Last month, I was able to attend a technology briefing conducted by the Chief technology Officer at Deloitte.  Toward the end of each year, Deloitte publishes their view of trends that will help shape technology in the coming year.  These trends come in two varieties – disruptions and enablers. 

Disruptions:

• Social Business:
  Applying social technologies on social networks, amplified by social media, to fundamentally reshape how business gets done.
• Gamification:
  Game mechanics, game theory, and serious gaming are being infused into day-to-day business processes to drive passion and performance.
• User Empowerment:
  Users demand intuitive, user-friendly, purpose-built solutions, and won’t hesitate to go around central IT to get them.
• Enterprise Mobility:
  Mobility’s potential is starting to be realized, but making mobile offerings secure, reliable and maintainable is still a development challenge.
• Hyper-Hybrid Cloud:
  Organizations face a hyper-hybrid reality – multiple cloud solutions integrating back into the enterprise.

Enablers:

• Geo-spatial Visualization
  Creating visual, interactive, location-based models of large, complex, high cardinality data can jump-start analytics value.
• Digital Identities
  Context-rich, non- repudiable digital identities are paving the way for new products and services – across companies, industries, and geographies.
• Big Data Goes to Work
  Businesses harness exploding data volumes and the deluge of unstructured information to find undiscovered insights.
• Measured Innovation
  Innovation can be industrialized, but it requires deliberate structure, mechanics, and culture.
• Outside-in Architecture
  Businesses change their mindset and look outside of the organization for advantage.

You can envision all of these having some impact on NARA over time.  Actually, some are already impacting us.  And, some in particular are clearly in our sights as we develop strategies for meeting our mission as more and more information is born digital, or is converted to a digital form for quick and easy access.

More and more Federal applications are moving to cloud computing and cloud storage to replace dedicated data centers.  Agencies will eventually use multiple cloud services to develop records, and at some point will be looking for easy methods to manage these records.  NARA is in a unique position to help lead the architecture of these Hyper-Hybrid Clouds to best support effective electronic records management processes.

NARA is all about Big Data.  Agency electronic data sets continue to grow in size, making the management of these Big Data more and more difficult.  To demonstrate this, we recently had to develop a way to effectively (cost and time) move less than 20 terabytes (TB) of 1940 Census data to our hosting partner.  Let’s face it, in today’s world of Big Data, 20 TB is not all that big – the big box stores sell 2 TBs storage systems for less than $200.  Finding a storage device to hold the data was not the issue — moving the data was the real problem.  It took us about a week to move this data set across a dedicated high-speed connection.  Moving this data across today’s Internet could take several months! 

To make things even more exciting, larger datasets are coming.  In 2011, we received over 300 TBs of 2010 Census data…on a truck, the only conceivable way to quickly move a large amount of data between 2 agencies.  This approach is working now, but it certainly isn’t scalable. 

NARA is in a unique position to lead efforts to develop Big Data solutions across the Federal Government.  It may be that the best way to address this problem of moving data is to actually not move it at all.  Instead, a solution to Big Data could involve Outside-in Architectures, utilizing agency cloud solutions and an adoption of a Hyper-Hybrid Cloud approach, linking these Federal clouds into a networked storage environment.  In this hypothetical approach, these data sets could be effectively utilized and managed, either by the creating agency or a service agency, like NARA, allowing it to remain in the cloud environment where it was originally created. 

But, in order to make this work, important preservation and records management information (metadata) must be captured throughout the data lifecycle.  Combining NARA’s expertise in managing records, our understanding of required metadata, and a cloud-based network of data storage, positions us to confidently manage these data sets throughout their lifecycle without physically moving the data.  This is a big idea, requiring careful coordination among Federal agencies and good execution of data management practices.  But, in today’s constrained budget environment, we need to think differently to effectively manage the records of our government. 

These 2012 technology trends may not be completely accurate, but certainly paint a clear picture of the potential disruptions and enablers that we will experience.  Fortunately, our strategies have already anticipated some of these and position NARA in a great leadership position.

I admit it, earlier in my life I had very little appreciation for history.  But over time I realized that an understanding of history provides valuable insight into why things are the way they are, and can help provide suggestions for addressing issues today.

When I joined the National Archives, I used work that I had been doing to trace my family history to help me better understand the processes that were in place for archivists and researchers to find records. I used a few facts that I had about my dad’s military experience to launch into some amateur research at the Archives.

I had a picture from one of his albums that showed that he was in the Navy in WWII, and based on the annotations on the picture I assumed he was on the Memphis.

As it turns out, he wasn’t on the Memphis, which was a WWII ship, and instead he was in Memphis for training.

Without being terribly deterred by this misstep, my quest for information continued.  I completed an SF-180 to gain access to his military records, and was fortunate enough to travel to the Archive’s St. Louis facility earlier this month to see the Archive’s National Personnel Records Center, which is where most of our military records are housed. I was able to catch up with my request for access to dad’s records and his Navy file was located for me to review.

The record was awesome.  I had expected to see the typical record entries – his enrollment date, discharge date, etc. What I found were these things, plus some very surprising items that helped me resolve some of the mysteries in my dad’s past.

Dad joined the Navy in the height of WWII and was discharged at the end of 1945.  One of the unexpected treasures in the record file was a film negative containing the image taken of dad the day he joined the Navy.

The big surprise came when I found a letter from my grandmother, written to the Navy, requesting an early discharge for my dad. The request accompanied other documents that supported her request which was based on her inability to maintain the household given my grandfather’s failing health. Dad was needed back home to support his family.

Through a number of letters supporting the request, dad was honorably discharged from the Navy on December 29th, 1945 and returned home to re-assume his position as head of the household. He was 24 years old.

I now understand more of the background of my dad’s life. His role as the head of his household was never discussed, nor was the situation leading to his departure from the Navy. The history did help me understand what drew him to an eventual career in the aircraft industry. After his dad passed away, he left the Virginia area and moved to Cincinnati, Ohio to be a part of the growing jet engine industry. His Navy training in aircraft maintenance certainly must have been the seed that inspired him to seek a job working on jet engines. He worked for the General Electric Aircraft Engine group for 32 years, retiring as a field quality engineer, after starting as a production worker.

Records provide invaluable insight into our past.  Making these records permanently and easily accessible is incredibly important, not only to researchers, but everyone.  Someday, everyone will want to explore the past to finds some clues that will undoubtedly reveals things that will be a surprise.

NARA’s mission is to preserve and process records to provide prompt, easy, and secure access to these records anywhere, anytime.  As information today is widely expected to be available in an electronic form, we are working to make records available on line.  Our work in Information Services is focused on supporting and developing systems to preserve and make records accessible in a form that meets current and emerging market expectations.

Here at the National Archives and Records Administration, we have never been more excited about the role that information technology is playing in organizing, storing, and governing, and providing access to our Nation’s records.  Our team is on the forefront of unique crowdsourcing efforts with our Transforming Classification blog, along with many other uses of social media to fulfill our mission.  Recently, we have also been working hard to implement the 25 Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal IT Management.  I want to share some of our accomplishments to date at NARA as we reach the 6 month mark in the IT reform process.

We used a number of techniques to assess our performance in developing the Electronic Records Archives (ERA) system, including OMB’s TechStat process.  The TechStat process was instrumental in helping us assess and plan a successful path forward for ERA that will allow us to conclude development at the end of this fiscal year and allow us to focus on the challenges of implementing this complex investment which involves stakeholders from across the entire Federal Government. As a result of the TechStat sessions and the efforts of the ERA team, system development has been accelerated by six months and life cycle costs reduced considerably.  We also improved governance processes of the project by updating the required documentation for executive level review and decisions.

The ‘Cloud First’ initiative has been a focus for NARA.  We are developing a cloud email pilot and a hosted/cloud-based solution to streamline our Security Clearance Tracking System. We are also moving to a hosted/cloud solution in order to concurrently manage and track cases for mediation of FOIA requests cases as well as provide a public web portal to communicate to and educate the public on matters related to FOIA and FOIA disputes.  This new web portal will support online submission of service requests as well as status of requests – something that is not available currently. With more than 500 cases expected in Fiscal Year 2011, NARA is expecting that the self-help portal will help solve 10-15% of FOIA requests before they are even made and reduce overall case time from 25 days to 15 days, a substantial reduction in turn-around time that will directly benefit our users – the American people.

Moving forward past the 6-month mark in the IT reform process, I am very confident that we will find more opportunities to better serve our customers, improve access to information, and maximize the value of our investments and IT budget.  I look forward to the opportunity to collaborate further with my colleagues across the federal Government.