ERM in Government and Public Service: Key Trends

Faced with a sinking economy and shrinking tax base, Kennewick, population 66,000, came to the conclusion that it needed a new business process that would enable it to do more with its current resources and improve efficiencies throughout city government.

Hobbled with manual processes
Prior to implementation, the city was hobbled, for instance, with an entirely manual way of creating, editing and finalizing agendas for city council meetings. Documents were stored in multiple locations including minutes books, filing cabinets and an old imaging system. The city also used varying degrees of labor-intensive, paper-based processes throughout its government.

Working with a value-added reseller, Kennewick automated the city clerk’s manual processes, which eliminated the duplication of documents, vastly reduced physical storage needs, and eliminated staff time formerly wasted on ineffective processes.

Tossing out paper yields $1 million return
The initial cost for the system, which took three months to complete, was $620,000. The city spent another $100,000 bringing additional departments online. But the return on investment has been significant. The system paid for itself in 14.7 months and the savings per year to the city include $25,423 for staff time for agenda item processing, $166,000 for storage and maintenance of filing cabinets, and $50,000 for payroll processing. The system has also enabled the Clerk’s Office to redeploy seven full-time employees and will save Kennewick nearly $1 million over the next five years in paper storage costs.

Looking across all industries, not just government, electronic records are still taken less seriously than paper records, according to a recent AIIM study.² Responsibility for applying good records management practice to electronic records would seem to reside in the IT Department rather than in the Records Department, and even where good policies exist, they are often not monitored or enforced. In this report AIIM compared volumes, policies and effectiveness between the management of electronic records and that of traditional paper.

General findings among all industries
The AIIM study contained 19 general findings across 17 market segments polled. Among them:

• The volume of paper records is still increasing steadily in 56 percent of organizations, but in 22 percent it is at last showing signs of decreasing. Meanwhile the volume of electronic records is “increasing rapidly” for 70 percent and not decreasing for any.
• Half of organizations are scanning newly received paper items and filing them electronically rather than manually, and a third of businesses are considering moving to go to all-electronic records-keeping
• But for the other half, as well as manually filing inbound paper documents, 40 percent admit to routinely printing newly generated office documents and emails for the purpose of filing them as paper records.
• Electronic records are more than twice as likely to be described as “unmanaged” than paper records.
• Of those organizations with no ECM/ERM system, 60 percent were not confident that, if challenged, that their electronic records have not been changed, deleted or inappropriately accessed. Findings among government respondents Drilling down into government, however, we can see the most salient trends in this industry (FG refers to Federal government respondents, LCSP refers to Local, City, and State/Province.
• Illustrating the resilient burden of paper, 34 percent of FG respondents say the volume of paper records is increasing somewhat, while an additional 20 percent say it is increasing rapidly. LCSP respondents answered 42 percent and 18 percent respectively.
• 67 percent of FG respondents say the volume of electronic records is increasing rapidly while 30 percent say it is increasing somewhat. LCSPs reported 71 percent and 29 percent respectively.
• 52 percent of FG respondents still print important emails and file them; 52 percent scan newly received times and file them electronically; 49 percent manually file newly received items as paper; 43 percent manually file newly received items as paper but index them electronically, 39 percent print anything that may be needed for an audit and 38 percent print newly generated office documents and file them.
• When it comes to LCSPs, 65 percent still manually file newly received items as paper; 54 percent print important emails and file them; 52 percent scan newly received items and file them electronically; 47 percent print newly generated office documents and file them, and 43 percent manually file newly received items as paper but index them electronically, and 35 percent print anything that may be needed for an audit.
• When asked, “If challenged, how confident could you be that your electronic records have not been changed, deleted, or inappropriately accessed?”, only 15 percent of FGs said they were very confident; 35 percent said they were confident; 18 percent said fairly confident, 27 percent said not very confident, and 5 percent said they were not at all confident.
• When asked the same question, only 9 percent of LCSPs said they were very confident; 19 percent answered confident; 32 percent answered fairly confident, 28 percent said not very confident, and 11 percent said not at all confident.
• Only 50 percent of FG respondents and 50 percent of LCSPs said they train new staff in how to deal with electronic records.
• 47 percent of FGs said they have a need for Electronic Records Management training, while 53 percent of LCSPs said they have a need for it.

Footnotes
1. See “Remarkable Case Studies: From Paper to Electrons at City Hall,”  by John Harney.

2. See the AIIM “Industry Watch” market intelligence report, “Electronic Records Management: still playing catch-up with paper?” By Doug Miles. This survey was taken by 768 individual members of the AIIM community in July and August of 2009, using a Web-based tool. Invitations to participate in the survey were sent via e-mail to a selection of the 65,000 members of the AIIM community.