Marie Patterson:

Welcome to Archive360's Data Governance 360 Podcast. This week's episode is titled Data, Records Management and Analytics in the Federal Government. My name's Marie Patterson and I'm the chief marketing officer here at Archive360, and joining me today is Christopher Beasley, the CEO of Edge Digital Group based in Arlington, Virginia. Welcome, Chris.

Chris Beasley:

Thanks, Marie. I'm happy to be here.

Marie Patterson:

So, thank you so much for joining me on this week's podcast, Chris. To get things started, can you tell our listeners a little bit about Edge Digital and then something about your background? Because your background in particular is just so relevant to today's topic.

Chris Beasley:

Certainly. So Edge Digital Group is a federal contractor concentrating on information governance for various agencies, whether it's law enforcement, Department of Defense, or civilian agencies. We do a lot of records management consulting, and we also have a branch of the business that does mass amounts of digital conversion from different formats, including standard paper, microfilm, microfiche, wide format, and a variety of relatively outdated digital formats as well.

Marie Patterson:

Awesome.

Chris Beasley:

Yeah, I've been in this industry for 30 years and I can tell you there have been a significant number of changes in this industry in that time.

Marie Patterson:

So just out of interest, what made you get into, I guess at the time it was records digitalization or records management?

Chris Beasley:

So, it all kind of started with SharePoint, believe it or not. So we had been doing websites as a relatively young company back then, and in the late '90s we started to see that we wanted to find something more substantive to do where we could support companies and agencies in helping to manage their information. SharePoint came along and we said, "Well, this is a way in which agencies can really categorize their information, store it in something that's better than a file share."

Now, SharePoint in and of itself didn't entirely realize that benefit at that time. It's gotten better since, but that was our first foray into finding a real business use for what they used to call intranet sites. When we stumbled upon records management as a potential line of business, it just kind of made sense, because you have to maintain records for an extraordinarily long amount of time in the federal government, and then we started looking at ways aside from SharePoint to satisfy that need for electronic records management in government.

Marie Patterson:

So specific to records management, Chris, I know that you're also a board member of the Greater Washington DC chapter of ARMA GWDC. For those who don't know, ARMA is, I believe, the primary community for records managers, information managers, and folks in information governance. So, really the professional association for anyone and everyone in records management. What's the primary focus of your particular chapter of ARMA, Chris?

Chris Beasley:

So obviously being in DC itself, there's quite a bit of emphasis on federal records managers, agency records officers, departmental records officers, liaisons and custodians all in the information governance space. But as you would also guess, there are quite a number of law firms in this area, so there's a lot of information governance also stemming around the legal community. So, that's kind of what our focus is.

Marie Patterson:

I believe that you have a major event coming up next month, is that correct? It's your sort of annual conference?

Chris Beasley:

That's right. So there are three area chapters, my chapter, the Greater Washington DC chapter, the Northern Virginia chapter, and the Metro Maryland chapter. We all three come together and do a spring seminar every year. This one will take place on May 14th in the Ronald Reagan building. It's free, lunch is provided, and we have quite a nice set of local luminaries in federal government especially. Our theme is the brave new world of records management.

There's been essentially an upheaval in how records are treated in the federal government. There have been some new mandates coming from both The White House and the National Archives to treat records differently to try to bring them, if not into the 21st century, at least into the second half of the 20th century. So there's quite a bit of activity going on around that, and that's why we consider this a brave new world.

Marie Patterson:

So I think that you mentioned upheaval and brave new world, and that seems to align very much with what we're chatting about today, so let's dig into that, this whole area of records management data and analytics in the federal government and the upheaval. By way of introduction, let's just go straight for it. What are some of the key issues that you're seeing as you are working with your clients, and why do you think it's such an upheaval?

Chris Beasley:

Big reason for the upheaval is the demand for electronic records management and the complete shunning of paper-based records, the embrace of independent formats for electronic files, and the, again, rejection of older formats, whether they be physical electronic formats like Zip drives, Jaz drives, CDs, DVDs, cassettes, all the old stuff that is still sitting around, and the need to convert those to put them into a proper system.

Now, that provides for some amazing gains however, it's not all toil and it's not all cost. You can realize huge benefits by using extractive AI and analytics in order to realize new benefits from old data. Data that most people in an organization don't even know they have, 'cause it's trapped in paper or it's trapped on a floppy disk or what have you. This data does have some amount of value, and it's really important to actually get that into a system where you can house it appropriately and secure it appropriately so that you can analyze it appropriately.

Marie Patterson:

So that really is the shift, isn't it, as you say, new benefits from old data, and that's kind of the paradigm shift to use the big P word that we're seeing in the industry?

Chris Beasley:

Indeed. I think of it kind of like in the oil industry when they start digging into the shale. No one thought that there was going to be value in that old rock, and yet that's helped the United States become the biggest oil producer in the world right now, bigger than all the other countries or OPEC or what have you that you can think of.

We're starting to do the same thing with data, and the key to that is to be able to use records management principles so that you can figure out the truth of a business decision or a transaction and use the truth in your analytics. A lot of the buzz terms around AI and a lot of the interest in that kind of activity has to do with drawing pretty pictures or using distorted data to come to wrongful conclusions, and that is why records and information management serves such a key role in that new frontier.

Marie Patterson:

So one of the things I'm really interested in is clearly AI is no longer bleeding edge, certainly cutting edge, but we've been talking about AI, we've been talking about analytics for some time, but we seem to be at polar opposites to some extent, don't we? On the one hand, you're talking about very, very old data types, information types. You're talked about paper, you're talking about floppy disks, you're talking about systems that have been deprecated years ago, and on the other end of the spectrum, you're talking about organizations being able to extract value.

As you're working with agencies, what do you see as some of the major issues that agencies have to go through to make the case from going from where they are today, which is maybe primarily paper-based or working with very old systems, to this new world of being able to extract value, as you say, gain new benefits from old data?

Chris Beasley:

Well, part of the issue is that the IT sections of many agencies do have quite a bit of influence over how an information management budget is spent. If they can't find a benefit to the organization beyond mere compliance with the rules, it's really difficult to get that budget money, to get the level of effort, the personnel, the software, the hardware, the processes all put into place.

Where we find a lot of benefit to the records and information management community is in changing the conversation to not talk about records, but to talk about data, to talk about how all these different formats, all of this paper, all of these old systems contain data that can be mined for the benefit of the agency to support its mission. That is the paramount activity of any agency is to support the mission. The more you can show how you're supporting the mission, the easier it is to get the resources necessary to carry out the activities you want.

So when it comes to data analytics, being able to show, well, gee whiz, we've got data in this more recent database, we've got data in this other system, we've got potential data in all these paper documents or potential data in these old systems, let's surface all of it. Let's build what's known as a data cube, and let's take a look [inaudible 00:11:46] at how these different data sets interact with each other and what insights we can gain through analytics.

Marie Patterson:

Much of what you're talking about is what we certainly would term technical debt, and there was an article that I saw at the beginning of March I believe it was in The Wall Street Journal by Christopher Mims. So Chris Mims is a columnist who writes about technology for the Journal, and it was entitled The Invisible $1.52 Trillion Problem: Clunky Old Software. He was talking about the cost to organizations by maintaining systems that are very old. He was talking about what the risks are to organizations, that these end up being entry points, and that the cost of maintaining these applications actually prevents organizations from investing money in areas that they should be.

We were working with an organization and they had done the calculation, that I believe the cost to maintain every legacy application was north of $300,000 a year, and they had hundreds if not thousands of applications. What are you seeing, I mean, again, going back to what you were talking about with IT working with records management and the need to turn the conversation from being purely a records management conversation to a data conversation? Is that part of the conversation that you're having with agencies today, Chris, around this technical debt and turning that around?

Chris Beasley:

Absolutely. So first of all, I'll give you a hard format example, with microfilm and microfiche, those formats are obsolete to the point where an agency or a public library may or may not have any working film and fiche readers. That used to be the archival standard, is to put things on microfilm and microfiche. Well, now we're at the point where at many agencies people have these formats, but zero way to read them.

That's not just microfilm and microfiche. I mentioned Zip drives and Jaz drives, and a lot of the old SyQuest drives, other formats, there's barely a CD reader to be found in some of these agencies these days. We just ran across something recently that was asking for an optical drive reader, and I doubt there are many people in the United States who even remember what those are these days.

On the more software side, we've been working with an agency that was a real pioneer in developing an electronic records management system for its own use. It was essentially homegrown based upon some existing technology, and it worked really well for them for decades, but here was the difficulty, the programming days is outdated now. The number of entities who can actually contract with them to service and maintain and improve that system is down to one, and they're having trouble maintaining that as well. So, their difficulty is what if something happens to our system, who are we going to work with? How are they going to fix it, and what in the world are we going to have to pay them? Because they know they're the only people on planet earth who can do it.

So there is a huge debt, but also an opportunity cost, because that old system was not conceived with the idea of integrating with anything else to come up with real data and analytics, it was just meant to house old files. So yeah, this is a huge issue and because of the way the federal government works and obviously its longevity, it has done a lot of pioneering work in a number of systems that are still having to be maintained like that, and it is a huge tech debt.

Marie Patterson:

We had talked about technical debt. Those of you listening who may not know, all of the work that we've been doing with federal agencies has been helping them get rid of their technical debt. Chris, I believe that there's a particular situation that you were aware of with one agency. I think for our listeners, it would be helpful if you could tell us a little bit about that.

Chris Beasley:

Sure. So, the reason we became aware of Archive360 is that there was an issue in one of the DHS agencies that we support where they were using a vault solution to store their email records, but they weren't being stored as records, they weren't being stored efficiently by any stretch of the imagination. Again, we were looking at outdated technology that was not actually suited to the new purpose for records management, it wasn't suited to the capstone implementation that this agency wanted.

As some of you may know, the vault idea is that it's a one-way street. You put it in the vault and it sits in the vault, you don't really manage it in the vault. Transferring it out, it's not really something a vault is designed to do. Even deletion can be very difficult for some vault software. So working with Archive360, we were able to find a path forward and their experts helped get the information out of that vault and into their own system where you can actually manage all of this stuff efficiently and in accordance with records management principles.

Marie Patterson:

I guess the other important piece there, Chris, is going back to what you were saying with the "new mission of records managers," which is retention validation, but also providing appropriate access based on entitlements to the correct people for the correct reasons. So going back to what we were talking about, which is making data available to IT for specific use cases.

Chris Beasley:

Absolutely. That data needs to be not just managed and maintained, it also needs to be curated, and that is capability uniquely suited to the records managers of today, and Archive360 was a big capability jump in being able to curate that data.

Marie Patterson:

Chris, this must be completely transforming the role of records managers in the federal government. So you talked about the example of the agency with a system that they had built, and thinking about traditionally what records managers have cared the most about and their role within the agency and their role within the mission of the agency.

As someone who's been a records management and information governance professional for years, talk to me a little bit about that changing role and some of the newer capabilities, some of the newer ideas that maybe records managers need to be embracing today. Because clearly going from static physical records, paper-based records to this whole idea that I need to be creating something that others not just records management-specific individuals can have access to, that's a real difference.

Chris Beasley:

Agreed. So 10 years ago, a CIO of a particular agency told me that records are not data. As the CIO, he did not care about records, because his job was data. You might've been able to make an argument for that, obviously I disagreed at the time, but you can't make that argument anymore. What a "records manager" really is these days is someone who preserves, validates and presents accurate data to the IT folks so that they can perform analytics and other operations.

Records and data kind of have always been the same thing, but they're definitely the same thing now. Imagine performing operations on data that you haven't validated, you don't know where it came from, you don't know how old it is, all that kind of thing. Well, that's what the "records managers" have always been prepared to help with, they've just never really been asked or tasked with that. Now I think any agency that isn't going that route is doing itself a disservice, and again, is giving itself quite an opportunity cost for letting people essentially work with data in very meaningful ways, but using data that is perhaps not as meaningful or as accurate as they think.

Marie Patterson:

So this notion of data accuracy, making sure that you have clean data is becoming paramount based on what I'm hearing?

Chris Beasley:

That's right, and this is not to suggest that all data be preserved for all time. Data certainly has a useful lifespan, but I also believe in, as you say, clean data, which means you don't dredge in the mud at the bottom of that data lake. You need people with the expertise to understand what data is useful, what data has outlived its usefulness, and again, to sort of scrub it so that you can continue to get high use output from your analytics.

Marie Patterson:

So, many responsibilities being piled on records managers in federal agencies from what you're saying. As you said, the preservation, the validation, and then the presentation, those three pieces. So I'm assuming that the responsibility that records managers have had for some time in terms of the preservation, understanding the regulatory obligations, understanding things like entitlements, those are still paramount. Data governance doesn't go away when the need to make data available to IT becomes of increasing importance. How should records managers be thinking about that? That sounds like a bit of a juggling act.

Chris Beasley:

It is indeed, especially in a profession that has come from "file room management" in the old days to more of a supervisory role akin to what happened to the accounting industry when it became fully automated. This is the same or at least a similar evolution to that role where a records manager is more of a consultant and less of a "bean counter" like an accountant used to be.

This also means that records managers need different skills from what they traditionally used to have. They need to be able to be in the spotlight sometimes and have these group conversations with IT professionals and data scientists, so that they can provide an integrated team for coming up with these analytical solutions.

Marie Patterson:

That's a real big shift, isn't it? I believe that you're going to be at DGI's Annual E-Discovery, Records and Information Management Conference in Reston, Virginia next week. As I was looking at the agenda for that event, they were talking about the volume of digital information growing, the scope of records management expanding exponentially, that this is becoming a critical issue for government agencies, and they say particularly as it relates to providing electronic access and retrieval of government records. What are some of the things that you're hoping to hear at next week's event, again, going back to what you just were talking about regarding this expanding role of records managers?

Chris Beasley:

Well, I would like to be able to hear that there are easier and better ways to make records/data available to those who need to use it. There are so many silos, especially in the federal government, that it can be very difficult to build those data cubes I mentioned earlier and really perform the analytics that agencies are looking to do.

I would like to hear more about preserving data from a security standpoint. Not all data sets should be usable by all people, and it's really important that we keep security in mind. Otherwise, we could end up with ... well, you've seen what's happened with certain other public AI platforms when data sets are gotten ahold of by people who shouldn't have them, so we want to make sure that that doesn't happen in government agencies as well.

You may know that NIST is working on that issue of governance for AI and analytics. It seems that our brains are always ahead of the law when it comes to that sort of thing, so I'd like to hear more about how we're getting our arms around the more proper use of analytics and what we're doing to safeguard against misuse.

Marie Patterson:

Chris, let's try and summarize what you just talked about today.

Chris Beasley:

Well, I guess I would only emphasize that it's the older data that is still within an agency's grasp that is ripe for resurfacing. I think it's really important to take care of all those old formats, be they paper or hard digital formats or what have you. I think there's an excellent case to be made for surfacing that, using it for analytics and helping to make forward-looking decisions that are based on agency history and proper regulations, of course, in forwarding the mission of that agency. I think any agency that's not preparing to do that is really going to be missing out.

Marie Patterson:

Thank you for taking the time to join me on our podcast today as we dig into the topic of records management, information governance and analytics in federal government. I think it was a great conversation. For our listeners who'd like to contact you directly to follow up this conversation, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?

Chris Beasley:

I'm certainly available on LinkedIn, just search for my name, Chris Beasley, or my company, Edge Digital Group. Website, edgedigitalgroup.com, or folks are free to email me at cbeasley@edgedigitalgroup.com.

Marie Patterson:

Fantastic, thank you. If anyone has questions on this topic or would like to speak to one of our subject matter experts here at Archive360, please send an email mentioning this podcast to info@archive360.com, and we'll get back to you as soon as possible. So again, Chris, thank you so much for joining us today.

Chris Beasley:

Thank you for having me, it was a pleasure.

Marie Patterson:

I'd like to thank everyone for downloading and tuning in, and look forward to speaking with you on our next podcast.

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