Long‑term Digital Archiving — Outsourcing or Doing it

Abstract

Governments all over the world are confronted with a new sphere of electronic data that is the consequence of increasingly presented and used information technology (IT). The data is heaping up on desktop computers, servers, tapes, CDs, etc. Not till the last decade did leading employees and the political elite start to ask themselves how will this data be saved as a proof of e‑government actions for the near and far future and our posterity. Considering the nature of electronic form compared to the paper form we can define keeping electronic data as a "non‑stop" job, while keeping the classical paper form can be defined as a "store‑and‑leave" job. New legislation and standards regarding the management and archiving of electronic data arise and so do practical solutions — information systems. At the point of implementation we can be confronted with huge expenses and the question of best implementation. How to solve this issue, considering outsourcing the service of long term digital archiving by external contractors or implementing it by the government itself is the topic of this paper. The paper focuses on organizational, technical and financial aspects of the dilemmas "to outsource or not", "parts or the whole service", how to do it, etc. It analyses the decision factors and tries to make conclusions on the basis of theory and research results from different survey projects. It presents the results of the empirical study of the digital archiving filed in the public sector of Slovenia that also focused on the outsourcing of digital archiving service or different segments of this service. The results from the public sector are also compared with the results for the private sector.