Improving service delivery in the public sector

Despite ongoing digitalisation, a great deal of business still gets done on paper in both the public and private sectors in Australia. Although the percentage of paper records is declining, a third of respondents in a recent Iron Mountain survey indicated that they are currently storing over 100,000 boxes of paper records, and some have 500,000 or more.

The future of Australian Government records management has been a topic of discussion and debate across the Australian Public Service and with external electronic digital records management systems vendors for many years.

Record keeping in Australia by Commonwealth Government entities is governed by the Archives Act 1983. Under the Act, ‘Commonwealth records’ cover all information in digital and non-digital formats that is created, used or received as part of government business. Issued in October 2015, Digital Continuity 2020 is a whole-of-government approach to digital information governance that aims to support efficiency, innovation, interoperability, information re-use and accountability by integrating digital information management into all government business processes.

Essentially, by modernising the way in which government services data is managed and recorded, more efficient and timely services can be provided for Australians.

For organisations that still have large inventories of paper records, cleaning up these records is becoming more of a priority as the ease of digitisation prevails. The main benefits of managing paper records through secure storage, digitisation and destruction are cutting costs and reducing security and compliance risks. However, digital transformation, especially regarding the digitisation of documents and data, is not a straightforward journey. In many organisations the digitisation journey has to be combined with a clear direction and change management interventions.

Long-established organisations, like numerous public sector institutions, cannot jump from physical to digital in one step. Many of them are still heavily paper-dependent. Paper is tangible but paper-record dependency suffocates innovation and business optimisation.

The good news is that the increasing pressure for digital accessibility and cross-departmental connectivity have pushed digitisation of paper records higher up on the priority list.

Meeting compliance obligations

Before an organisation starts implementing its digital strategy, it first needs to know what it has and where it is stored by performing an inventory audit. After conducting an audit, it’s important to securely destroy the documents that are no longer needed.

Organisations need to not only meet internal operational requirements, but external regulatory ones too, such as the Archives Act that places the responsibility of implementing controls and policies on organisations to ensure compliance.

Retaining records in any format past their compliance requirement — known as over-retention — increases an organisation’s costs and elevates its risks. Therefore, identifying records that are eligible for destruction is a major driver behind records clean-up projects.

Any data security protocol should account for the secure storage and disposal of paper documentation. When the time comes for older records to be digitised and physical documents are ready for disposal, they should be shredded following privacy and data compliance regulations to avoid penalties, fines or legal action. This means keeping the retention schedule up to date so organisations can legally dispose of information when it is no longer required.

Navigating the increasingly complex regulatory landscape can be challenging when the requirements are continuously changing. Additionally, organisations lack automated tools to enable employees to understand what’s required of them.

Last year we introduced our Policy Centre, a cloud-based retention and privacy policy management platform that provides a user-friendly way for organisations to know their obligations and show compliance. It enables organisations to keep their retention and privacy policies current and reduce the risk of fines, and save on information storage costs by confidently disposing of information. It offers quick and easy access to the right information when needed.

Public sector organisations can reduce their risks by identifying and defensibly destroying records that are no longer needed to meet regulatory compliance. On the cost side, tens of thousands — if not millions — of dollars can be saved when these records are defensibly destroyed. The budgets, as well as the physical space required to store and preserve these paper records — whether onsite or offsite — can now be reallocated.

With the volume of worldwide data expected to reach 175 zettabytes by 2025, and substantial penalties for data and information breaches, knowing how to properly manage and protect records and data is more critical and mandatory than ever before.

A recent IBM report revealed that the average cost of a public sector data breach has increased from $1.93 million in 2021 to $2.07 million in 2022. Keeping records beyond retention requirements exposes organisations to security gaps, including fire and flood, and increases the possibility of violating privacy rights and losing public trust.

Driving data accessibility and productivity

Data risks are often unintentional, associated with human behaviour and usually driven by seeking improved efficiency and productivity.

To achieve continued service delivery and offer new services to citizens, Australian public sector organisations need to improve the productivity of their employees. Technology holds the key to implementing digital ways of working and managing data, which in turn can drive productivity.

For example, moving from physical to digital can be the difference between trying to sort through 500 files in a box to find a crucial piece of information or making a quick query on easily accessible digital data.

Iron Mountain’s Economist Impact research revealed that nearly 76% of business leaders are increasing investment in technology to facilitate data and information exchange across teams and almost 75% are increasing investment in cloud-based technology to improve workflow automation and business processes.

Central to effectively converting data to actionable insights is an organisation-wide information lifecycle management framework that is failproof and comprehensive across how information is collected, used, stored and then safely disposed. This strategy maps data throughout its lifecycle to be able to better manage and optimise its value. The data then evolves from a mere business record to a vital asset driving business performance and decision-making.

It is important for the public sector to partner with organisations that will not only walk with them in their digitalisation journey and help them manage and extract insights but also ensure that their important documents are stored as part of their physical record retention and archive storage strategy.

By converting paper records to digital, Australian public sector organisations are able to free up the information locked within, and drive productivity, efficiency and new approaches to improve service delivery to citizens.

Image credit: iStock.com/roman023