Rising to the Challenge of the Electronic Records Directives

Guest post by Tara Combs, RM Specialist, Alfresco Software

The Managing Government Records Directive (OMB/NARA) sets goals that federal agencies must meet to modernize records management. Complying with the Directive presents opportunities to adopt a 21st century approach based on digitization, automation, open source, and cloud technologies.

But the clock is ticking. It’s now time to look ahead to the 2019 deadline for managing records electronically.

Modernizing Records Management

Alfresco Governance Services, running on Amazon Web Services, is the foundation for modern, compliant records management at the Department of Defense and multiple civilian agencies. It’s a full-featured, cloud-ready solution and an open source product certified to the DoD 5015.02 standard. Alfresco automates the record management lifecycle, making life easier for hundreds of thousands of government end users and records managers.

Many government customers have deployed Alfresco on the AWS Cloud. A joint Alfresco and AWS solution has several advantages:

• Lower Total Cost of Ownership: Government organizations can realize significant savings through a combination of consolidation, automation, and lower infrastructure, storage, development, support, and maintenance costs. The Department of the Navy, for example, saved $16.7M in storage costs in the first year alone.
• Rapid Time to Value: Customers have delivered joint Alfresco and AWS solutions 50% faster than planned. Alfresco’s open architecture and AWS’s ready-built infrastructure accelerate solution delivery. Plus, Alfresco’s AWS Quick Start allows agencies to spin up a production-ready reference configuration in less than 45 minutes.
• Scalability and Performance: Agencies can maintain a massive data store in Alfresco—with no performance degradation. In benchmark testing, Alfresco surpassed the 1 billion document mark (read more here) on a full cloud-centric technology stack based on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Aurora (more info here).
• Security: Together, Alfresco and AWS satisfy the security and compliance standards of the most risk-sensitive organizations. AWS’s network and data center controls complement Alfresco’s role-based permissions and security classifications and marks.

Beyond the Compliance Checkbox

The Managing Government Records Directive and Draft Strategic Plan is more than a call for compliance. It’s a catalyst for agencies to transform how they manage information and how they operate.

The Alfresco Platform provides benefits by integrating process, content, and governance services. Our government customers have used these converged capabilities to improve mission performance with increased efficiency, better collaboration, faster decision-making, and greater responsiveness.

Here’s just one example: The Department of the Navy (DoN) replaced 20 different records management and task management systems with one unified Alfresco-based solution. Military leaders can now make more informed decisions with enterprise-wide visibility into each task and its associated records. The DoN has reported a 57% decrease in tasker time-in-process and expects to save 4.3 million working hours annually.

Meet the Requirements, Advance Your Mission

The 2019 NARA deadline is fast approaching. For ideas on how turn this federal directive into a mission enabler download your copy of Modernizing Records Management: Taking Action Beyond Compliance.