2008 GAO Helps Clinton on Email Records?

In the flap over Clinton's emails, I've not seen any mention of the GAO report in 2008 on problems in preserving e-records.  Turns out I included much of its summary and commented on it back then.

I won't repeat it here, but this paragraph is interesting in light of the current controversy:

"Preliminary results of GAO's ongoing review of e-mail records management at four agencies show that not all are meeting the challenges posed by e-mail records. Although the four agencies' e-mail records management policies addressed, with a few exceptions, the regulatory requirements, these requirements were not always met for the senior officials whose e-mail practices were reviewed. Each of the four agencies generally followed a print and file process to preserve e-mail records in paper-based recordkeeping systems, but for about half of the senior officials, e-mail records were not being appropriately identified and preserved in such systems. Print and file makes no sense--electronic is cheaper [regular type is GAO, italic is my 2008 comment]

 Let me repeat words: "followed a print and file process..."  In other words, the idea in these agencies, and I think generally throughout government, was:

1. not all emails were official records worthy of retention, just as not all paper documents generated within an agency were official records worthy of retention. 
2. someone was supposed to winnow the wheat from the chaff, go through the email, select the ones which merited retention, print them out, and file them in the paper filing system which was governed by records retention schedules approved by NARA. 

My comments then, though not well expressed, were based on these ideas:

1. the cost of retaining all electronic records was low, and becoming lower with every year Moore's law applied
2. the cost of reviewing, printing, and filing email as prescribed by NARA  was high
3. the likelihood of a bureaucracy doing no. 2 in an effective way was very low, as borne out by GAO's report
4. therefore, agencies should just keep all email in a searchable repository.

In the context of Clinton, there's two issues: the propriety of using a private email server for her work, on which I've no comment, and whether she complied with rules on preserving records, on which I will comment.  Clinton seems in the end to have complied better with the 2008 rules than many of the senior officials GAO looked at.  Were there changes in the rules after 2008?  I'm sure there were, as NARA continued to play a game of catchup, trying ineffectively to bring its filing systems and records retention systems into the modern word.  So I'm not saying she followed all applicable rules--she may have, may not have. I am saying her end result, in terms of selection and preservation, is well within the range for other senior officials. 

I'm also saying I was right in 2008--the simple effective rule is to retain all email records from email servers used for any government business, and let them be searchable.

Standing Staff Meetings

Too soon old, too late smart.  Somewhere this week I read of some guy who does meetings standing up, and I realize that's the way I should have done my meetings. 

The idea is, people get tired of meetings so there's an incentive to be brief and to the point.

Nagging: Redundancy or Consistency?

This study, according to Barking Up the Wrong Tree, shows that nagging works. When managers gave the same message over and over, the results improved.  But I'm tempted to disagree.  Back when I was a new manager and having my problems, as in cursing at an employee, my division director gave me a message.  He pointed to another manager in the division, a loud, boisterous man, WWII veteran whose ship had been sunk under him, who was an obvious male chauvinist. That made him seem to be an odd fit to supervise a female manager after a reorganization.  The director pointed out that the vet was consistent; he was always the same. Further he was fair, and the woman in question was assertive and wouldn't take any crap off him  The director said in his view consistency was the great managerial virtue.  Employees could adjust to any managerial style, so long as it was consistent.  Conversely, it was dangerous to be erratic, to be up and down, to jump from one great idea to another.

So it's possible the good results from repetitive messages was caused less by the repetition than by the consistency.

How Slowly We (Govt) Adapt to Change

From the GAO on e-mail and official records (my comments in italics):

E-mail, because of its nature, presents challenges to records management.

• First, the information contained in e-mail records is not uniform: it may concern any subject or function and document various types of transactions. As a result, in many cases, decisions on which e-mail messages are records must be made individually. Why make decisions at all?
• Second, the transmission data associated with an e-mail record--including information about the senders and receivers of messages, the date and time the message was sent, and any attachments to the messages--may be crucial to understanding the context of the record. So keep the whole thing.
  
• Third, a given message may be part of an exchange of messages between two or more people within or outside an agency, or even of a string (sometimes branching) of many messages sent and received on a given topic. In such cases, agency staff need to decide which message or messages should be considered records and who is responsible for storing them in a recordkeeping system. Again, why decide anything--keep the whole sequence.
• Finally, the large number of federal e-mail users and high volume of e-mails increase the management challenge.
  

Preliminary results of GAO's ongoing review of e-mail records management at four agencies show that not all are meeting the challenges posed by e-mail records. Although the four agencies' e-mail records management policies addressed, with a few exceptions, the regulatory requirements, these requirements were not always met for the senior officials whose e-mail practices were reviewed. Each of the four agencies generally followed a print and file process to preserve e-mail records in paper-based recordkeeping systems, but for about half of the senior officials, e-mail records were not being appropriately identified and preserved in such systems. Print and file makes no sense--electronic is cheaper

Instead, e-mail messages were being retained in e-mail systems that lacked recordkeeping capabilities. (Among other things, a recordkeeping system allows related records to be grouped into classifications according to their business purposes.) Unless they have recordkeeping capabilities, e-mail systems may not permit easy and timely retrieval of groupings of related records or individual records. Gee--I think being able to do a Google search on a body of text is a whole lot better than relying on poorly paid clerks to perform groupings according to a subject scheme that is likely 20 years out of date.

Further, keeping large numbers of record and nonrecord messages in e-mail systems potentially increases the time and effort needed to search for information in response to a business need or an outside inquiry, such as a Freedom of Information Act request. Factors contributing to this practice were the lack of adequate staff support and the volume of e-mail received. In addition, agencies had not ensured that officials and their responsible staff received training in recordkeeping requirements for e-mail. If recordkeeping requirements are not followed, agencies cannot be assured that records, including information essential to protecting the rights of individuals and the federal government, is being adequately identified and preserved.

My comments, and perhaps the emotion, date from some years associated with records management. Records management was part of the rationalization of business (see Alfred Chandler's writings)--creating, processing and filing information. But it rests on the economic fact it was costly to generate a memo (or equivalent piece of paper). You had to have a specialized individual (called a clerk-typist or secretary). She (or sometimes he) had to be able to handle multiple carbon copies for the multiple files, including something called the "official record". The piece of paper had to be routed through levels of bureaucracy until it got to an approving official. Once signed, the copies would be distributed appropriately. But all that's so 20th century.