Automating electronic records management in a transactional environment: The Philadelphia story

Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science, Jun/Jul 1997 by Giguere, Mark D

The popular and timely notion of reinventing business processes has caught hold at all levels of government. Indeed, many federal, state and municipal governmental entities are currently engaged in reexamining their ways of doing business. In the city of Philadelphia, as elsewhere, the culmination of many of these efforts is the re-design of information technology (IT) systems to support re-defined activities.

When information system designers and program managers discuss the functions of a new system, they rarely include records management capabilities in that conversation. In the paper world, the fact that few people thought about records management issues at the time of the creation of records was not as serious a problem as it is in the electronic world. Records managers and archivists are faced with a multitude of problems trying to preserve records in electronic form. But many records managers understand that an organization in the throes of re-engineering is a perfect candidate for the incorporation of records management functionality into the re-design and/or procurement of information systems that support re-defined business activities.

In 1991 the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) supported a national meeting to devise an electronic records research agenda. Since that meeting, the Commission has funded over 30 projects examining a set of questions that need to be answered for the profession in this developing area. The city of Philadelphia project is one of the most technically ambitious of these efforts.

In Philadelphia, the need is to jump start an electronic records program for the municipal Records Department at a time of development or redesign of over 100 significant information technology systems outlined in the city's strategic IT plan. This massive city-wide information systems effort has caused the NHPRC project to concentrate on intervening in the redesign of specific, small- and medium-sized transactional information technology systems. This article outlines the approach taken in this initiative jointly sponsored by the city of Philadelphia's Records Department and the Mayor's Office of Information Services, the alternatives to such an approach, and the risks associated with our proposed course of action.

Principles Tempered by Pragmatism

Archivists and records managers recognize that information and records are not synonymous concepts, and our understanding of the differences helps us to articulate the distinctions between automated information systems and electronic recordkeeping systems. In fact, there are many contentious issues associated with the notion of transforming an information system, whose primary function is to facilitate the update and delivery of electronic information that supports business processes, into a system capable of generating records from that electronic information.

One of these issues is determining who has stewardship of the electronic record and what additional contextual information must be bound to the information content of an electronic transaction for recordkeeping purposes. Another matter of concern is whether adding the recordkeeping functionality to each system individually is better than an enterprise-wide solution, such as an integrated paper and electronic system.

The activities pursued in Philadelphia thus far sidestep many of these issues because of the prototype nature of these efforts and the need to demonstrate to city agencies an agreeable means of incorporating records management functions into system redesign and procurement. By the conclusion of the final phase of the project (November 1997), we hope to have achieved a workable solution and will report to the larger, national records management community the successes and shortcomings of our approach.

The Various Approaches

Recent judicial decisions have required that certain information be preserved with electronic files to make them meaningful. The best known of these decisions was handed down in Armstrong v. Executive Office of the President, commonly referred to as the PROFS case, which established that additional contextual information be bound and preserved with the electronic information content of a transaction (i.e., e-mail message) in order to achieve record status. Examples of additional information that could be added include who created an electronic record, when the record was created, who received it, if and how it was altered, which version was it, what is its electronic structure, etc. There has been much research activity in recent years into precisely what additional information is needed and the best methods by which it can be preserved so that future users can access electronic records many decades or even centuries from now.

The University of Pittsburgh Research Project

One such research project took place at the University of Pittsburgh. This three-year, NHPRC-funded effort established a set of functional requirements for electronic recordkeeping. The Pittsburgh project focuses on records as evidence of business activities for the purpose of accountability.