Agencies Grapple With Unruly Web of Electronic Documents.

• Author: Baker, Athanasia D.

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...