Government Technology - October 2008 - (Page 22)

B Y C H A D V A N D E R V E E N | A S S O C I AT E E D I T O R C ANADA With in-depth rules and a progressive vendor, the Canadian federal government aggressively confronts the challenge of records management. Exposure W E AS A SOCIETY may never entirely escape the crinkly clutches of paper, but we are converting more of it to digital format. More importantly, we are also creating many more documents today that are born digital. As such, records management is an issue of growing prominence and mounting concern. Every public-sector agency should be thinking about a records management strategy — at the very least making plans to handle e-discovery requests. As daunting a task as making sense of thousands of unstructured digital documents may seem, you are not alone. Records management is a challenge governments around the world must confront, including our neighbors to the north. cies and procedures that are implemented across the board. In the United States, states govern themselves to a higher degree than Canada’s provinces. Though still a federation, Canada’s government is structured similarly to the United Kingdom, in which power is largely consolidated at the federal level. Document management is one area where greater centralization may be an advantage. In Ottawa, government officials have been working hard on a national strategy for managing electronic documents. The cornerstone of the strategy is documenting how to manage digital records and disseminate that information — and the associated training — to all government employees, according to Stephen Walker, senior director of information management strategies for the Chief Information Officer Branch from the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. Already, Walker said, federal employees are being trained on what Canadians call information management, or IM — not to be confused with instant messaging. “First of all, there’s a document, which has already been published and departments are responsible for implementing, which is on roles and responsibilities for IM specifically,” he said. “It speaks to what every individual level of employee within a given organization is responsible for respective of IM. There’s a new document to be delivered this fall called IM Basics, which again, breaks down those rules of responsibilities to the day-to-day operational requirements for every government in the country.” Accompanying the documentation is a government-backed training and development program, which educates employees on IM, with additional training for task-specific agencies and agency managers. Training and documented policies are good, right? But how do such policies get set, and who decides what kind of training employees ought to have? Walker said the federal government has been working with provincial governments and the Public Service CIO Council — a body made up of Northern Docs, Docs, Docs The Canadian federal government is more centralized than the United States. As a result, Canada is better positioned to roll out poliOCT_08 22 http://www.govtech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - October 2008

Government Technology - October 2008 Contents Point of View On the Scene Big Picture Four Questions for... Letters Cover Stories: Border Crossing The Australian E-Connection Easy Rider Northern Exposure Technology on the Cheap Ditching the Desktop Heightening the Experience Pipe Dream Falling Between the Cracks Come Together, Right Now... It's a ... Car? Digital State of the Art Spectrum Products Two Cents signal:noise

Government Technology - October 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.