Information Management Strategy to 2020

January 2017

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Strategic goal 1: Insight
  • Objective 1: Content-driven
  • Objective 2: Continuity
  • Objective 3: Contributing
• Strategic goal 2: Integration
  • Objective 4: Transparent
  • Objective 5: Trusted
  • Objective 6: Secure
  • Objective 7: Effective
• Strategic goal 3: Improvement
  • Objective 8: Engaged
  • Objective 9: Enabled
  • Objective 10: Compliant

IM vision

IM will be visible until it becomes invisible.

Insight gained by leveraging information assets and knowledge resources will be possible through integration of information management priciples into improved IM practices.

Introduction

Information Management (IM) is an important function within the Government of Canada (GC) that delivers true value. Since the GC Policy on the Management of Information was released by the Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS), along with directives and related guidance (e.g. IM Roles and Responsibilities, Recordkeeping Directive, Open Government Directive), GC departments and agencies have been using various approaches to implement these policies and directives. Evidence has shown that the successful implementation of a robust departmental IM program incorporates change management, awareness and communication aspects and must be presented to the knowledge workers as a service and a means to reach maximum efficiency in their everyday work.

Effective GC organizations use TBS guidance to build their departmental IM programs, such that the services provided to their organizations are valuable, useful, and simply result in better IM as a by product of evolved business behaviour. This is the approach that Library and Archives Canada (LAC) is taking. LAC understands that IM is part of the internal value proposition for employees only if it provides value, rather than creating constricting rules and processing burden. Given LAC's mandate, LAC has to be a leader in the area of IM. LAC knows that good IM doesn't just happen, it is a product of understanding our business model, managing effective business processes, and creating an efficient business culture.

The LAC IM Strategy is not simply a document about how to best comply with GC IM policies and directives, but represents LAC's commitment to provide and sustain valuable business services within the department, which will result in better IM through daily business processes. This strategy is an evolution from the previous LAC IM Strategy, which focused primarily on compliance. Through awareness and promotion, LAC will strive to make IM visible. Through process improvements and effective tools, LAC will strive to make IM invisible.

Approvals

Surinder Komal
Information Management Senior Official (IMSO)
Senior Director General and Chief Information Officer
Library and Archives Canada
February 21, 2017

Hervé Déry
Assistant Deputy Minister
Corporate Services and Chief Financial Officer
Library and Archives Canada
February 22, 2017

Guy Berthiaume
Librarian and Archivist of Canada
Library and Archives Canada
February 23, 2017

The LAC Information Management Strategy to 2020 is built on goals and objectives that will provide the foundation for the LAC IM Program and Recordkeeping Compliance Plan.

Strategic goal 1: Insight

Employees will gain insight into how to exploit existing information assets and knowledge resources. Employee content contributions are captured systematically, are authenticated, and are reliable and re-usable, enabling knowledge growth and retention.

Objective 1: Content-driven

LAC will focus on structuring content throughout the information life cycle to enable use and re-use.

Objective 1: Context

LAC employees produce mountains of content, much of it for use at any point in time. However, information is rarely produced in a way that facilitates its reuse-in whole or in part. Whenever there is a need to create a new document or data, the process is usually started at the beginning because finding templates or good samples is often too challenging.

This objective emphasizes how LAC employees will evolve the information life cycle such that the focus is no longer on creating documents only. With a good understanding of the near and longer-term use of content created at LAC, it will be possible to structure this content so that it has lasting value for multiple uses over time. This will contribute to greater productivity and will ensure the value of LAC's content.

Objective 1: Expected benefits

• Write once, use often.
• Optimizing the re-use of existing information or data to create new content.
• Higher productivity and efficiency due to reduction of rewriting similar content by different employees.
• Lower risk by capturing quality data once and re-using many times.

Objective 1: Actions undertaken to date

• Developed workspaces to assist with the automation of business processes.
• Created processes and methods to support real -time reporting.
• Implemented "My Profile" to capture basic employee information.

Objective 1: Future actions

• Create content types (e.g. metadata) and templates for key document types within LAC.
• Develop document templates and create a template repository within the Collaboration Portal.
• Develop the capacity to search content and to re-use it.
• Automate processes to capture structured information - using electronic forms.
• Create dedicated workspaces for specific processes, to enable real-time, dynamic reporting.

Objective 2: Continuity

Information is captured and managed, contributing to the growth and retention of corporate knowledge.

Objective 2: Context

LAC's unique role within Canada is due to an optimal blend of ingenuity and experience, leveraged to ensure the enduring value of Canada's documentary heritage. As experienced employees change careers or retire, LAC must ensure that it retains relevant, critical knowledge so that it can be leveraged by other employees.

This objective is to facilitate knowledge sharing and retention of LAC's expertise through deliberate, calculated activities meant to retain corporate knowledge and experience. LAC's evolution as a memory institution depends on the agency's ability to leverage its experience and expertise, and apply it to new paradigms such as those contained in LAC's Digital Strategy.

Objective 2: Expected benefits

• Knowledge shared by our experts is retained and used.
• Proactive management of new employees will provide access to knowledge, and will reduce time to achieve optimal productivity.
• Increased productivity due to the ability to build upon existing knowledge and expertise.
• Increased retention of corporate knowledge.
• Strengthened integrity of retained documents and corporate knowledge.

Objective 2: Actions undertaken to date

• Development of the capacity to create knowledge repositories in the Collaboration Portal.
• Competency profiles on "My Site" within the Collaboration Portal to help people understand competencies across LAC.

Objective 2: Future actions

• Ensure LAC enterprise information architecture accommodates the capture, management, and discovery of corporate knowledge.
• Create knowledge capture and retention processes, building upon existing related business processes.
• Develop dynamic management tools to facilitate knowledge sharing from highly experienced employees.
• Support the development of a video lecture series, (e.g. akin to "TED Talks'), featuring internal experts, to capture key insights on various topics.

Objective 3: Contributing

Enabling a high-performing workforce with the required knowledge and behaviours for how information is used now and in the future.

Objective 3: Context

LAC employees must understand why adopting IM best practices and using effective IM tools in their daily operations is beneficial to all. The LAC Information Management Strategy to 2020 will be the fundamental building block to help reach this important culture change.

This objective focuses on ensuring that LAC employees contribute freely and willingly to the agency's IM goals. By understanding the importance of "what's in it for me," employees are more willing to contribute knowledge and information that can be leveraged for present and future use.

Objective 3: Expected benefits

• Increased productivity due to enhanced capacity to find and reuse information, resulting from increased employee contributions to the organization, by way of improved IM processes.
• Greater discoverability of corporate information and data, leading to higher productivity, job satisfaction and improved knowledge.

Objective 3: Actions undertaken to date

• Developed the Collaboration Portal as a foundational platform for information sharing and management.
• Developed a plain language IM awareness campaign with engaging messaging, and delivered in an appealing way.

Objective 3: Future actions

• Continue to improve the user experience in the Collaboration Portal.
• Continue to provide IM awareness activities and efforts.

Strategic goal 2: Integration

IM will be integrated and invisible. IM will become invisible as it is integrated into business processes, producing trusted sources of information that enable effective use of time and resources.

Objective 4: Transparent

IM is integrated into business processes and will contribute to optimizing productivity.

Objective 4: Context

GC departments and agencies must comply with GC IM policies and directives. However, IM should be primarily presented to employees as an efficient and effective way to do business. Smart organizations understand that IM must be visible until it is invisible. Simply stated, if proper IM principles are embedded in existing business processes, then employees do not need to think about complying with IM requirements. They just need to keep doing their daily jobs.

This objective focuses on evaluating and revisiting LAC business processes such that they take into account the information management life cycle. As business processes are fine-tuned, supported by the proper tools, employees will seamlessly comply with IM objectives while benefiting from more effective business practices.

Objective 4: Expected benefits

• IM will not only be an exercise in compliance requirement, but will become a by-product of effective business processes.
• Greater uptake of new IM-oriented business processes as they are seen to improve employees' daily lives.
• Support for LAC's mandate and priorities.

Objective 4: Actions undertaken to date

• Documented business processes to support LAC activities.
• Implemented selected business processes through the Collaboration Portal.

Objective 4: Future actions

• Review and revise business processes such that IM is seamlessly embedded.
• Expand the implementation of new and updated processes through existing tools such as the Collaboration Portal, and planned tools such as the Digital Curation Platform.
• Institute a monitoring and measurement approach to determine the effectiveness of processes and to establish a cycle of continuous improvement.
• Investigate emerging trends in information management to further remove process burden (e.g. auto- classification, archiving).

Objective 5: Trusted

Employees trust LAC's information resources as the authoritative and single source for content.

Objective 5: Context

LAC, similar to other departments, relies on trusted Information to make decisions. Over the years, organizations such as LAC have become increasingly digital, hence, the information produced has grown exponentially.

Understandably, the sources and repositories for information have become increasingly scattered, disconnected and in some cases redundant. Discoverability of information, both structured and unstructured, has become complex and time consuming. Information needs to be organized and managed to produce reliable and accurate search results.

This objective focuses on increasing the reliability of information managed by LAC employees. While discovery and findability is one key aspect of information use, trust is critical to the quality and integrity of our daily work. The elimination of redundancy and improved management of existing information systems, will result in trusted, authoritative sources of information that will be managed and used to support the organization's mandate and priorities.

Objective 5: Expected benefits

• Clarity on authoritative, trusted sources of information for use by LAC's employees.
• Reduction of unmanaged information repositories (e.g. network shared drives, email systems, personal storage devices).
• Greater corporate knowledge retention.
• Reduction in information technology (IT) infrastructure costs.
• Increased employee confidence in information accuracy.

Objective 5: Actions undertaken to date

• Confidence in the Collaboration Portal was reinforced through cooperative development of a classification and search structure (File Classification Plan) clearly linked to business processes.

Objective 5: Future actions

• Institute a master data management approach to identify authoritative sources of information - structured and unstructured.
• Create business rules and governing processes for creating and managing authoritative "master" information resources.
• Identify and implement trusted, authoritative repositories for information of business value (e.g. Collaboration Portal, GCDOCS, Digital Curation Platform.

Objective 6: Secure

Information security is embedded in LAC's processes, tools and thinking.

Objective 6: Context

Safeguarding and protecting information is a critical requirement within any organization. However, reaching the 100% security status requires ongoing maintenance and improvements to LAC's business processes and systems. Evidence of breaches, leaks and hacks are a reality in the history of the GC. To optimize an organization's information security, it takes the right combination of people, process and tools.

This objective focuses on a sustainable secure environment, founded on modern information security methods, tools and common sense. While the information that LAC produces, ingests and manages is primarily within the public domain, LAC must safeguard against any misuse of its information and systems. This includes everything from external breaches to inappropriate internal behaviours such as password management. Knowledge is one of LAC's best defenses to information security.

Objective 6: Expected benefits

• Knowledgeable workforce whose behaviour reflects a security-aware organization.
• Lower risk of information loss or of recreating work already completed.
• Increased confidence in information security, by both employees and Canadians.

Objective 6: Actions undertaken to date

• Creation of "Guideline for the Management of Access Rights on LAC Information Repositories".
• lmplementation of Classified Information Processing Room for handling secret records.
• Employee are trained on security of information
• Security Measures are embedded within the Collaboration Portal.

Objective 6: Future actions

• Continue training employees in secure management of information resources.
• lncrease number of dedicated workspaces with specific security measures to automate business processes.
• Complete an IM Risk Profile.
• Complete set of IM guidelines encompassing information security and related procedures.

Objective 7: Effective

Knowledge is leveraged through collaboration and "open by default" approach within LAC, enabled by more effective IM practices.

Objective 7: Context

The GC's Destination 2020 urges departments and agencies to become more efficient and effective. At LAC, the word effective translates into the need to optimize our operations while at the same time providing better services to LAC's internal and external clients.

This objective looks to qualify and quantify the degree to which LAC becomes more effective as an organization, enabled by proper IM culture, practices and tools.

Through the streamlining of processes and the use of collaborative and open content approaches, LAC will identify and manage indicators and measures that will help to tell our story of increasing effectiveness as a GC organization.

Objective 7: Expected benefits

• Increased return on investment made in IM and enabling IT infrastructure.
• Ability to set and manage realistic targets to assess the effectiveness of IM investments.
• Quantifiable feedback on the value of our investments in IM.
• Employees have greater clarity about the value of their contributions supporting good IM.

Objective 7: Actions undertaken to date

• Implemented the updated Collaboration Portal and Intranet to enable modern collaboration among LAC internal teams.
• Created a business process inventory, linked to the information life cycle.
• Developed an initial set of measures for IM effectiveness.
• Enabled external collaboration using LAC Direct.

Objective 7: Future actions

• Create a performance measurement plan with key performance indicators and measures to be managed throughout the implementation of this strategy, with a focus on before and after.
• Produce a comprehensive report for senior management and employees on the evolving effectiveness of communications, processes and tools.

Strategic goal 3: Improvement

Improved IM practices will help LAC meet its obligations. LAC will work toward improving its IM practices, enabled by appropriate tools, leading to GC policy compliance and the achievement of expected results.

Objective 8: Engaged

Interesting and engaging approaches are in place to lead employees toward improved IM behaviour.

Objective 8: Context

This strategy encourages the establishment of seamless and transparent information management. The successful achievement of this goal will require an engaged and active workforce. With effective management support, employees will come to understand the answer to "What's in it for me?". As a result, the understanding of their role in LAC's IM activities becomes clearer and they are more apt to see the benefit of their contribution. The LAC IM team will use an engaging approach to ensure awareness and understanding of why LAC is evolving its processes and tools to help make LAC workforce more effective and efficient.

This objective will employ a blend of "push and pull" techniques to help guide LAC employees to change their daily behaviours.

Objective 8: Expected benefits

• Engaged workforce with understanding of the benefits of good IM.
• Reduction of individualized IM habits (e.g. use of network shared drives, email systems, personal storage devices).
• Contribution of knowledge to the LAC information systems, improving the fulfillment of this and other LAC strategies.

Objective 8: Actions undertaken to date

• IM Awareness sessions.
• IM communications campaign.
• Collaboration Portal for internal teams to share/collaborate.
• Identification of information coordinators from business lines to share their experiences.

Objective 8: Future actions

• Continue to use gamification techniques to provide incentives and engage employees.
• Create "badges and awards" under the My Site section of the Collaboration Portal, as part of a gamification approach to recognizing employee achievements.

Objective 9: Enabled

Convenient, intuitive tools are available to help LAC employees do their work while fulfilling GC IM obligations.

Objective 9: Context

The world of IM is evolving in the GC. New IT infrastructure management and services management have been established at the GC level-as the focus shifts to information and business process, which are the true assets managed by GC organizations. By leveraging this new working model and enhancing LAC's own internal digital infrastructure, LAC employees can become much more empowered as members of the public service.

This objective is to remove process burden for employees by facilitating their daily work and increasing productivity, all while meeting GC IM obligations. The choice of the proper tools is essential to this goal.

Building on strategic goal #2 of integration, by ensuring that effective IM is embedded in LAC's business processes, LAC can automate these processes through a carefully chosen, implemented and managed toolset.

Objective 9: Expected benefits

• Anytime, anywhere access to information.
• Digital collaboration workspaces to work with teams and colleagues.
• Higher productivity due to increased discoverability and use of relevant information.
• Compliance with GC policy on IM and related directives.

Objective 9: Actions undertaken to date

• LAC employees use modern productive tools (e.g. up to date laptops, WiFi, mobile devices).
• LAC operates as a connected digital office.
• Implemented and improved the Collaboration Portal, leveraging the latest in digital office technology.

Objective 9: Future actions

• Continue to apply a user centered design approach to future improvements of the Collaboration Portal, with usability testing, to encourage uptake.
• Move toward increased mobility capability, where applicable.
• Continue to improve and streamline approval processes.

Objective 10: Compliant

Obligations relating to GC policy and legislation requirements are met and best practices ensure information is authentic, reliable, has integrity, and is useable.

Objective 10: Context

IM is frequently perceived as a discipline required for compliance to GC policy only. Although IM compliance is mandatory for all GC departments and agencies, there is a need to change this perception from mandatory to simply good business sense. LAC is gradually including IM best practices into existing and new business processes. Therefore, LAC is working towards the culture change needed to become an IM leader for GC departments.

ln April 2015, the internal IM function of LAC received its Disposition Authorization (DA) from the Librarian and Archivist of Canada. This DA serves as the official mechanism for the disposition of information of business value (IRBV), as well as the transfer of LAC's information resources of enduring value (IREV) to LAC's holdings.

As all other objectives evolve, LAC will become IM compliant by design, rather than by additional process burden. However, this strategy does not advocate a work environment where IM "just happens". Through the combination of leadership, awareness, process revision, communications, and change management, IM will move from being visible to being invisible.

Objective 10: Expected benefits

• Higher degrees of knowledge sharing and information security across LAC.
• LAC serving as a model IM leader within the GC.
• Greater readiness to support LAC's digital agenda.
• Compliance through delivering and implementing IM best practices, ensuring departmental obligations to GC IM policy and directives are met.

Objective 10: Actions undertaken to date

• Developed of a classification file plan aligned to IM fundamental principals.

Objective 10: Future actions

• Implement GC tools chosen to support recordkeeping requirements throughout the information life cycle, with minimal impact on productivity.
• Ensure alignment of LAC information systems to the Directive on Open Government.
• Implement protocols to identify official records as electronic, reducing reliance on paper records.