Across the country as people become more politically engaged, they pay more attention to elections. One offshoot of this situation is an increased number of Open Records Requests as local government scrutiny increases. In addition, more technology and ease of accessing information online is increasing citizen expectations of accessing public records quickly from a city.
Unfortunately, cities can lag in responding to these requests in a timely fashion. It’s not intentional. Paper-based manual processes, storing documents and records on individual desktops, or poorly organizing or centralizing documents all make an Open Records Requests a potential nightmare. You might think you’re adhering to the letter of the law, but your lack of timely response resulting from technology issues may negatively impact your ability to comply.
Combined with the right document management and records management systems, these tips can help you improve your Open Records Request response processes.
First, do you have one? Some cities store documents and files on individual computers or shared files on servers. This is not ideal, especially when the processes you’ve built around such systems are non-existent, ineffective, or limited to only a few people able to access documents.
If you do have a document management system, does it:
We’ll talk about some of these specific capabilities below in more detail, but you first need to make sure you have a records management system that covers these bases. Otherwise, your system may fail you when you need it most and not allow you to effectively respond to Open Records Requests.
Even if you have the right technology, you must focus on three activities that need your full participation.
For each document created, what needs to happen? How is the document created? How many reviewers? What happens after it’s approved?
Focus on creating generic roles such as document creator, reviewer, or approver that are assigned to people. A records workflow process will include automatically enforced rules around:
This way, documents are created once, go through a process, and receive quality control.
Even if you buy the right technology, set it up correctly, and create workflows, it’s useless if no one uses it or continues to rebel against it by sticking with their old habits. Training and policy enforcement are essential. Make sure employees know the records process, why you’re doing it, and that you will enforce policies around it.
Cities that follow all four tips above can still make the mistake of keeping every record indefinitely or applying broad records retention schedules to all documents. The reality is that you are only legally required to keep specific records for specific lengths of time. Why increase your storage costs, operational work, and liability by keeping records past their legal deletion date?
With the right document management system, you can automatically apply records retention schedules to documents so that you consistently follow state law and city policies. The system will enforce policies such as archiving, retention, authorization, and deletion with a combination of automation and oversight from your IT staff or vendor.
Email poses a particular conundrum for many cities. Your document management system may work well, but Open Records Requests involving email may throw you off base. If you have an older email system, you might have limited storage on your email server. That means employees will often store emails on their own computers in local archives.
When that happens, it’s difficult to retrieve emails and keep them secure. You also risk losing emails because you’re relying on non-technical employees to archive this information as well as hoping their workstation doesn’t experience a failure. And if you happen to use a consumer-grade, cheap email solution, then you risk issues not only with reliability but also compliance.
Consider email seriously as part of your records management system. You need to:
We end this post with two bonus tips that will also help cities:
Need some extra help processing your Open Records Requests? Reach out to us today.
Original Date: 2/5/2019