Yesterday I voted in the upcoming Boston City
Councilor and Mayoral election – two weeks early. Why? Because I
will be on the road making presentations at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on
Election Day, actually all that week. But that is not why I am blogging about
it.
As often happens to ECM geeks like me, we experience ECM moments in doing everyday things such as “voting”. When I arrived at the election department in Boston City Hall, much to my surprise I had to wait in queue. (Apparently absentee voting is more prevalent than I thought. It was my first time.) Standing in line I looked around the rather large room, brightly lit with fluorescents, many diligent city employees busy doing what they do, and everywhere, and I mean everywhere - lining the walls, filling bookshelves, on carts between desks - there were volumes, no I mean VOLUMES of three ring and spiral bound binders. Labels such as “voting rosters”, “registration logs”,and “democratic election results”, many with years appended to them, helped to identify the value of the content contained within. (Ah labeling and taxonomy I thought.)
But my ECM mind ran away with me even further. Was there a
standardized information architecture to all of this. Where was the back-up? Were pages missing from these
binders, and if so who would know? Was each binder in each series accounted for? If someone removed a
binder to assist in a task, was there a way to track where it went? Were there
alternative ways of extracting this information?
As I looked around I thought, "e-gads
what would the e-gov folks think?"
And then I thought of the many people I run into that believe the paper volumes are a better way to
go, that these paper records that represent critical data and history are better managed in this way. These records were
so precarious, vulnerable to theft, loss, fire ...
Those who know me well know I am not a paperless office dreamer or bigot. I am also willing to admit that electronic media has its own list of challenges. But electronic content has its strengths - especially when it comes to security, regulation and retrieval. My mind quickly recalled another recent Boston City Hall event that involved electronic content, i.e., e-mail. A month ago I blogged about the scandal and investigation that surround Mayor Menino and his his aide Michael J. Kineavy. Apparently Kineavy deleted hundreds of work e-mails before they were archived - a violation of laws regulating public records - which yes include email. Menino stated the deleted emails were a "glitch" in the system and "sometimes technology breaks down. Well luckily ECM is not so easily "glitched."
After a five-week investigation by the Secretary of State's office, 48,000+ of these e-mails were restored, and yes some have substantive content that
should have been preserved under the law. Well, now thanks to ECM they are "re-preserved." (See the latest details.) Sure electronic content has its challenges. But what if these e-mails were paper mail, and had been shredded, where would the investigation be now? ECM is no substitute for good ethics, but a well designed and managed ECM system can go light years beyond paper in ensuring adherenece and protecting against circumventions to policy (let alone providing faster and more dyanamic retrieval.)
And then I thought (I told you my mind was racing - and this all happened in about 3 minutes), about another article I had recently read and twittered (@carlfrappaolo) about, which overviewed the challenges the Whitehouse is facing in pushing for a more Web 2.0-based government. The line in teh article that came to mind: "For now, the costly work-around is to manually print and store paper copies."
And all I could think was "E-Gov - E-gads."
