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Tony Byrne

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Uncle Sam pushes Records Management and Archiving...and Meridio too

4-Apr-2008

Tags: Document Management (ECM), Building Business Case, Industry Standards, Marketplace at Large, Selecting Technology, Government

The Gimmal Group's Dan Elam recently pointed me to an important and seemingly under-reported guidance memo (pdf) to U.S. federal government CIOs from Karen Evans. Evans serves as a kind of über-CIO for e-government at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

The biggest news comes in the third paragraph:

When planning for and acquiring information systems and services, agencies must incorporate records management and archival functions, including the cost of implementing and maintaining those functions, into the design, development, and implementation of information systems.

The memo continues that OMB will monitor adherence as part of its overall evaluation of how different agencies make IT investments, presumably through its oversight of the so-called "Exhibit 300" process, where agencies must prepare business cases for large IT projects. Many federal employees look at preparing 300Bs as a hassle, a bureaucratic check-the-box exercise to justify a technology acquisition they already believe they need, and they don't always follow OMB guidance (and occasionally that makes sense, as OMB's guidance is sometimes incomplete or unrealistic). But on the whole the system works, and resembles successful approaches to technology investment review that you see in the private sector.

The shocker comes in an ensuing paragraph, where Evans recommends:

A recently finalized SmartBUY agreement for records management software provides a secure, scalable, and high-performance solution for the management and control of documents, records, and other enterprise content.

SmartBUY refers to a newish government-wide acquisition mechanism, where federal and state agencies can very easily purchase commercial software (typically from resellers) at cut-rate prices. There is actually only a single RM vendor (and in fact, the sole ECM vendor) in SmartBUY: Meridio.

Meridio is an Ulster-based software company that built a name for itself providing RM services for (the old) Microsoft SharePoint. Now, as ECM Suites Report readers know, Meridio's solution can be called many things, including "inexpensive" and "developer-friendly" (both fine attributes!), but is less well known for "scalability" and "high-performance." You probably also know that Microsoft, being Microsoft, spurned its once-favored partner by building its own RM services into MOSS 2007. And what did the jilted Meridio do? Turned the other way and quickly sold itself to UK-based search vendor Autonomy, who seems to have ambitions in the e-discovery solutions space. Perhaps most importantly, there is a big difference between RM and Archiving. Even if Meridio works well as an RM product for you, an Archiving solution it is not.

You don't need to be a genius to figure out what's going to happen next. Harried federal managers trying to complete their IT business cases are going to budget for a slew of Meridio licenses -- "that's what Karen Evans told us to do" -- licenses that in turn will almost surely sit unused. Meridio/Autonomy will not see all the funds -- the Service Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business reseller gets a piece -- but as a U.S. taxpayer I would look to OMB to point out a more competitive set of choices. Well, let's just assume the Meridio mention in the memo was a hasty mistake. A quick search shows 269 "Records Management Software" products available to federal buyers from two-dozen different suppliers. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the problem is that Meridio is a non-US-based vendor, but rather, that no single vendor should be promoted in guidance like this.

Indeed, the bigger problem is the latent message in the memo: Government agencies have an RM and Archival problem, and here's some RM software you can quickly procure to fix it. Remember that records management is only secondarily a technology problem.

Nevertheless, simply raising awareness is a very good thing. Most U.S. federal managers, like managers everywhere, often simply don't consider the long-term archival, retention, and disposition implications of the information systems they develop. And with government trying to move more at "Internet-speed" I don't really blame them. The Meridio meander notwithstanding, I think the bigger impact of this message may fall on the Archiving side, rather than the RM side, though the implications for both should not be underestimated.

More generally, I think this dovetails with broader trends in cost accounting that ensure that the expenses of storing and ultimately getting rid of stuff should fall under total cost of ownership. Consider the "recycling and disposal" fee you may pay when having your car's motor oil changed. Economists are increasingly looking at things like solid waste and carbon footprints when evaluating the real costs of various initiatives.

So why not the same for information? Surely the cost of an information management system should entail more than just the expense of getting data into a repository and playing with it. At some point your investment calculations need to account for the cost of either storing it long-term or getting rid of it, properly. It's good to see OMB catching up with its European counterparts and providing some leadership in this area.