Chenega Analytic Business Solutions (CABS) was recently awarded a contract with the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, MO. With CABS Record Management’s past performance successions, they hope to bring their expertise to revamp NARA’s records management processes and preserve records retention of government communications in real-time.
In an article published by Government Technology Insider (GTI), NARA’s New Directives Create Challenges and Opportunities in Records Management for Federal Agencies, author Jenna Sindle highlighted CABS’s president, Sonia Mundra’s thoughts on the challenges that might arise through this particular record management contract; “While government-wide, modern, cost-effective, standardized, and interoperable set of records management solutions and services is beneficial, its implementation creates its own set of burdens,” stated Sonia. The idea of retaining electronic records by reengineering older solutions is challenging; with strict government deadlines to move to fully electronic environments, CABS is up for the challenge.
Moving forward, the CABS team intends to ensure the long-term integrity of digitized records and embrace Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Their solution is multi-layered; it does no good to convert paper documents into electronic databases if they become unusable or burdensome to retrieve. The CABS team understands the complexity of altering previous record management practices. Their ultimate goal is to produce searchable records by creating meaningful metadata tags so that database searches yield optimum results. Sonia mentions, “as our federal government catches up with the speed of technology, it’s the role of industry partners to advise and guide. [Our team] wants to make sure that the records of our country are accessible to the people who need them and secure against those who don’t.”
