Bridging the Divide: Traditional Information Management and the Data Revolution

As Savan President & CEO, Veeral Majmudar , recently pointed out in his piece on the Data Revolution in Government , the federal information and data management world is in flux. Traditional practices, grounded in paper records and legal requirements, are facing a data-driven revolution. This clash, often generational and cultural, can lead to miscommunication and missed opportunities. But fear not, information professionals! There's a hidden potential for partnership waiting to be unlocked.

Current Tensions

●????? Information Management Equals Paper & Data Management Equals Bits: Traditional information management (think filing cabinets and records schedules) thrives in the physical realm. Anyone with experience in federal offices that predate the turn of the century recalls that filing cabinets were a prominent feature in our workspaces. If you could access a drawer in that cabinet, you could only see what was physically stored within it by walking over, unlocking it, and flipping through the hopefully labeled folders. Not surprisingly, policies, practices, and processes for information management written during that era equate information with a piece of paper. By contrast, data management thrives in the digital realm and presumes that information is stored and managed electronically. In today’s shifting data management environment, opening the proverbial file cabinet can give you visibility into a drawer of seemingly never-ending data created by multiple cross-functional systems. This modern data management reality requires a new paradigm of policies and practices that address remote access to, and creation and/or use of, data.

●????? Legislative Lag: Another clash occurs between modern information ecosystems and the period when the primary pieces of federal information policy were enacted into law. For example, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was enacted in 1966, and the Privacy Act was enacted in 1974. Information creation, use, and management have shifted far away from the general practices of the 1960s and 1970s when these laws were enacted. This often results in agencies attempting to solve modern information challenges while complying with outdated policies that do not accommodate today’s reality. Further, the preeminent piece of information policy legislation at the federal level is arguably the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA), originally enacted in 1980. Despite ‘paperwork’ being in the name of the law, its significance lies in the management of information as a strategic resource. It marked the beginning of a subtle shift toward managing information regardless of whether it’s electronic or not. The Evidence-based Policy Making Act (also known as the Evidence Act) was enacted in 2018, which codified the role of the chief data officer and included the OPEN Government Data Act, followed the PRA by nearly four decades.

●????? Organizational Silos: New federal officials and offices emerge in response to new legal and policy requirements. This is particularly evident when managing information and data, where we see varied organizational homes for these functions. For instance, records management offices are often housed within administrative functions. Privacy offices are sometimes separate or report to a General Counsel or a CIO. Some agencies have all of these information management functions in one organization. The organizational homes for CDOs are also varied, with some reporting to CIOs while others are hosted in program evaluation or other staff offices. In rare instances, information and data management functions are in the same organization. This leaves those responsible for managing enterprise-wide information and data management initiatives attempting to solve common problems through narrow organizational lenses.

●????? Talking Past Each Other: These varied organizing patterns have several implications. One implication is that acculturation leads to different implementation approaches. The relatively recent focus on data management from CDOs can sometimes lead to miscommunication with information management professionals who have been working a particular way for decades and have separate legislative authorities. I have been in more than one conversation with information and data management professionals where they cannot find common ground because they lack an agreed-upon vocabulary.

●????? Focus Mismatch: Some of the miscommunication stems from this lack of agreed-upon vocabulary, but the nature of the work manifests itself differently. For instance, information management is often transactional (e.g., information collection requests, FOIA requests, privacy impact assessments, and records schedules). In contrast, data management focuses on enterprise-wide initiatives such as data architecture, data inventories, and metadata.

●????? Control vs. Liberation: Information and data management have conflicting legal responsibilities beyond this focus mismatch. At best, there’s tension, and at worst, there are profound contradictions on how agencies are supposed to manage their information resources. Fundamentally, data management policies often seek to liberate data for broader use in agencies and use by the public. At the same time, information management policies prioritize control and security of information, with a particular focus on protecting sensitive information.

Why Does this Matter?

Regardless of where one sits on the information/data management divide, there’s general agreement that agencies are sitting on mountains of information and terabytes of data whose information value is unrealized due to the abovementioned complexities. Given the disparate viewpoints on the right time, the methods for managing information resources, and who in the organization should be ’in charge,’ there is often a focus on process and turf, not strategy. Both sides get bogged down in operational details, neglecting the big picture. I’ve seen multiple agency-wide policies for information and data management stall due to disagreements among offices over who should own and oversee the policy (which includes keeping the agency accountable). Debates on managing analog (i.e., paper) versus digital information and records remain at the heart of the problem. As different offices try to address this challenge separately, it often leads to office- or system-specific solutions, creating redundancy or risks from directly conflicting approaches instead of agency-wide efficiency. In my experience, information and data managers often undervalue each other’s expertise. With a generation of retirement-eligible federal workers leaving federal agencies each day, taking extensive institutional knowledge with them, we can hardly afford to let this dynamic continue.?

The Path Forward

To be clear, the divide between information and data managers is not universal. We see pockets of cooperation, but they seem isolated enough to highlight why it's worth bridging this gap.

●????? Shared Goals: Both the PRA and Evidence Act promote treating information as a strategic resource—a common ground for collaboration. Separated by almost 40 years, both laws seek to minimize the burden on the public, improve the customer experience, and maximize the value of information for agencies and the public.

●????? Overlooked Knowledge: Traditional information managers act as the cartographers of information—they know where the data lives in the organization and why. That institutional knowledge is key to developing organization-wide solutions, especially for data inventories and catalogs that CDOs are developing.

●????? Enterprise and lifecycle-wide by Design: CDOs also tend to think about the complete information lifecycle across the whole enterprise. Due to the fragmentation of federal information policy, it's hard for individual information managers to maintain a perspective that looks across both the organization and the information lifecycle.?

●????? Enforcement Power: Information management's transactional control over information collections, privacy approvals, and records management can be a powerful tool for enforcing enterprise-wide data standards.

The Takeaway

There is immense potential for a win-win situation. By combining forces, data and information management professionals can:

●????? Force the Conversation: Information and data management program leaders must communicate early and often to synchronize upcoming initiatives, policies, and technology shifts.

●????? Deliver Results: Solve comprehensive information and data management challenges by leveraging successful initiatives across domains so that tangible enterprise-wide benefits are clearly demonstrated.

●????? Identify Champions: Look for individuals who can bridge the communication gap and translate perspectives.

●????? Stay Relatable: Traditional information managers must demonstrate their value in the data age. Data managers must be willing to value the institutional knowledge that information managers bring with them.

This isn't a battle between old and new—it's about embracing both worlds and creating a future where information and data work in harmony. Now is the time to break down the silos, bridge the generational divide, and unlock the true power of information!

Authored by Stephen Holden , Vice President of Mission Support Services at Savan, with contributions from Dan Albarran , Savan’s Chief Strategy Officer, and Alex Pirela, PMP , Savan’s Capability Lead for Records and Information Management.

About Savan

Savan is a premier data and information management-focused firm that is a trusted partner to public sector clients, helping them solve their most critical data challenges with sustainable success that is uniquely tailored to their environment. Savan Group is headquartered in Vienna, Virginia.

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