen to only 20% of
users and the rate of increase is low.
As the TNS report says: “There is still work to be done to convince
citizens of the benefits of online access when compared to other delivery
channels like telephone or face-to-face.”
The e-Envoy, Andrew Pinder, is losing his job this year as his contract
ends and is being replaced by a new ”Head of e-Government”. Publicly, he recognizes the poor response
from Britons, telling an interviewer, recently: “The take-up of on-line
government services is a particular area of concern.”[1]
Privately, he believes that the British Government’s rush to get
everything on line has been precipitous, resulting in Government departments
hastening to the World Wide Web with a random, ill thought-out jumble of low
value information rather than making efforts to build useful, useable services.
And in its last annual report, UK online 2003, the Office of the
e-Envoy admits: “Overall e-government transactions are still relatively low. Only 8% of
Internet users claim to have transacted with Government departments online.” [2]
Britain is not alone in this short fall. The road to e-Government is filled with such
potholes.
China gets on-line
But how fares the Peoples’ Republic of China? Where does it lie in these various scales of use and expertise?
In the latest report from Beijing’s China Internet Network Information
Center (CNNIC), China was said to have 68 million Internet users and half a
million web sites[3]. With a population of 1.3 billion, according
to the United Nations, that puts the republic still a long way down the world
scale at about five percent penetration, but it displays a huge increase from
the January 2002 estimate of only 12 million users.
Big efforts are being made across this country to improve those figures
and bring them into line with the massive potential of this massive
nation. Some men have already seen the
light. China’s richest man, William
Ding Lei, made his US$900 million with his Beijing dot.com company,
Netease. The People’s Daily
on-line newspaper called him “the most influential rich man in China”.[4]
Mr Ding has vividly demonstrated the power of the Internet and has also
shown that Chinese citizens are happy to use the World Wide Web when they can
access it. Central Government, city and
borough authorities are taking notice.
China gets on-line
Back in 2001, a group of leading experts took the first steps
pronouncing “the construction of e-Government in China is a strategic keystone
of national economy and social information”.[5]
In December 2002, the Permanent Secretary for Commerce, Industry and
Technology, Francis Ho, lead a delegation to the e-Government China 2002 Expo
in Beijing with representatives from nine Chinese Government departments and
senior executives of 16 Hong Kong IT companies. It was, said the Commerce, Industry and Technology Bureau, the
first time that “the public and private sector joined hands to demonstrate Hong
Kong's expertise and talents in the development of e-Government solutions in
the Mainland”.[6]
Last September, Dr Zhou Hong Ren, deputy director of the China National
Information Generalization Experts Committee, announced that the Chinese
government will spend 250 billion yuan per year for e-government programs in
the next few years[7]. Compare the
size of these huge sums with the estimated U.S. e-Government annual budget of
just a little over one-third of that figure.[8]
The announcement did not meet with unalloyed approval. The Shanghai Guangji Business Consulting
company newsletter commented: “The content of the government website is poor and
updates to the websites are not forthcoming. The public feel that they cannot
get the latest information and there are also no useful applications on the
websites.”
But Chinese bureaucrats are not deterred. Last January, Shanghai’s new Mayor, Han Zheng, reassured the city in his massive,
14,000-word annual report on the metropolis’s progress. He told city deputies:
“Application of information technology will be
promoted vigorously in the whole society, and the pace of construction of a
unified e-government network at the municipal level will be quickened.
Resources of information about government affairs will be developed and put
into use, and sharing of information resources will be promoted.”[9]
Recordkeepers’ hard work
It is all very modern and exciting but for us records, archives and
information managers, these brave words mean hard work, anxiety, business
pressure and even political campaigning the like of which we have never
experienced.
The renowned leader of the British World War II effort, Winston
Churchill, expressed the outlook famously 18 months into that five-year
conflict. In the House of Commons, the
British Parliament’s lower house, he warned of the coming battles: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”
I do not pretend to be another Churchill or that the electronic
information revolution we face will necessarily be bloody. But to get the job done properly, we will
have to become revolutionaries. There
will sleepless nights, long working hours, toil and sweat ...
perhaps even tears, too.
What your employers and even most of your colleagues will not have
understood is that electronic records are dynamic, impermanent and fragile,
requiring new processes and procedures to allow your organisations to benefit
from the electronic advantages … immediacy, automation, accessibility, re-usability.
And as the information revolution battles are won, your organisations
will become healthier and more efficient than ever in their history and, if
there is any justice, your masters will be patting you on the back and offering
generous bonuses.
Oh, would not that be wonderful!
As my sardonic recordkeeping colleagues would say: “Don’t hold your
breath until then!”
Seriously, though, e-Government will undoubtedly bring huge value to
citizens. But it will not be achieved
without huge effort and much of that effort will have been ours, the
recordkeepers.
Re-shaping e-Organisation
The effort will have to be expended to literally re-shape our
organisations, re-training fellow workers from chief executive to humblest
clerk to think about records management, applying controls to everything they
write or receive.
The principles of records management are simple, as you know. They were carefully set out by the
International Standards Organization in its Records Management standard,
ISO15489, which was published in late 2001 and so usefully translated into the
Chinese Mandarin language by Associate Professor Dr An Xiaomi and her
colleagues at the Archives College of the Renmin University of China in
Beijing.
The standard is not just a Western work. The ISO15489 authoring committee, ISO sub-committee TC46/SC11,
had representatives from China and Japan and the Standard was reviewed by every
ISO national member body, the standards authorities in the dozens of nations
that belong to the organization, many in the Asian region.
So, we can gird ourselves with ISO15489 to take the revolution to our
seniors and your peers. You can tell
them: “This is not just your records manager/archivist telling you the way to
do things. This is the world telling
you.”
Faces of e-Government
E-Government systems have many faces, but they fall into three major types.
These are:
Intra-departmental use by staff within an agency to move
information between each other as required for the organization’s
business. This may be achieved on a
private internal Internet system sometimes referred to as an intranet.
Intra-Government use by which agencies correspond in
situations like social welfare services and, perhaps, police departments
exchanging information about their “clients” or finance ministry bureaucrats
networking with agency chief executives.
Government-to-citizen use is the most obvious but the most
difficult to manage because it comprises the delivery of information and
services to and from astronomical numbers of people, few of whom can easily be
trained beforehand to use the systems well.
Understandably, governments want to extend this latter class to persuade
citizens they are close to government, that they have greater control over
their own destinies, can see more clearly what Government is up to and
understand better what it is trying to achieve.
e-Government buzz words
E-Government has given our leaders a clutch of strange, new phrases and
sayings. “Transparent Government” is one of them, though it is not one that
commends itself to me. It sounds vaguely indecent, but we know what the
politicians mean.
“The Connected Public” is another, a high-sounding aim to have the whole population using and understanding the Internet. And we talk about “bridging the digital divide”, “the changing role of government”, “transforming the government business sector” and “democratic renewal”.
But what it all comes down to is communicating with the public in a way
that makes it comfortable … comfort
with an unknowable array of sensitivities and requirements. The trick of e-Government is to satisfy
those requirements with comprehensible information and effective services
involving many different forms of information.
Contact with citizens at present largely involves paper in the form of
letters and forms. E-Government will
need more than that. It will include
email, of course, voice, sound and video files, records from systems we have
not thought of, yet. And, it will
inevitably eventually involve records containing more than one of these media.
It requires displays of information, little if any of which will be
everlastingly unchanged. It needs
information from databases that are constantly up-dating. And it needs to keep
track of the information that citizens are using and reacting to because it has
to keep vital. And it must know when things go wrong.
To recordkeepers, the automated nature of e-Government is the nub of the
problem and the excitement of the challenge.
Statistics change minute by minute.
Regulations change day to day.
Legislation changes regularly.
Urban regions grow existentially.
Nothing that concerns e-Government is immutable.
To do the e-Government job satisfactorily, governments have to ensure
that the information their systems release is current, correct and
comprehensible. Here is where records
and archives managers come into focus.
This requires records management of a high order, by recordkeepers
certainly, but also by every member of the organisations that produce the
information that the public will have to trust and act upon.
That is why
ISO15489 recommends: “These
responsibilities should be assigned to all employees of the organization,
including records managers, allied information professionals, executives,
business unit managers,
systems administrators and others who create records as part of their work, and
should be reflected in job descriptions and similar statements.”[10]
To maintain public trust, we have to ensure the integrity of the
information in the systems. It has to
be complete and authentic.
That is why ISO15489 says: “A record
should correctly reflect what was communicated or decided or what action was
taken. It should be able to support the needs of the business to which it
relates and be used for accountability purposes.”
Those disgraceful disclaimers
Many e-Government processes have not understood this imperative for trust,
and many websites give themselves away with what are called ”disclaimers” but
are really admissions of failure in recordkeeping.
I came across one once on an American website boasting of "Using
information technology to improve the quality of … government". I
leave the blank space to avoid embarrassing the state. The website disclaimer then said:
"No warranty,
expressed or implied, is offered as to the accuracy of this information. (The
state) cannot be held liable for damages incurred due to accurate, inaccurate,
or missing data."
It was an extraordinary escape clause. The site was primarily to inform
the local citizens, or so it said. How
could anyone trust such a site? It had
no faith in its own material.
Now however, two years later, the state agency has seen the light and no
longer makes grand statements like “using information technology to improve the
quality of government.” But it still
has a disclaimer that I’m sure the agency’s recordkeepers blush at when they
see it.
“Any person or entity that relies on any information obtained from this system does so at his or her own risk.”
Perhaps the local state legislature requires such a statement, but across the world, there are thousands of websites with similar legal escape clauses, perhaps required by local laws but always a tacit admission that records management is not holding its own.
I am sure that when China gets more of its e-Government sites up and running and its recordkeepers have a firm grip on the contents, there will be no need for such dismaying excuses in the Peoples’ Republic.
Will there?
Metadata matters
Metadata are vital to record keeping and especially to
e-Government. Paper records carry their
own metadata, signatures, letterheads, dates, postmarks and addresses. Electronic records have to be given similar
data about the data they carry … the
metadata. Metadata identify where,
when, who and, often, why a record was made, to whom it was sent and why, who
has seen and amended it, why and, most importantly from an e-Government
perspective, when.
Government and citizens must be sure they
know when rule and regulations change, for their own benefit and peace of
mind. The “when”, is often the most
vital meta-information.
These are the reasons ISO is
on the point of publishing a metadata standard, created by the ISO15489
sub-committee 11, to complement the records management standard. It is called ISO 23081 Records Management Processes – Metadata
for Records. In its final draft for public discussion as
a technical specification, it is currently circulating for international
comment. It acknowledges its importance
to e-Government with the statement:
“Metadata play a role in enabling e-business, including e-commerce and e-government, which includes integration with enterprise applications. Metadata about all stages of the e-business processes can be captured.”
It is
another simple document, setting out the truths of metadata creation and the
different times they should be added to records.
It consists
of three parts:
SC11, I believe, hopes to have the document complete by the end of this
year and published early in 2005.
Understandable, accessible
A further concern for records and archives manager is that the information
we care for should be understandable and easily accessible.
That is why ISO15489 says: “A useable record is one that can be located, retrieved, presented and interpreted. It should be capable of subsequent presentation as directly connected to the business activity or transaction that produced it.”
What is more, we must ensure that, in this ephemeral environment, we
know what is being promulgated by our automated information systems.
That is one of the reasons why ISO15489 says: “An organization … should
establish, document, maintain and promulgate policies, procedures and practices
for records management to ensure that its business need for evidence,
accountability and information about its activities is met.”
Dynamic documents, that is records created automatically in response to
user commands, are the most difficult to manage because they are so completely
transitory. They exist only while the
user is on-line but they may be needed in the future, especially in the case of
a dispute.
So, ISO15489 says: “Tracking
systems have to meet the test of locating any record within an appropriate time
period and ensuring that all movements are traceable.”
There are two ways to solve this problem. The easiest way is for the system to create and keep a copy each time
such a dynamic record is made. That is
the cheapest, but it is also the bulkiest.
The more difficult way is to provide processes to re-create the record.
It is more expensive to build but has no storage overhead.
But there is an even greater dynamic hazard for recordkeepers,
“presentation transactions”
Legal snares of presentation
The requirement to record web-based “presentation” transactions like those happening on e-Government systems every second, is a particular source of disquiet for records and archives managers. The problem with presentation transactions is that they move control of content away from the information owner and closer to the end user.
Take, for example, those electronic tax returns now, apparently, increasingly beloved of American citizens. When Mr America goes on-line to pay his dues, the system gathers information about him from many databases … his employment details, family and other allowances, the exemptions for expenses, mortgage, debts, investments and, perhaps, charitable donations … all set out against what are, at that moment, current tax liabilities and regulations.
Based on what the system tells him, he calculates on screen the amount he owes and pays, probably with a credit card, keeping for himself the receipt and copies of the on-screen forms he has completed. Once he closes his Internet link, all that assembled information disappears and very rapidly changes as Mr America’s life goes on and rules are amended. Perhaps more importantly, the calculations he made on his computer screen are lost … unless somewhere, somehow, someone has managed to keep a record of them.
It is a problem eloquently set out to a recent national conference of
the Records Management Association of Australasia in Sydney.
A tall, suave exporter of Australian document output software, Mr Tony Poynton, spoke carefully and slowly to around 400 Australian and New Zealand recordkeepers, letting the words sink in.
“Content and presentation are now separate entities, unlike traditional document production. Presentation influences action. Records management often views the document as a static entity, but users demand documents as fluid entities. Documents are now event-driven and the most important documents may not be those we consider records.”
They were dismaying words. Up to this point, we records and archives managers were reaching comfort zones in what we do. We seemed, finally, to be getting retention strategies, context and structure settled. Access protocols were being agreed, disposal authorities established and implementation procedures fixed. We had even begun to think, rightly or wrongly, that we had built useful defences against the tidal waves of emails. But now, just when a permanent electronic record looks possible, technology seemed to be going to defeat us again.
Mr Poynton was referring to new information technologies that can and are creating records which organisations and their recordkeepers often know nothing about: records made instantly on websites, customised for individual customers from different and, perhaps, widely distributed data sources. In an unacceptable percentage of cases organisations are either unaware of this danger or in denial that what they sending to clients is not what is being recorded
Documents may now be created with data from a variety of sources using what has become known as “conditional processing” which can change content at will with up-to-the-second calculations and information that can disappear immediately afterwards. Often, the user undertakes the procedures at places in the process beyond the traditional control points for organisational records, on the screen of Mr America’s home-based personal computer, for example. It is no use arguing that the resultant documents are not records. To the user, they most certainly are.
The record is whatever the client is able to get a court of law to agree to. And in a court of law, anything can be a record
Sooner or later, the result will be that, when faced with legal challenge, organisations will not be able to prove what was said or given to the client, or be able to refute allegations of miss-information.
Already, in some parts of the Western world, Internet stockbrokers are being sued for losses as clients claim their decisions were based upon inaccurate research linked to their World Wide Web sites. And debt claims are being lost because claimants can no longer produce invoices with their original data.
Imagine how this could impact on Government’s electronic correspondence with citizens, planning decisions, taxes, legal advice, emergencies and changes of financial, commercial or personal status.
Some deep thinking
This scares me. Does it scare you? It should.
It requires a deep re-think of electronic recordkeeping. All system output must be processed through a rules-based document output and management system.
All Web transactions must be recorded before or as they are completed.
Documents must be kept in a stable form like .PDF, for instance, and no outputs should be created without recourse to records management policy.
With our knowledge of the immensity of the problem, records and archives managers are the ones best placed to show that e-Government success requires the involvement of everyone in the organisation, not just the records managers or people with the similar titles. That is probably going to be the biggest change of them all.
When most e-Government planners set out on their long journeys to transparency few have studied or understood just what changes will be required or how to manage them when they are required. It will involve profound system, cultural and organisational changes.
The challenges to records and archives managers are in convincing organisations of this, convincing them that that standards like ISO 15489 and Government regulations are necessary.
It is not an easy journey. In parts of the world where e-Government has been on the menu for years, outcomes have often fallen far short of expectations. Witness the British experience. The plethora of recordkeeping systems and best practice regulations are not enough to guarantee success.
We archives and records managers must recognise that we have to do something. We must become pro-active instead of just reacting. We must adopt a consultative stance, develop broader organisational bases for the profession with less emphasis on the purist, traditional processes.
We have to realise that recordkeeping goes to the heart of organisational activity. Effective recordkeeping systems, by which I mean both manual paper processes and electronic, must integrate with business information systems. Here will be the cost savings and productivity increases sought by our principals.
No, it is not all bad news. Advantages to an organisation could be considerable. Day to day recordkeeping will become cheaper and largely automated. Document production and distribution costs will be lower and customer service will be better and cheaper. Document delivery will become the responsibility of the users but the owner-organisation will remain in charge of document production.
Dropping the “e”
These and many others are the decision and challenges that we records,
archives and information managers will have to grapple with as our nations move
further and further through the e-Government Evolution, from static information
through interactive and dynamic applications, to electronic transactions,
service integration and, finally, whole of government delivery.
Then you
and I will stop talking about “e-Government” and call it simply “government”. That irritating little initial “e” will fade
away as digital service becomes more and more accepted as the way governments
work and we, the recordkeepers, gain strength and surety though our standards
and policies to abandon those annoying website disclaimers that attempt to
dodge legal responsibility for miss-information.
I wish you all well in your journeys. They are exciting, infuriating, frightening and amusing. Like all journeys, they begin with one step … the determination to do something.
Good luck !
