Central Government

Transformational records management in Singapore

By Jianggan Li | 23 October 2008

How do you plan for scalable records management? What different approaches are organisations taking to the business of information management? Can public sector organisations find the skilled staff to manage information registries? These were some of the key questions raised by senior government officials at a recent CXO Lunch organised by FutureGov, and co-hosted by Fuji Xerox.

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The issue of records management is taken very seriously by government–something underlined by the fact that the CXO Lunch was oversubscribed.

More than 30 senior officials joined subject matter experts from industry, the Editor of FutureGov magazine, and a visiting official from the Australian Bureau of Statistics for several hours of detailed discussion.

“We have a number of records registries in multiple locations, and our challenge is to map out the best way to integrate these, whilst at the same time ensuring that the new consolidated registry is as accessible as before,” said one official. In this case records management reflected the structure of the organisation, rather than the structure of the workflows within the organisation.

Another challenge voiced by a number of participants reflected the manpower constraints of managing ever greater volumes of archived material, whilst maintaining responsiveness to internal users and the general public.

“In the old days you had experienced staff who had spent decades in the registry and who instinctively understood where and how different records were to be categorised. But these people are now all reaching retirement age, and frankly you cannot replace them these days,” one person commented.

Agreeing, the next speaker went on to say that this was happening against an unprecedented increase in volumes of records requiring filing: “I think everybody is struggling with the amount of information they have, let alone the increase, and I know that it is hard to find people who want to commit to a career in records management. This is proving to be a really big challenge for us.”

The knock-on impact of this twin challenge of increasing volumes of records, and staff recruitment, is that government organisations have tried to either arbitrarily reduce the amount of material being archived, or spread the workload out across all the staff of an organisation. As the discussion made clear, neither of these approaches were without pitfalls.

One government department had debated whether all records should continue to be archived or whether discretion should be given to individual staff to file or discard documents as they saw fit. In this case, caution ruled – and the decision was taken to view all information as corporate knowledge requiring archiving.

John Lalor, a visiting official from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, said it was very hard to get people to tag the information themselves. He cited an initiative to unify several Australian government agencies’ information and make them searchable through a single web portal: “The idea was fantastic but it never reached its full potential. The reason was just that everyone was asked to put the tagging themselves; it just didn’t work.”

The knock-on impact of this twin challenge of increasing volumes of records, and staff recruitment, is that government organisations have tried to either arbitrarily reduce the amount of material being archived, or spread the workload out across all the staff of an organisation. As the discussion made clear, neither of these approaches were without pitfalls.

One government department had debated whether all records should continue to be archived or whether discretion should be given to individual staff to file or discard documents as they saw fit. In this case, caution ruled – and the decision was taken to view all information as corporate knowledge requiring archiving.

John Lalor, a visiting official from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, said it was very hard to get people to tag the information themselves. He cited an initiative to unify several Australian government agencies’ information and make them searchable through a single web portal: “The idea was fantastic but it never reached its full potential. The reason was just that everyone was asked to put the tagging themselves; it just didn’t work.”

“The key issue is always how to encourage people to use the system, because when you put in place a content management solution, it forces people to change the way they work,” says Paul Yam, Business Manager, Document Solutions Group, Fuji Xerox.

Yam then referred to a study by Fuji Xerox which had found that workers typically spent at least between 15 to 20 minutes a day filing content. Multiply that across the entire headcount of an organisation over the course of a year, and you can see that the hidden cost of record management is actually very high.

“Asking staff to shoulder more responsibility for the filing of an organisation’s records does not reduce their individual workload, and it does not reduce the amount of records management undertaken by the agency – it merely spreads out the work. But the work is still there,” said James Smith, Managing Editor of FutureGov magazine. “It’s a neat way of hiding the issue – but as records management volumes continue to grow, the problem of won’t go away. Workers will just get less productive as more of their time is spent self-filing.”

NO QUICK FIXES. The Singapore officials broadly agreed that although technology had led to the explosion in the amount of information being handled and archived by government organisations – the solution would require more than just a quick technology fix. One government observer ruefully explained that their agency had been struggling for over a year to ‘train’ a metatagger to correctly recognise documents.

“Our experience over the past ten years is that the success of your content management strategy is not dependent on the technology – that’s just the beginning. The reason why some agencies are successful and some are not is because of the people,” added Fuji Xerox’s Yam.

He explained that no system could compensate for a lack of process and discipline in the tagging of content: “Once you tag wrongly, it’s a case of rubbish in, rubbish out. And I’ve yet to see a technology in the market today which can ensure auto-categorisation of information. So because of this, outsourcing the more monotonous low value tasks associated with archiving and records management is an increasingly important option.”

One of the Singaporean civil servants agreed: “With lean manpower we need to rethink the whole process. Our staff expect to spend their time on higher priority tasks, rather than tagging content all day.”

DELIVERING TRANSFORMATION. The role of outsourcing in delivering a more effective information management process monopolised much of the discussion – drawing upon earlier expressed concerns about the increased volumes of data, the challenge of finding the right staff, and the desire to leverage international best practice.

As Fuji Xerox’s Yam explained, government organisations needed to be clear sighted about what constituted their core competency – tagging information, or acting on information that had been tagged effectively by others: “If you want to put people to do the job, you put the best people.”

FutureGov magazine’s Smith agreed, noting that too few organisations were making full use of the information they had tagged, and that there was an opportunity to get more return from an organisation’s knowledge assets if government agencies’ saw this as their specialised purpose: “Who tags the information is not really important, as long as it correctly and effectively tagged. What you do with that information is what marks out high performance government agencies.”

In order to maximise the ‘best sourcing’ opportunity, a number of representatives of Singapore agencies stressed that key concerns had to be addressed – primarily relating to the security and privacy of information.

Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Lalor said that outsourcing did not raise security issues; security issues stemmed from the processes you did or did not have in place. The same processes used to secure internal information handling could also be applied to third party providers. A large number of participants already had co-sourcing arrangements in place for the scanning of images – outsourcing records management was in many ways the next logical extension.

“How do you ensure that your own employees won’t leak your information?” Yam asked rhetorically. “You sign contractual documents with them. When you enter into an arrangement with a third party provider like Fuji Xerox, we make the same legal undertaking that your staff would.”

AN INFORMATION SPRINGBOARD. Information was clearly a doubleedged sword. On the one hand, everyone recognised the value of their information, and the importance of managing it to support the mission of the agency. On the other hand, ever increasing volumes of records threatened to overwhelm the best efforts of civil servants to act on this information.

A truly transformational approach to records management – one that recognised that categorising of information was a commoditised process, and which focused resources and staff attention on higher value activities.

“Information management is a very long journey,” concluded Yam. “So what I tell my customers is that we can work with them throughout the entire information lifecycle. Parts of which remain in house, and parts of which can be selectively outsourced. In all of this, the objective is to focus on delivering the best quality outcome for the organisation.”