Records Management is not a new concept to the Federal government. For decades, every agency has had designated records managers for managing physical records in the organization. Every employee knew who in their department was responsible for maintaining records, and who could produce them at will, seemingly from the ether. Records management may have been a dark art, but things worked, and pretty well most of the time. And then came electronic records. The flood gates opened, and life became very complicated. Not just for the records manager, but for every employee who now had to figure out whether the note they were typing constituted a record, and if so, where it had to be filed. The net result - successful electronic records management implementations in the Federal government are few and far between. Every agency is mandated to meet certain records management requirements. The Federal Records Act and the Presidential Records Act have been around for some time, DoD 5015.2 is all the rage, and now HR 1387 is possibly around the corner. NARA has certainly been pushing agencies to work out an authorized records schedule, but even agencies with approved schedules have not been very successful in implementing them. One of the primary reasons brought up for this failure in many presentations and demonstrations I do to agencies is the inability to change work cultures, and get users to properly declare records. I suspect one the reasons for this failure is the emphasis on meeting mandates. In the push for compliance, agencies acquire products that force employees to drastically change their work practices and make them use mechanisms that seem alien. They forget to educate their own employees on the benefits of records management.  Cost-Benefit Analysis, Return on Investment, Total Cost of Ownership - all essential in deciding what to buy. But then you absolutely have to turn around and sell the solution inside the organization too. User acceptance of the product would be much easier if two factors were met by a solution- clear defined benefits to users and least disruption to the current work culture. One of the biggest benefits of a successful electronic records implementation is information accessibility. Users in most organizations have great difficulty in finding pertinent information at the appropriate time. There are many reasons - information is distributed over a wide variety of products and platforms; you have to sift through tons of junk or obsolete data to find what is relevant; and the integrity of the data is often questionable. Electronic records management solutions that can effectively ensure only relevant and appropriate documents are stored in an organization's electronic repositories, using a uniform policy, can make information access a much easier task. Federated electronic records management is the answer to this - ensure documents stay in the repository users most frequently access, but at the same time, ensure a uniform retention and disposition  policy is applied on all these repositories. This way, users do not have to learn a bunch of new tools and technologies, they can continue to do what they have been doing. But the agency or organization can implement retention requirements they are mandated to meet. An electronic records management product that can effectively disappear into the background would be nirvana. Automated records declaration that can effectively take the employee out of records management can also ease the pain of adoption. It has been heartening to see over the last few years that more and more agencies are looking at quickly adopting a solution. It is important to start a program as quickly as possible with at least a "going forward" approach - start a practice from this point forward, and then figure out the best method to import legacy data into the overall solution. Because the more you delay, waiting for a perfect solution, the larger the mountain of data will be that you have to deal with finally.