Cloud Computing: Why Are Governments Stuck in the Stone Age?
July 14, 2014
Grazed from GovTech. Author: Todd Newcombe.
Last month, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) revealed that Lois Lerner, the tax agency official under investigation for allegedly mistreating Tea Party groups seeking tax exemptions, had lost copies of her emails when her hard drive crashed. But why was she was backing up email on a desktop computer in the first place?
It turns out that Lerner and other IRS officials were supposed to be following a policy of backing up emails on paper. But because the policy was unclear about how an email meets the standard of an official record, it doesn’t appear to have been followed or enforced. When all records were paper-based, retention policies led to the storage of vast amounts of government records in warehouses…
It was expensive but effective. But with the explosion of the Internet age, records management has become more complex. Today, virtually every government employee — federal, state and local — uses computers and sends emails yet the policies and standards for managing so many electronic records are vague and inconsistent…
Read more from the source @ http://www.govtech.com/budget-finance/Why-Are-Governments-Stuck-in-the-Stone-Age.html