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"It Is Wiser to Find Out Than Suppose"

11.11.2010
The recent article, provides advice to government workers who worry about losing their jobs due to the current climate of calls for a smaller and more efficient government. To offset government workers fear of joining the ranks of the unemployed, Mr. Fox reminds the reader of a Mark Twain quote, "I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened." I'll add my own Mark Twain quote, "It is wiser to find out than suppose" and my own advice to government workers, particularly those who deal with information technology.

Echoing Tom Fox's advice, keep the focus on the mission. To this I add, find out (versus suppose) how your work and IT programs not only support the mission, but deliver the mission better, faster, and more efficiently. For example, federal agencies are being asked to deploy their open government plans, and many facets of these plans deal with making useful information useful – to their own agency, other agencies, and to citizens. However, as a recent MeriTalk survey shows, it is often difficult to find information government needs to make informed decisions, share data with the public, or respond to FOIA requests. The GCN headline, is the result of survey participants indicating that they spend more than a month each year searching for information, and computes the downside of wasted time and salary of not leveraging technology to store, manage and easily retrieve information.

Information management is a challenge for any industry, and government in particular faces a tsunami of information captured in paper, digital, audio, video, and social media formats. Government today is experiencing information overload that reduces the productivity of government workers and increases the cost of doing government business. Government challenges in managing information is impacted not only by the staggering growth of information but also by increased regulation, rising litigation, and tight budgets. Yet there are solutions that provide effective, secure information management, with easy and timely retrieval. As paper-based records are replaced with electronic logging, indexing, classifying, meta-tagging, transferring, retrieval, and storage of information, government agencies should consider deploying secure media-agnostic and location-agnostic information management solutions that allow government employees to store and retrieve records in any media, whether onsite, managed by a provider, or stored remotely at compliant locations.

This transformation will allow government employees who handle and respond to requests for information to efficiently access consistent and up-to-date information through easy and timely retrieval of individual records and groupings of related records. This transformation also enables government employees to meet their mission requirements, serve citizens, and comply with their open government plans.