MANAGEMENT OF RECORDS AND INFORMATION PROCESSING ACTIVITIES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP74-00390R000300100004-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 13
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 26, 2009
• Sequence Number: 4
• Content Type: MF

Approved For Release 2009/05/26: CIA-RDP74-00390R000300100004-0
MEMORANDUM FOR: Deputy Director for Support
SUBJECT : Management of Records and Information Processing
Activities
1. This memorandum contains a recommendation for your approval;
such recommendation is contained in paragraph 14.
2. We have problems in the Support Services Staff which are
impeding our ability to fulfill our responsibilities and plan adequately
for their future fulfillment.
a. We have a mix of responsibilities at the Agency
and Directorate levels: the Regulations Control Branch
has an Agency role; the Records Administration Branch has
an Agency role and a Directorate role; the Information
Processing Branch has a Directorate role; we have the
Agency responsibility for Emergency Planning and the
responsibility for the Directorate Historical Board. In
addition the Executive Director has recently expressed
agreement with the idea that there should be an Agency
Archives but has said it should be a Support function. We
have the responsibilities without the resources to meet
them.
b. The Support Directorate has no records staff but
has relied on the Agency Staff for support. The Agency Staff
has fewer people than the Clandestine Services Records Manage-
ment Officer has to deal with CS records problems; not enough
to meet its Agency responsibilities much less to meet the
additional requirements of the Support Directorate. The
Support Directorate has a larger volume of records than the
Clandestine Services.
c. Not only are we short on quantity, we don't have
the quality of resources necessary to do what we can see needs
to be done. Some offices, for example, have included in their
Program submissions plans to develop new systems. The Chief,
Plans Staff has asked the Support Services Staff to concur in
these plans. Before concurring we should understand the
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problems in order to be able to make reasonable judgments
about whether the proposals represent the best or the right
solutions. We don't have anyone who can be spared from
his present duties for the time it would take to conduct
such studies. In any event, none of our people has the
qualifications to do an adequate job of recommending the
best solution because none of them has the appropriate
combination of experience and background in manual, auto-
mated, and microfilm systems. To get the right combination
we would have to use more than one person and it is twice
as hard to release two as one.
d. Staffing constraints in the Records Administration
Branch through the years have deprived us of the flexibility
necessary to keep people current with the state of the art
and broaden their experience. The youngest member of RAB
is 42 and she has been in her present assignment 14 years.
The oldest member is 53 and he has been in his present
assignment 19 years. The lack of staffing flexibility
prevents the assignment of young officers. and we have no
practical way of making room for them because the experi-
enced records officers are too highly specialized for assign-
ment to other types of positions. Attitudes toward records
management and the career service structure itself are such
that young officers are not likely to be attracted to the
records profession.
e. All of the problems of the records program which
have been cited in various presentations over the past two
or three years continue to exist because resources are not
available to do anything about them. To restate all of
these problems in detail here would be needlessly redundant
but it should be re-emphasized that systematic management
control over the creation of record material is the heart
of any successful records management program. Records manage-
ment programs must give attention to all methods and media
of records creation: correspondence, microforms, reports
including the output of computer systems, file creation
and storage, forms design, and copying machines.
f. Some of the same and some different problems plague
the Information Processing Branch. People were selected by
their parent career services for assignment to this function
with the result that we have more quantity than quality of
the kind we need for the long term. In the Information Pro-
cessing function we have the problem of uncertainty or open
endedness, of the future of the SIPS Task Force. Planning
to meet the long term information processing requirements without
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knowing the future of the SIPS Task Force will be awkward.
It would be helpful to know whether we will continue to
operate under an agreement with DDS&T, return to separate
management of DD/S and OCS resources, or place the total
responsibility in one Directorate or the other, and we will
need to be highly selective in identifying the people who
will perform the functions in whatever organizational setting
is chosen.
g. We need to consider whether to concentrate the
information processing skills in one place or allow them
to develop in each of the offices. Having these skills
in both places leads to competition between the two and
the central structure tends to find itself in an adversary
role opposite the people having these skills in the offices.
Moreover, competence in the information processing field is
so scarce that competition for it within the Directorate
cannot be afforded.
h. Management of the information processing personnel
in the Support Directorate is a problem that we can't deal
with effectively until we have settled on the future of the
SIPS Task Force and how we should organize to cope with
information processing problems of the future. We need to
be able to plan for the kinds of skills we are going to require
and in what mix and then we need to figure out what career
paths and opportunities can be offered.
i. There is a need in the Support Directorate for a
staff competence to take the initiative in identifying and
dealing with problems. There is a need to bring some
imaginativeness into the records and information processing
functions in a Directorate context as well as within the
individual offices. There should be a close procedural
and review relationship with the DD/S Plans Staff to ensure
that programs developed in the offices give proper attention
to Directorate implications. We should be able to aggressively
and imaginatively pursue the development of information
systems to meet changing Directorate requirements. The DD/S
should have a staff he can turn to with problems whether
they are local to one office or are Directorate-wide. Pro-
blems identified for the Problem Solving Seminars which don't
lend themselves to solutions in a week may be examples as
well as some of the studies and actions needed to take
advantage of the recommendations of the Seminars. There
should be a nucleus of competence in the modern management
sciences to ensure that we develop solutions and foster
innovations which are at least current with the present state
of the art.
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j. The idea of the Data Management Center being developed
by the SIPS Task Force suggests the need, for a new concept
in systems management, or at least an, adaptation of traditional
line-staff relationships. The data managed in these centers
will be the products of integrated systems designs which won't
fit neatly within the functional responsibilities of one
Support Office or another. They will have to be managed in
some way at a level which falls between the Office and Direc-
torate levels without directly superimposing another manage-
ment echelon between the Deputy Director for Support and his
Office Directors.
k. We need a capability to review and evaluate on-going
systems to find out whether they are doing what they were
intended to do or have outlived their usefulness and to take
corrective action as appropriate. This need applies to all
information processing systems, manual, automated, filmed, or
whatever.
3. The most difficult problem of all, of course, is to find some
way to deal with the problems stated above. They exist because there
are functions to be performed that aren't being performed at the Agency,
Directorate, or component levels; because the resources available are
fully committed to their present tasks and none are available to deal
with new problems; because the resources available have evolved into
organizational structures to meet particular requirements as they occurred
and this has caused distortions in the career service and personnel
management systems; and because the evolution of functions has caused
a peculiar admixture of Agency and Directorate responsibilities at
different echelons of the organization. Perhaps the best way to get at
the solution to these problems is to examine the functions which lie
behind them.
4. Basically, these functions relate to the continuing require-
ment for management improvement and management improvement almost
inevitably will cause or must be accomplished through changing present
or developing new information processing systems. The process of change
begins with problem identification and proceeds through the steps of
defining the problem, conceptualizing alternative solutions, designing
a change to the present system or developing a new one, and implementing
the solution chosen. An example may be useful to describe the process.
5. In a recent program submission the Office of Medical Services
said its file room in the headquarters building is nearing capacity.
Although the problem was initially identified as a space problem, it is
directly related to OMS's overall records filing and information pro-
cessing systems. To solve the problem OMS proposed to install a terminal
digit system, a microfiche system, and to engage the services of a
consultant. The need for a consultant is not clear especially since two
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solutions have already been selected. Because microfilming is not
usually an economical solution to a space problem, we recommended
further consideration and study before proceeding. Following the
steps listed in paragraph four above, the process would be:
a. Problem identification - the file room is nearing
its capacity and the overcrowded condition results in
inefficiencies in the filing and retrieval of individual
clinical files.
b. Definition of the problem would require an
examination of the system to develop answers to such ques-
tions as: What is the content of the file? Where, why,
and by whom is it originated? How long is it kept and
why? How often is the file retrieved? Is the'whole file
needed each time it is retrieved or only certain documents
it contains? What is the frequency of update? What is
the output from the file?
c. Study and analysis of the answers to these and
other questions should permit definition of the real pro-
blem and permit alternative solutions to be conceptualized.
The alternatives may range from some form of manual solu-
tion to miniaturization to automation or a combination of
two or three of these choices. Selection of the best alter-
native will depend on feasibility, cost, and expected bene-
fits.
6. The example of the Medical files problem points directly to
the very close relationship between records management functions and
information processing functions. A file problem is an information pro-
cessing problem. The solution may or may not require the use of computers
or microform. There are other problems and functions which point up
the close relationship between the records and information processing
functions.
a. The need to change a form or design a new one usually
is symptomatic of a problem in an information processing system.
Before a form is changed the designer ought to have a pretty
thorough knowledge of the system the form is to serve. A
form is a medium for collecting data and dispersing it. Data
on the form should be ordered in such a way that it facilitates
the collection and entry of information required as well as its
extraction from the form by its users. Forms may be either
input to manual, automated, or filmed systems or output from
them, or they may simply be a convenient medium for hard copy
storage of some systematic array of data. The purposes for which
they are to be used and roles they play in the information pro-
cessing systems they serve are critical factors in determining
how they should be designed. Records Management officers have
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traditionally had primary responsibility for forms manage-
ment and design. In today's world of Optical Scanning
Forms and Computer Output Microform, the storage, manipu-
lation and retrieval of information demands that information
systems analysts play a co-equal role in forms management.
b. Reports management is a primary element of every
Records Management Program. Reports are the products - the
outputs - of virtually every information processing system,
manual or automated. Outputs are produced to satisfy infor-
mation requirements. Their content, format, frequency and
distribution are critical elements of information processing
-systems design. Reports are records for short term use or
long term preservation.
c. The files and outputs of all systems are record material
regardless of the form they take. When their immediate utility
to every day operations in the office declines they will be
transferred to the Records Center. Those which have historical
value will be retained permanently in the Archives where they
will become the research tools of historians and serve as the
permanent documentary record of the history of the Agency.
7. The relationships among the historical, archival, and records
management functions seem self evident and should not require further
elaboration. The relationship between the information processing and
records management functions is illustrated and described in the fore-
going paragraphs. Neither the Agency nor the several Directorates are
currently organized to deal with these functions in a coherent fashion.
The Agency Historical Staff is a separate unit reporting to the Executive
Director-Comptroller; the Agency Information Processing Staff reports
to the Director of Planning, Programming and Budgeting; and the Agency
Records Administration Staff is a Branch of the Support Services Staff
in the Support Directorate. Functional coherence suggests that they
should all be a part of the same organizational component reporting to
the Executive Director-Comptroller with each function represented as a
separate Division within that component. Transferring the Agency Records
Management function to the Office of the Executive Director would be
the most logical, simplest, least disruptive, and least controversial
change.
8. The recent response of the Executive Director to our Archives
proposal suggests that he would not be receptive to having these functions
report to him.* That being the case another alternative is to consider
*This might work if Chuck Briggs was made the Chief of a new staff
composed of Archives, Historical, Records, and IP Divisions and someone
else became Deputy to the Director OPPB.
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