Navy Rear Adm. Raymond Archer, vice director of the Defense Logistics
Agency, believes that the government has a serious problem: It has
lost control of its documents.
The advances witnessed during the past decade in information technology
and the rapid proliferation of Internet-based networks have not
been accompanied by any significant improvements in the processes
and standards for handling digital files, Archer said in a speech
during a recent conference in Columbia, Md., sponsored by the Defense
Department’s Document Automation and Production Services (DAPS)
and the Association for Enterprise Integration.
Lost Control
Archer noted that document management is worse today than it was
in the days of the filing cabinet.
“Thirty years ago, I could ask for information on an issue,
and you could show me all the information on that issue. If I walk
into an organization today, I couldn’t find that. ...We’ve
lost control of managing all of this information,” he said.
As an example, he cited the recent controversy over recalled chemical
protection suits that had been purchased by the Defense Department
for use in combat. He admitted, “If you asked me about all
the correspondence and the trail on that, I couldn’t tell
you.”
Steve Sherman, the deputy director of DAPS explained that the problem
cannot be blamed on technology. “[It is] all the different
things that surround technology that we often fail at,” he
told the conference.
Sherman pointed out that the technology involved in document management
changes every six months. “What that tells you,” Sherman
said, “is that if you are ever standing still, you’re
actually falling behind.”
The way to stay ahead, he said, is not to just focus on the technology,
but to pay attention to all aspects of document evolution. “Business
dictates the technology, not the other way around,” Sherman
said. A document has a life cycle from conception to eventual destruction.
Understanding every step will lead to successful document management,
explained Sherman.
“Effective records management is a building block of successful
information superiority doctrine [for the Defense Department],”
said Marion Cherry, a senior systems engineer with the Architecture
and Interoperability Directorate, under the Pentagon’s chief
information officer.
She noted that the Army has been successful in identifying nine
out of the last 13 soldiers killed in Vietnam, because it was possible
to locate and access the medical records from Vietnam in a timely
fashion. On the other hand, poor record management hurt the Army’s
effort to trace the cause of the so-called Gulf War syndrome that
many soldiers claimed to have suffered after Operation Desert Storm
in 1991. Because unit-tracking records were incomplete, destroyed
or non-existent, veterans’ claims of Gulf War syndrome are
unable to be substantiated, said Cherry.
The Solution
Archer endorsed a return to fundamentals, such as library services,
as a viable solution to the current problems the government experiences
in file management. A process for sorting, storing and categorizing
information and communications is “essential” for government
organizations to control the information that is created electronically,
he said.
Archer suggested that government agencies establish partnerships
with companies that specifically deal with digital document management—not
just management software companies, but companies that have the
technology and have developed processes to easily search and retrieve
stored data.
An expected growth in the demand for these services already has
spawned a number of corporate ventures.
In 1999, NetIDEAS, based in Mt. Laurel, N.J, was formed by a group
of technology professionals who previously had worked at Lockheed
Martin Corporation. For a monthly fee, NetIDEAS provides the infrastructure
and software needed to manage e-documents, over the Internet. All
the client needs is a Web browser, said Mark DeBellis, the company’s
director of collaborative solutions. He compared NetIDEAS with other
Internet service providers such as America Online. The difference,
he said, is that instead of using the service for online shopping
and chat-rooms, customers manage and store documents. Currently,
NetIDEAS has a contract with the Navy’s DD-21 next generation
surface combatant program.
Document Conversion
Another important aspect to electronic data management is document
conversion, officials said. Information Manufacturing Corporation
(IMC), located at the Rocket Center, W.Va., specializes in converting
paper-based records, microfilm, microfiche, aperture cards, engineering
drawings and maps, and books to electronic formats such as CDs,
floppy disks or tapes. Scott Kline, vice president of sales, said
the converted data can be transferred on a secure Defense Department
private network. Currently, IMC has contracts with the Immigration
and Naturalization Service, the Naval Sea Systems Command, and the
National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, for which
the company so far has converted more than 25 million images.
Xerox Corporation, meanwhile, has developed a Web-based warehouse
for document distribution that provides electronic access to forms
and publications. The system is being used by the Army at Fort Hood,
Texas, where more than 46 million pages are distributed per year.
A user can identify the document needed and view it online through
Adobe’s Acrobat software or print it out at DAPS headquarters
at Fort Hood. Forms can be filled out online, recorded and shared.
Technology also can make it easier for a user to navigate through
a lengthy document and find the relevant information more quickly.
Techniques such as tags, links to video and graphics can be added
to documents such as technical manuals, said Gary Bauer, program
manager for Docucon Imaging Services, in McLean, Va. The U.S. military
services have embraced the so-called interactive technical manual
technology, because they save the trouble of loading hundreds of
pounds of paper manual every time a unit deploys. The electronic
manuals can be provided on CDs or over the Web, explained Christopher
Brown, project engineer for Integic Corp. of Arlington, Va.
Even though e-commerce is commonplace today, there are problems
that have yet to be addressed, said Norm Hubbs, vice president of
Integic.
“Linking the customer order to the fulfillment process requires
discipline in customer support, supply chain management, procurement
history, warehouse and inventory management, distribution and legacy
system interface,” said Hubbs. The idea is not simply “to
join or attach” a customer to the Web, but “to have
or establish a rapport.
“Look back to last December, when a number of very frustrated
shoppers, during the holiday season, placed their orders in for
gifts. The lucky ones got an e-mail five to seven days later saying,
‘Sorry, we’re out of stock, [or] sorry, we’ll
ship it to you in 10 days.’ The unfortunate ones found out
the hard way. It never showed up.”
Web Site Integration
A company’s Web site needs to be integrated into its business
processes, said Hubbs. He used the Defense Logistics Agency’s
(DLA) procurement gateway as an example of a successful application
connection.
DLA has supply centers located in Philadelphia, Richmond, Va.,
and Columbus, Ohio.
The centers are responsible for the acquisition and management
of more than 4 million commodity items. To reduce acquisition and
distribution costs—and administer $900 billion in contracts—DLA
established a Web site for e-business. The new system is saving
DLA more than $3 million annually, said Hubbs. The savings stem
from increased competition, streamlined procurement process and
reduced transaction costs, vendor profiling and paperless flow of
documents.
The U.S. government is taking steps to introduce more e-business
practices, said Jonathan Womer, from the Office of Information and
Regulatory Affairs.
“One of the first integrations of this [electronic service
delivery] came from the National Performance Review ... in 1993.
The idea was to go look at government programs and government policies
across the federal government, and see how a change could be made,
how they could be recreated,” said Womer.
In December 1999, a White House directive on e-government explained
“how the federal government needs to push the idea of electronic
government into the program, into the recording keeping of each
individual agency,” said Womer. “Some of the principles
outlined in electronic government ... were to organize services,
not simply by bureaucracy, not simply by a program office, not simply
by the rhetoric and the sort of scaled hierarchy that has developed
in the federal government over time, but rather by the subject area
that different citizens might intuitively see.”
The directive also promoted the use of digital signatures.
The Government Paperwork Elimination Act (GPEA) was passed in 1998,
and the goal was to have agencies automate interactions with outside
partners and customers by October of 2003. “I won’t
tell you that’s going to happen either,” Womer said.
“One of the loopholes in the law is ‘when practicable.’”