KEY POINTS:
As you prepare to clear the year's unfinished paperwork from your desk, and maybe delete some of the clutter from your hard drive, spare a thought for the archivist.
They're the ones who, in years to come, may need to dig out that intemperate letter or unfilled invoice
and present it for further scrutiny.
In the past, such records were paper - the National Archives has 85 km of paper in its Wellington storage facility alone and is fast filling its new space near Auckland Airport.
Increasingly though, they are electronic, which brings a new series of headaches for the 2500 government agencies, local governments, schools and health organisations covered by the Public Records Act.
The Act was overhauled two years ago, to bring it into the electronic age, and the first deadlines are coming up for organisations to have a plan for how they will be in compliance when audits start in 2010.
"Compliance doesn't happen overnight but we expect agencies to have road maps in place," says Evelyn Wareham from the National Archives.
Fifty years ago, when the previous Act was written, it was all relatively simple. Everything was on paper and it all went into a file.
Email has changed all that.
"There are massive, lots of ephemera and then very important stuff mixed up among it," Wareham says.
"One strategy is just to throw it all in a bucket and then run a search over it but we say that is not the best idea.
"To really deal with information well, you need the front line people to decide if this is a keeper or not."
The Act doesn't require agencies to keep everything. It includes guidelines for the material which must be kept.
As government decision-making is a cumulative process, it is important to keep all the versions of documents as they change, so people in future can be clear on what was said when. "When did the minister know?" is the question that will be asked.
Wareham says multiple projects are going on through the public sector, as organisations modify or install electronic records management systems.
Larger organisations are likely to have specialised software like Hummingbird of Documentum already, but organisations are also looking at how other content and database management tools can help - especially ones with a lower up front cost, or for which they already hold licences.
Jonathan Stuckey, a solution specialist at Microsoft in Wellington, is working with several of them.
"We took a proof of concept from our Innovation Centre to look at how our software could support the Public Records Act," Stuckey says.
"It's not a prepackaged product but a set of guidance or examples to show how you can deal with real world clients using SharePoint."
SharePoint started out as a collaboration system but, with the inevitable Microsoft feature creep, it has become a toolkit that people can use to build content management systems.
It has become a business services platform. It originated in the collaboration and portal space but now it had other capabilities such as forms automation and enterprise content management, which the focus is on for the Public Records Act.
"People are also using SharePoint to manage their internet presence," Stuckey says. He warns the software is just part of the picture.
"As engineers, our thinking was around the technology needed to support the Act, but we found compliance was more than technology. Most of it is people and process," he says.
"There is a lot of impetus in the market because many organisations have never had to deal with the change management required to get this done."
It is like many complex IT projects. People are needed to work out what an organisation does and how, and map that to new systems which will generate transparent and well-understood processes for capturing records.
"Policies are often written down and then never picked off the shelf and applied to the way people really work," Stuckey says.
The solution Microsoft has come up with should allow organisations to build in rules, so front line staff can quickly judge whether a document should be trashed.
Its integration with other office applications means metadata, the information about information, can be easily collected - important for functions like knowing what version was actually sent out.
It can also support photos with thumbnail views, web pages and collaborative tools with the same record keeping used for document libraries. Stuckey says it is also being used for corporate reporting, score carding and business intelligence.
"It does the classic things required by any compliance regime - process history, access control, change updates and so on. It also gives people something back in terms of the way they work. If compliance is a by-product of that, ti makes it easier for the change to be accepted."
