Government has an obligation as history and heritage custodian, as well as a mandate to record and store, with the ability to retrieve, distribute and share, an almost infinite volume of community information. It must do this to ensure continued operation in all the services it delivers to citizens; anything that impedes this puts the government of the day at risk, says Paul Mullon, divisional director of marketing at Metrofile.
Business continuity should be a paramount concern for government, since it is responsible for great volumes of often sensitive or confidential information spanning a broad and diverse range of communities and geographies. That information is contained in a vast spread of systems, including a combination of microfilm, electronic and paper records.
Since data privacy legislature is being formulated and will soon come into effect, government will not only be providing citizens a better class of service, but it will also be ensuring it does not breach the barricades of new legislative citizen protection. Critical to this process is ensuring not only the privacy of information, but also that it is protected in the event of disaster.
Disasters visit themselves on organisations in a number of ways. There are two basic distinctions: man-made and natural. While the likelihood of a tsunami with the horrific impact of that recently experienced in Asia is supremely unlikely in South Africa`s geologically stable environment, fires and floods do occur. As incomprehensible as it may appear to the sanity-unchallenged, sometimes airplanes do fly into buildings. Viruses and malicious hackers are naturally man-made disasters that could befall any organisation, and with government`s many and varied outlying offices, not always with immediate access to the latest technologies, there are many potential gaps and cracks for these to slip through.
Simply losing information does not fall under the disaster category, unless that information is critical to either government or its electorate. The fact is, it happens. With the sheer volume of paper stacked throughout national, provincial and municipal government offices, some of it is going to be lost. Loss of land ownership records, for instance, would have a seriously detrimental effect on the Restitution of Land Rights Act of 1994.
Managing disaster recovery requires a number of steps to be completed: assessment, planning, process analysis and rectification followed by continuous process refurbishing. Assessing the extent of document-generating operations, and in the case of government, the extent of dislocated document volumes buried in labyrinthine storerooms around the country, is an undertaking of massive proportions.
Although at first glance it may appear to be, document management is in fact not government`s core function, which is why it is imperative, considering the near infinite size of this task, that departments look to specialist service partners to handle the various aspects of managing documents from creation right through their lifecycle, before handing them over to the national archives.
There are so many issues for government to consider in a complete and holistic disaster recovery policy and implementation that it would be magnificently delusional to believe it should reinvent the wheel when others have already been through the pain of putting these intricate processes in place. In the event of a disaster, departments will have so many issues to think about, that the protection and retrieval of documents will be the last thing on their minds. Having a trusted service provider who can manage the protection of these critical societal assets is a solid first step in ensuring that the department will be up and running again as soon as possible, once again providing high levels of service to the citizens of the country.
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