WRITTEN ON December 20th, 2004 BY Simon Banton AND STORED IN Across the Board
In the debate about the Cabinet Office instructing civil servants to delete any email over 3 months old in advance of the Freedom of Information Act coming into force, the reason reported (The Times, Saturday) is for ‘good records management practice’ to stop files blocking the system, going on to say ‘It is the end of the year and our computer system is getting overloaded.’
What complete and utter nonsense! Anyone would think we were still using punched cards or paper tape.
If the state of the Government’s internal IT is such that they are unable to retain all email indefinitely in a searchable system, then their IT suppliers must be even more useless than those of us in the profession have come to believe.
To be flippant, all they would need to do is forward their email archive to the Echelon system. Or get a few GMail accounts – I have some spare invites, if they’re interested 🙂
2 Responses to “WIBBI… government didn’t just flat-out lie to us”
As usual, one rule for us and a different rule for Government!
Strange that Government requires businesses to preserve emails for much longer.
How convenient that emails relating to Government “scandals” will be quietly deleted.
…or send it to archive.org.
I suppose one positive hint in all this is that they are taking FoI seriously and assuming it may have some effect.