Report Contents
Report Terms
Report Recommendations
The Bureau of Administration should establish a process to review record email usage by bureaus and missions annually with data provided by the Bureau of Information Resource Management and to provide feedback to those organizational units.
The Bureau of Administration should convene functionally defined focus groups of employees to identify practical examples of official records and include them in Foreign Service Institute courses on State Messaging and Archive Retrieval Toolset and records management.
The Bureau of Administration should issue guidance to Department of State employees and mission staff members to remind them of their record-keeping responsibilities; outline practical, function-specific examples to guide choices among cables, record emails, and working emails; and suggest that missions establish record email policies.
The Bureau of Human Resources, in coordination with the Bureau of Administration and the Foreign Service Institute, should convene a working group to develop proposals for requiring Department of State employees to take courses on records management, both an introductory course and a refresher course, and offer those proposals for approval by the Under Secretary for Management.
The Foreign Service Institute, in coordination with the Bureau of Administration and the Bureau of Information Resource Management, should review its training curriculum and expand its existing and new State Messaging and Archive Retrieval Toolset course content by including hands-on State Messaging and Archive Retrieval Toolset client classroom training as well as more material on the Department of State’s requirements for keeping records.
The Bureau of Information Resource Management, in coordination with the Bureau of Administration, should canvass through focus groups in all bureaus periodically to identify application program errors and other obstacles to the easy and efficient use of the State Messaging and Archive Retrieval Toolset for record emails and cables.
The Office of Management, Policy, Rightsizing, and Innovation should establish the Electronic Records Management Working Group as a continuing entity to advise on record emails and related issues.