National Archives and Records Administration hosts these bimonthly records and information discussion group or bridge meetings to present information relating to federal records management. Bridge is co-produced by the Office of the Chief Records Officer for the United States and the Federal Records Center program and is live streamed to the audience via our YouTube channel. Generally, bridge meetings consist of a scheduled program of presentations with an open at the end of each meeting to ask questions of the presenters or of any related federal records management topic of interest. Viewers are encouraged to post questions in the chat or by sending an email to rm.communications at narra.gov. Our staff will be monitoring this email box during the meeting. You are also welcome to make comments during this meeting in the YouTube chat. However, please keep in mind that all comments are subject to moderation, so we ask that you keep the comments relevant to the topics being discussed. Copies of the presentation slides can be found in the information box below and on the bridge page of the Archives website. That web page is where you will also find links to the transcript of today's meeting when it is available as well as links and information about previous and upcoming bridge meetings. If you have general comments about bridge or suggestions for future topics, you can use that same email address rm.communications at narra.gov to pass those along to us. We welcome your feedback. With that, I would like to open today's meeting by introducing Gordon Everett, Director of the Federal Records Center program, to get us underway. Good morning, Gordon. Thank you, Arian. Good morning to everyone and happy Federal New Year. I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy and enjoying our entry into the fall, at least here in the D.C. area where my heater happened to kick on yesterday morning. So it seems as, you know, we will get to enjoy some semblance of Thanksgiving with family this year and that we are thankful for. But we're going to get started with the agenda today. I will bring a quick update from the Federal Records Center program. We'll have Matt Edson and Derek Kennedy. We'll bring some information on the annual move. Cindy Smolovick and Don Rosen will talk about annual reporting data. And Kirsten Mitchell and Krista Lemelin from OGIS will be talking about reporting update, a revised, excuse me, and an advisory committee update. And as Arian mentioned earlier, if you do have subject matter that you'd like us to cover in future meetings, please send that info to, as Arian said, email rm.communicationsatnara.gov. So let me get my notes in front of me and we'll get started. And this is the, I'll give you an update for the Federal Records Center program. So since the starting of the pandemic, NARA and the Federal Records Center program have endeavored to keep our staff safe while continuing to provide essential services. Every now our Federal Records Center has continued servicing emergency requests throughout the pandemic using limited onsite staff. But as of yesterday, we've discontinued a process of phase reopenings that we previously used. And instead, all Federal Records Centers are now open, but are limited to 25% pre-COVID occupancy, as the counties they are in are experiencing high COVID transmission levels as defined by the CDC. So I must advise you that when centers are in high transmission areas, our staff resources, our volunteer staff, and only 25% at only 25% level, and we may not necessarily reach the 25% occupancy. Many of our folks still remain on weather and safety leave until the COVID transmission levels improve in the county where the FRC is located. Now, any facility located in a county experiencing substantial, moderate, or low transmission levels for three consecutive weeks on or after yesterday will be able to expand to full building occupancy and onsite work functions. Currently, only to San Bruno FRC is at a substantial level and has been given approval by the archivists of the United States to begin transition to pre-COVID levels of staff in their facilities. So again, only San Bruno has the opportunity to move pre-COVID levels of staff. At this point, all other centers will be at 25% of pre-COVID. The archivists of the United States will continue to make all progression and regression decisions based on CDC transmission levels. Now, when we say no occupancy limits, no limits, on the number of staff who can enter the facility, it does not mean that the FRC is at 100% pre-pandemic staffing levels. It just doesn't mean that. I mean, there are a lot of reasons where staff may not all have returned, but each FRC will update their capabilities based on current staffing levels and we'll do that at our website at www.archives.gov.frc operating status. And you should see that. I think Pam Northern is going to pop that into the chat box for you. I know many of you want to hear about physical 22 rates. Many thanks to our customers who have sent us their funding commitments, at least through the continuum resolution for this physical year. We know many of you would prefer to have the rates in hand before sending your funding commitments. And we expect to have those in your hand any day now. But just as a reminder, while NARA is an appropriated entity, the federal records center program is not. And we're reviving fund that by law must cover all of our operating costs. So we go through numerous financial exercises based on projected workloads and more to ensure the rates that we charge will return in full the expenses of operation, including reserves for annual leave, work as compensation, depreciation of capitalized equipment, shelving, amortization. There are a lot of things. We are legally prohibited from charging more than 4% over our costs. So the more information we have close to the end of a physical year, the better our forecast to determine the rates for the new year that's coming. And what we don't want to have to do is increase rates during the year as we did in 2020 with the COVID surcharge. So that's why it takes us a little long to get the rates to you. We want to give you the best and rate possible where we don't have to make adjustments during the year. So we apologize for any inconvenience on getting the rates to you. But this was even more challenging as we're having to do forecast from COVID activity and hopefully going back to a normal year. So it was difficult, but we hope to have those to you any day now, not by the end of this week, maybe early next week, but you'll have the 2022 rates. You should have received just this week where it's coming, your final October, I'm sorry, your final September invoice. And that's coming out to all customers. So with that, that's the updates from the Federal Records Center Program. And Ari and I'll take any questions. I also have Chris Pinking, our Director of Operations. Chris should be on with me if there are any questions. That's always great when you're very clear. Thank you, Gordon. We have no questions at this time. So I think what we'll do is we'll just, as a reminder to folks, please feel free to put a chat in. If you have a question, put it in chat. We'll collect those and we'll ask those at the end of the program. Okay. Thanks. So with that, oh, wait a minute. We just got one. Okay. If the Federal Records Center Program overestimates a fiscal year's rates, why not offer the federal agencies who are FRC customers a rebate or an app or an adjustment to next year's FY invoices? Well, if we have, and I don't have my financial person on here, if in fact that we, as I said, we're able to project rates or offer rates up to 4%, they recover 4% of our cost. If at any time that there is more than 4%, we've collected more than 4% of that revenue. There's not a profit or anything. We have to return those funds to the Treasury or to the agency. And I know in the 10 years I've been here, I've not seen us have to return funds to Treasury. We've been pretty good at estimating or projecting where the rates are. So I understand when folks don't necessarily agree where they are, but again, by law, we have to cover our costs. Okay. I don't see anything further to the FRCP. I will acknowledge there's a question about the 2022 deadline. We will get to that in the general portion of the meeting. Okay. Thank you. Okay. With that, I'd like to pull up the next slide and we can get to our next topic today, which is Matt Aidsen and Derek Kennedy of the Permanent Records Capture Team discussing the annual move. So Matt and Derek, you're up. Thank you, Ryan. As Ryan said, I'm Matt Aidsen and with me here today is Derek Kennedy who coordinates the annual move for our team, the Permanent Records Capture Team. Our Records Capture Team is organized within the Office of Chief Records Officer and among the duties that we perform, we coordinate the annual move of Permanent Records from the Federal Records Centers to Archives across NARA. And before I get started, I just wanted to say a word of thanks to all of you ahead of time for the help you do in performing the processes and getting through the annual move each year. You all have a pivotal role in the transfer and the preservation of historic records.  All right. Next slide. Okay. So we're going to talk about the 22 annual move and that just a reminder that includes agencies that's for agencies that use the Federal Records Center for storing records. It's for transfers that are eligible to move in the year 2022. It also includes a five-year sweep of records that are overdue for transfer. Next slide. Okay. A little bit of background and notes on this year's annual move and just to explain, the annual move is NARA's process for transferring legal and physical custody of Permanent Records that are stored in the Federal Records Centers to the archival custodial units across the nation. It's a cross-functional activity that touches a lot of different parts of NARA and among many agencies that this all supports the core mission to preserve apparently valuable records of the federal government. This year we had some changes and adjustments in the timeline. We sent out candidate lists. Candidate lists are kind of the transfers that are becoming eligible for agencies to review in May. So that was a change and we wanted to get it to agencies earlier. So there's more time for agencies to address and identify issues in the data to work for their records within their agency to get to final approval by the end of the year. We also standardized and gave a spreadsheet response so that we could have some better tracking on changes as they came in. These efforts seem to work well and we plan on continuing to do this in future moves. Another thing that happened, NARA suffered a connectivity failure due to the flooding on the east coast, Hurricane Ida, if you guys remember that. And this resulted in NARA not being available to agencies for records scheduling, transfer requests, annual move for about two weeks. But just in time, we were able to get back online and we were able to meet our deadline by October the 1st. And so we had a successful load of 2022 annual move and all the TRs. My pleasure to say all the TRs are there in draft data. About COVID this year, wanted to recognize these are not normal times for operations. And while we're able to execute actions for the annual move in ERA on transfer requests, the physical move of records from the record center to archival facilities and the acceptance of legal custody continue to be delayed due to the continued impacts of COVID-19 on NARA's operating status. All right, Derek. Yes, thank you, Matt. Next slide, please. Yes, the slide before you is the 22 annual move timeline. And as Matt touched on, we have moved the candidate list being sent to agencies up to May 1st to give agencies more time to respond, to have better information, to put an ERA to have the agencies propose these records to NARA. As you see, our candidate list feedback deadline is the 30th of June. Of course, the 1st of October every year, the TRs are loaded into ERA so that the agencies can propose them so they can be approved by NARA to be moved into NARA's custody. Our hard deadline is December 1st. The hard deadline of December 1st means that all TRs in ERA that are submitted by agencies or should I say proposed by agencies between October and December are moved in a spring. It does not mean that you have to stop proposing TRs from the 22 annual move. It just means that if you missed that hard deadline of the 1st of December, anything proposed after December will be moved in a future annual move. Of course, the next point on our line is the 15th of January. That is NARA's approved decision deadline. So after the deadline of the 1st for the agencies, NARA has to the 15th of January to approve those TRs that were proposed by the agencies. The next timeline point is the 15th of January through the 31st of March. NARA moves the records. This is considered the spring move. The next point on the timeline, June 1st, 2022 is the proposal deadline for the late summer move. That proposal deadline is for the agencies. The next deadline is the 15th of July. That approved decision deadline for the late summer move. That deadline is for NARA itself to make a decision on those TRs that were proposed for the late summer move that would do by the agencies on June 1st. Of course, moving on the records for the late summer move, that is July 15th through September 30th for the late summer move. That would be the physical moving of the records. But as agencies know, due to the pandemic, some of these will be subject to the availability of staff at the various FRCs. Next slide, please. Here we have AMU facts. So on October 1st, NARA loaded 6,908 transfers, totaling 103,727 cubic feet. These records are covering 149 agencies. And for this 2022 annual move fact, the oldest record date we have is from 1875. And those records belong to St. Elizabeth's Hospital, which the permanent record capture team worked very hard on getting approved to be a session by NARA, which was a great day for us. On average, each agency has about 40 TRs to propose. Some have a few more. Some just have one. Next slide, please. So of course, on October 2021, we loaded 6,908 TRs in ERA. The next points are taken directly from ERA as of this morning. So we still have 6,658 in draft status. We have 148 and submitted for agency approval status. And what that means is that the transferring official has submitted these in ERA and now it's up to the agency approving official to also submit those same records so they could be approved, I mean, I'm sorry, proposed in ERA. 90 have been proposed by the agency. 92 are in ready for approval status and zero are in approved status, which means that NARA has not taken action as of yet on the 92 that are ready for approval by us. Next slide, please. Here we have the top five agencies with the largest number of TRs. Of course, the District Court of the United States has 1,502. Environmental Protection Agency has 884. NASA has 704. Department of State 439 and the Department of the Army 364 TRs to propose. Next slide, please. What should the agencies do? Agencies to propose their TRs by December 1st. And the steps to proposal it would be to complete an advanced search in the keyword search field for the 2020 annual move to locate your assigned TRs. Now, sometimes when you log in to ERA for your agency, you don't see those TRs in your queue and you email us or you call us sometimes say, hey, I know our agencies have TRs for 2022, but I don't see them in my queue. What do I do? So what we ask you to do is not always rely on the TRs being in your queue, but to complete an advanced search and use the keywords and parentheses 2022 annual move to locate your assigned TRs. Two, review and make the necessary changes through the graph TR. Please note that this position authority, if it's a mistake, cannot be changed. It must be deleted and redrafted. And we ask that you notify annual.move at narrow.gov if this does occur, so we'll be able to assist you. Number three, records officers who have dual roles in ERA as transferring official and agency approval official will need to hit submit twice in order to have the TR fully proposed and the way ERA is designed for the transferring official to create transfer records and submit them to the agency improvement official, but sometimes an agency might have multiple individuals assigned to this role. So it's best to know who your agency does have this dual role feature and to remember that if you have both roles, you have to hit submit at the transferring official and then you have to go back into that same TR and then hit submit to have it proposed at the agency approving official. That is very important. Next slide, please. Agencies with single roles in the ERA transferring official submission review approval. The TRs cannot be approved unless the agency approving official submits the TR and proposed status in ERA. If you need any guidance of the use restriction fields, consult pages 48 to 53 of the ERA user manual and we have provided a link to the manual on the slide that you'll be able to get to so you can get to those pages and find out about the access and use restriction fields. Matt, I believe it is slide ten is your turn. All right, just want to clear up one thing that I noticed on the timeline, Derek talked about the late summer move. This is if you are unable to make the December 1 deadline, what would happen? The late summer move is primarily a separate process for the DC area and it's slightly different process in the field sites and other archives across the National Archives. I just wanted to point that out. Okay, so common problems that we hear are encountered by agencies, they kind of are similar to what Derek just addressed and what needs to be completed. One of the most common ones is I can't locate my TRs and then I'll, I think the best option is to use the search term and to not rely on the notification in ERA to auto populate what you need to do. So go in there with your advanced search and use the search term 2022 annual move and while you're in there look for previous years that you may not have, that they could still be in there waiting for your approval. Second one, transferring official versus agency approving official. So Derek talked about that status FAA and what, you know, that's submitted for approval to the next role and so if it gets hung up in there, you know, it doesn't get to be fully submitted. So, you know, the solution here is to know your role associated with your login. If you have two roles then you need to submit that twice in order to be fully submitted. Just a reminder that in order to use ERA you'll need to be in a secure connection with your agency.  So that's required to access and sign in to ERA. Our browser, the browsers that you can use at this time are Internet Explorer and Firefox in order to access ERA and if you're experiencing any problems you'll want to contact the head of the help desk, the ERA help desk directly. Don't, you know, don't hesitate. Give us a contact. We'll work with you on any of the browser issues you might have. And finally, sometimes you're getting through your TR, you're getting ready to submit it and you get hung up in an access restriction field. That's pretty common and you're unsure what to put. The best resource that I can say that you should use particularly for access restrictions is our pages 48 through 51 of the ERA user guide. They've got the screenshots there. They've got an explanation of what field, you know, which field and what options you want to put in there. So go straight to the ERA user guide if you're wondering about what are the right options, what do all these fields mean here that you're reviewing. All right. Next slide. So before we finish up here, I just wanted to say we have updated the ERA website and at the same time updated the annual move as a result of that. And so you'll have, we have more information about the annual move including explanation of the process, the timeline and helpful resources such as the user guide, training. We have webinars and access to the topics in the webinar all available on our website. So check out our website for additional help, you know, if you need it on the annual move. Okay. Next slide. So these are the top resources you want to use. Again, the ERA user guide, that's like the just in time, you know, when I'm on the screen where I'm having trouble, go to the user guide. It usually is going to work hand in hand while you're there. And of course annual.moveitnar.gov. Don't hesitate to please email us. We'll get back to you or if we take a bit, it's because we're coordinating an answer to try and get you the right answer. Of course the ERA help desk is also, you know, good to keep handy. Expect from us another reminder probably through email next month as we're coming closer to the December 1st deadline. As you can see, we need to get started on our numbers. We will want to get all of our TRs submitted before that deadline is always the best way. Okay. And the next slide is questions. So I'm ready to take questions. Thanks Matt and thanks Derek for that informative presentation. There are a few questions that have come in. The first one is how can I find out who is the agency approving official in ERA at my agency? Okay. The quickest way I know to find an answer to that question would be to call the help desk. I don't have it readily available, but I can get it. So if you did contact annual.moveitnar.gov, that'd be fine. We'd be able to find out. But I know if the help desk, they certainly maintain a listing of who is the approving official. Like this question in order to be able to get your TR fully submitted to NARA by December 1st, it needs to be in that agency approving official role. And so, yeah, you would contact the help desk to understand who that is at your agency. Thank you for that. We have a question. Can the delay in reviews and transfers be quantified? Are the delays months behind, weeks behind, or how else is it quantified? Have the 2020 moves been completed yet? So I guess sort of a status where we are. Yeah. So 2020, we got the majority move before the facilities closed from COVID and stopping the transfer or the shipment of records. So those are, that one's good. 2021. And we have not, I mean, in some cases, records could, you know, were accessioned in place or, you know, they didn't have to get moved. So some of them went to a final stage, not many. So, yeah. So for 2021, we are that far behind in moving records. If you want a kind of rundown of what is going on in your particular agency, please email us. We can give you a status report for those moves to let you know, hey, these are approved. These are waiting to be moved from record center and then kind of an account of how many are awaiting change of legal custody to NARA. So please, if you'd like to know a status of that individual for your agency, we can provide that. Thank you. And I'll read this comment and some clarification, I guess, and you can respond, if necessary. If your transfer request in ERA asserts the Privacy Act, applies to a specific set of agency-owned permanent records, ensure the transfer request also cites the SOAR, the system of records notice. So is that… Yeah, yeah. I think that's correct statement. There is a required field. If Privacy Act is checked, then you're going to need to cite the system of records notice. And that's one of the, you know, kind of hiccups or hangups that you might encounter. I don't know, you can't move on unless you cite the system of records notice, which might be, you know, take some research to find. And so that, you know, Privacy Act triggers, you know, a need for the agency user to enter additional information that we don't have. So yeah, that is a correct statement. And thank you for that. We did get a question about, did you mean MS Edge rather than IE? I guess when you were citing browsers. Right, yeah. So no, actually, I mean Internet Explorer. So I recognize that Edge is more common nowadays. I don't have any updates on development or implementation of expansion of browser. Unfortunately, I don't have updates today. But I do mean Internet Explorer or Firefox. So thank you, Matt and Derek. That exhausts the questions that we have in the queue. As a reminder to viewers, feel free to drop a question in chat. And Matt and Derek will be available at the end to clarify any issues that come up. And with that, I'd like to move to our next presenters. We'll have a report on the Federal Agency Records Management Annual Reporting Cycle. And I'd like to bring up to the stage Don Rosen and Cindy Smolovic. Good morning. I'm Don Rosen, Director of Records Management Oversight and Reporting. Join my colleague Cindy Smolovic who leads our annual reporting efforts. And we're going to provide an update on the results of the past annual reporting activities. We had an excellent response rate again this year with 98% of agencies participating. So very much appreciated that. Thank you for everyone who participated. And reporting covers records major program activities here of 2020 and able to gather data not only if agencies comply with federal statutes and regulations, but how well records major programs are implementing records and email minutes. Next slide please. These are the three things that we captured, our SEO report from senior agency officials. And the focus this year was on COVID-19, M19-21 and transition to electronic records. We also captured stuff from maturity model and our records management self assessment which we've now been running. Cindy could probably give you the background, but almost over a decade now. So lots of good information we collect and we really appreciate all the information from the agencies and we consolidated all this information into an annual report which Cindy is now going to walk us through. Then we'll answer any questions on the data you might have for us. So with that I'm going to turn it over to Cindy who's going to share with us some of the findings that we had from this year's reporting period. So Cindy, you want to take it away? Thank you Don. And next slide please. The annual report to Congress is available on our website and includes our analysis of all the reports that were submitted. It also has dependencies with agency scores and statistics for each of the questions in both the maturity model and the RMSA which would be in far more detail than I can do here. But there are a few key observations that I hope you'll find interesting. As Don mentioned, the impact of COVID-19 was something we had to gather information about. So two of the key points on this slide are about that. We found that agencies that had already been transitioning to fully electronic record keeping over the past several years reported this year that they had less of a disruption than they expected and an easier transition to the remote access and teleworking that COVID-19 caused everybody to have to deal with. Agencies also reported that the sudden need to access information differently and securely from telework or other remote locations highlighted the need for electronic record keeping and in some cases accelerated the changes that had been already taking place. Overall agencies reported that they were using an electronic record keeping system or an electronic document management system or some other electronic means of some kind to at least create and house their records. Even so, meeting the requirements to manage records in electronic information systems remains a weak area with less than half of agencies reporting that their systems meet the success criteria. Perhaps one of the most interesting pieces of information from the data this year was the shift in the types of challenges that were reported. This year the shift was more about the culture of paper than the actual technology and costs themselves. A lot of agencies reported that they are trying really hard to overcome the dependence on paper processes but there are laws requiring paper for signature or for seals or just that require paper through the law and those laws have not yet been updated to allow electronic format. Statistically the culture of paper was mentioned 33% of the time from the agencies that we collected information from and the lack of resources which is generally time staff or money was mentioned 31%. This is close to even but this is the first time that the culture of paper was higher. The other challenges were differences such as systems and their functions, IP infrastructure itself but all of those were about 10% or less. There were also a quarter of agencies which is about 22% that reported that they didn't have any challenges this year as the goals had already been met or they were very close to being met. Next slide please. To keep can you focusing just a bit more on COVID-19? There was a little bit of silver lining shown in green. Again the transition to electronic record keeping and projects that had already been underway received more support than they were getting before and those that had not been seen as a priority were now receiving greater attention. The work that had already been done to make the transition also lowered the impact of COVID-19 because many agencies already had the structures policies and procedures in place for accessing records electronically. Policies and procedures and changes to them were not needed. That was one of the questions that we asked on the SAORM report or the agencies reported that they just required small changes. They also required reminders to staff and additional training and these were the two that were mentioned most often but overall agencies felt like what they had in place already exists and was being followed by their staff. There were of course obvious negative impacts. Many digitization projects are now delayed because the access to the paper records themselves and the equipment to digitize them was not possible. Most agencies also mentioned that the limited services that the federal record centers could provide also impact both digitization projects and their ability to disposition records. Next slide please. Moving on to the usual data collected by annual reporting the RMSA risk levels are shown here from 2016 to 2020. Don mentioned we have data going back all the way 2009 but we update this slide every year to give you smaller blocks. The risk levels remain consistent with low risk moving back up to above 40 percent and had dropped down a little bit. It's the green line but this year it was it shows that it's moving back up. Moderate levels such as the yellow line are still pretty good and the number of agencies that we send links to changes a little bit each year as new agencies are created or identified. Sometimes departments reorganize and merged agencies together but overall the number has been stable enough to continue to make this type of comparison. Some agencies however do border one or two points away from moving up or down between the levels and we found this year that there are about 31 percent of agencies that are on the cusp between moderate and low risk where some are in low risk but could drop down and moderate where they're almost into low risk and can go up and there's about six percent that border on dropping down to high risk. So while each which particular agencies fall into each risk category changes the overall picture is made remain pretty much the same over the last five years. Next slide please. In using the same graph style to compare the maturity models and the maturity models cover electronic records management as a whole and then federal email management is part two. For electronic records management we only have two years. This is only the second time that we have run part one of the maturity model and it shows that there was at least an eight point improvement in agencies going from 50 percent selecting the low risk scenarios that the maturity model has up to 58 percent so that was good. The email management maturity model has been used for a longer period of time and has much more of a more of a dramatic if you will line the green line at the top there where it shows that when we first started doing the maturity model in 2016 44 percent of agencies picked the low risk scenarios but now it's up to 73 percent. So the concentration on managing email in electronic format has led to a greater maturity and more confidence in at least the email management. However it's also important to note that many agencies have indicated in their comments to us that the technology and methodology and success that they've had with managing email electronic format will be applied to other electronic records. So they use email as they're testing ground and the due date on it was first. This may also allow more maturity and confidence to grow for general electronic records management as we continue to use maturity model each year. Next slide please. If you've been wondering if the transition to electronic records has had any particular impact this is an illustration of some of the more dramatic shifts since we first started collecting data about how agencies capture email content. We first started asking this question in 2013 and as you can see by the red line print and file well it was the strongest choice in 2013 is almost a rare choice in 2020 which is of course what we wanted to see in the first place. The use of electronic record systems has increased as seen by the blue line and the introduction of cloud services as an answer option was first introduced in 2019 and it's the small green light there that sort of peeks out underneath the blue line. Next slide please. Here are a few other statistics from the data. At least 80 percent of agencies and their agency records officers have obtained the certificate from our training team known as the ABROC. Most agencies about 65 percent have formal evaluation programs to monitor their records management program implementation. The other 35 percent of agencies monitor with a mix of informal, general and some ad hoc evaluations. Most agencies again about 89 percent have a records management directive and of those 58 percent have updated it within the last year. Email systems are more mature with 44 percent of agencies indicating that their electronic information systems meet the success criteria while noting that 73 percent of their email systems. So again email is the stronger of the two right now. Next slide. And this is our last slide so where are we today? Well the annual report to congress that analyzes all this data has been posted to our website so you can see the links there you can go and read the report that we send to congress. Also available are the individual SAORM reports that's the senior agency officer for records management. We do post these individually so if you want to see your agency's report on the website you can go there or if you want to see how other agencies have completed the template this is where you would go. We also post the data from the federal electronic records management reports both part one and part two in a spreadsheet that is downloadable so you again can see your own answers and also see how your agency is compared with other agencies. Annual reporting for 2021 is just around the corner. We will be reporting again January and March. The exact dates will be coming out soon so watch for that. Look for the RMSA and the maturity model templates as soon as they've been approved hopefully in December but certainly by opening day you should have those in both word and in fillable PDF so that you can spread them around your agencies to gather your data. We also want to please update your contact information for annual reporting. You would send that to the rmselfassessment.nara.gov email address there on the slide and if you have any other problems or questions about annual reporting that's where you would send them and I will turn it back over to Don and we can answer any questions. Thank you Cindy. Are there any questions that we can answer for anyone about the annual reporting? Thank you Cindy. Thank you Don. Right now we have no questions of around annual reporting so as a reminder to our users, viewers if you have a question you can drop it in the chat and at this point we'll just bring you guys back at the end if we need to go through if you guys need to answer any questions. Thank you. Thank you Ari. So next on our agenda this morning we have Kirsten Mitchell and Krista Lemelin from the Office of Government Information Services or OGIS to provide an update on their reporting. So Kirsten Krista I'll turn it over to you. Thank you Arianne and good morning Records Managers and a very early good morning to those of you who are joining from the West Coast. As Arianne said I'm Kirsten Mitchell and I lead FOIA compliance work at the Office of Government Information Services here at the National Archives. I'm joined by my colleague Krista Lemelin. As many of you know OGIS is the federal FOIA ombudsman. OGIS is a place where anyone can ask for assistance with the FOIA process. Among our many statutory duties is reviewing FOIA compliance and one way we do that is through the Records Management Self Assessment the RMSA. Krista and I are here to talk more in depth about the FOIA questions asked in the 2020 RMSA and before turning it over to Krista I just want to thank all of you Records Managers for all the work you do every day. Your work is crucial to FOIA and I think sometimes it doesn't get recognized as much as it should. So next slide please and over to you Krista. And next slide after that please and thank you Kirsten and good morning everyone. We chose this picture of Harry and Best Truman's wedding party to represent OGIS's partnership with the Office of the Chief Records Officer. Since 2016 OGIS has partnered with the Crow's Office to ask FOIA questions in the Records Management Self Assessment Survey and the partnership it's been a very fruitful one for OGIS. It's allowed us to you know develop a rich source of FOIA data that we wouldn't otherwise have and you know we're seeing more and more over time that FOIA professionals and FOIA programs are there's more of an emphasis on the relationship between federal records management and FOIA because as we all know an excellent records management program is the foundation of a strong federal government and a successful FOIA program. And so we'll talk a little bit about that later in the presentation today. Next slide please. Thank you. So the 2020 Records Management Self Assessment Survey it asked seven FOIA questions which included well which focused on three topics. COVID's impact on FOIA operations, agency use of e-discovery tools and the relationship between chief record chief FOIA officers and agency records officers and you know before doubling into the results which are very high level we're not getting into the weeds here because the initial draft of this report it looks like a Thanksgiving dinner table there were so many pie charts so we decided to keep it higher level and you know focus on the main themes but you know we just wanted to say a big thank you to all of you who took the time to answer these questions so thoughtfully we really really appreciate the work that you do that you know keeps FOIA programs compliant with FOIA and so now over to you Kirsten and next slide please. Okay thank you Krista. So no matter your role in records management or FOIA for that matter the COVID-19 pandemic was the story of 2020 as Cindy discussed earlier. The pandemic was between 10 months and one year old when respondents took the 2020 RMSA earlier this year. I mentioned that in relation to this survey because by the time the RMSA questions were asked agencies had had some time to figure out new ways of working and although the RMSA is retrospective and that it asks questions on the prior years experience we think some of the results show some agencies resilience in dealing with the pandemic's challenges. Next slide please. So nearly half of all respondents 49% reported that the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted their agency's ability to respond to FOIA requests. That number may on its face appear surprising and appear a little low. After all we began hearing very early in the pandemic we at OGIS that the move to maximum telework was severely challenging agencies but when we drilled down in our work as the FOIA ombudsman early in the pandemic and then reviewed the RMSA responses we discovered a similar story and that is that the agency's most challenged were those dealing with classified records and systems as well as those relying on paper records in the shuttered federal record centers. So a lot of what you've already heard particularly in regard to the the record centers. So next slide please. So when the RMSA asked why FOIA had been affected we found that the responses generally fell into four buckets if you will. There were access issues like I just mentioned at the federal record centers personnel some obviously personnel weren't able to get into federal record centers or their workspaces resources and technology just again access issues. So one of the things I always enjoy with the RMSA are the answers to the open ended questions because they really provide some color as to what's going on and here are a couple of the responses that might not immediately pop to mind. Electronic records that are not stored to the server are inaccessible remotely. I thought that was an interesting response. This is something that Cindy touched on earlier. Many requests for records require staff to be in the office to scan. Thankfully as Cindy pointed out that number is going down across the board but there are still agencies that require staff to scan records. And then another question answer that we thought was really interesting was the inability to receive and process FOIA payments. That's not a strict records management issue per se but it is an interesting response on a topic of great interest to OGIS. Some agencies receive a bulk of their requests from commercial requesters who under FOIA's feet structure pay various processing fees. So just a little glimpse of some of the answers there. Next slide please. So drilling down into the 49% of respondents whose FOIA programs were disrupted by the pandemic. Let's have a little bit of a look at that. Of those respondents the vast majority 80% said the agency's paper records could not be accessed during the pandemic office closures and 46% that said that staff were not available to search for records. So next slide please. The next set of questions focused on the FOIA programs response to COVID-19. So we know that the pandemic affected agencies but how did the agencies respond with regard to FOIA? We found that they responded in a variety of ways from adjusting their processes to relying more on technology to communicating with requesters and we were really thrilled about the communicating with requesters. Next slide please. Next slide please. So thank you. Oh I'm sorry previous slide. Thank you. So the good news is that 72% of RMSA respondents reported that their agencies worked directly with requesters to tailor their requests for the most efficient processing during the COVID-19 pandemic and this is something that we really emphasized at OGIS was that agencies communicate with requesters and work with them to help them understand the challenges and help them better tailor their requests or write their requests for the most efficient processing. I won't read the slide but I'll give you a couple of seconds just to read the some of the other answers so you can see the different ways that agencies responded. So a couple of observations here just high level observations. The 2020 RMSA responses demonstrate that agencies that reported that they effectively managed their FOIA processes resources and technology and communicated with requesters were more likely to report that the pandemic did not disrupt their ability to respond to FOIA requests and that really mirrors what Cindy said earlier. Agency responses to the 2020 RMSA survey really offer insight into the challenges that some agencies face as they fully transition to fully electronic record keeping in accordance with the OMB NARA memorandum M-19-21 and before jumping to the next topic which Krista will go over e-discovery tools I just want to take a moment to thank all of you records managers who showed such resilience during the pandemic which unbelievably 19 months later is still challenging all of us. So next slide please and over to you Krista. Thanks Kirsten. This beautiful picture we're looking at right now is a picture of super computers at NASA. I thought it was beautiful so there you go but you know at OJIS we're interested in e-discovery and how agencies are using e-discovery tools to search for and de-duplicate records but we're also interested in other application of e-discovery tools to see whether that is you know of interest to FOIA programs and whether other offices within agencies are using e-discovery tools in a way that could benefit FOIA programs. You know 91% of the RMSA respondents said that their agencies use e-discovery tools for FOIA responses involving requests for email records. Next slide please. 72 respondents said that their agencies use e-discovery tools to search for records when responding to FOIA requests and or legal discovery which is a process by which agencies search for records in response to litigation or illegal inquiry. However e-discovery tools you know based on the survey results are not in as widespread use as they could be. 50 percent of the respondents use e-discovery tools for FOIA responses not involving requests for records. Next slide please. Of the agencies that reported using e-discovery tools 91% said that their agencies use them for FOIA responses involving requests for email records and a majority said that their agencies use them for lawsuit related requests legal discovery or third party subpoena requests managing legal holds and FOIA responses not involving requests for email records so next slide please. And so our final category of our topic rather for the RMSA questions was you know what's the relationship between chief FOIA officers and agency records officers. You know I love this slide that we have we're ready for the challenge of tomorrow let's do the job together and you know we're hopeful and we've been you know promoting the you know communication and work of chief FOIA officers working with agency records officers to you know improve IT improve you know record systems and everyone benefits when we work together. So next slide please. So a majority of respondents reported that their agency record officer and chief FOIA officer work together on IT requirements that benefit both programs and 50 percent reported that their training programs address the importance in relationship between FOIA and records management respondents also reported that their ARO and CFO provide training on records management and FOIA to each other staff work together on high profile or complex FOIA requests and identify programs or offices most likely to have responsive records 35 percent that said that the ARO and CFO coordinate search terms to identify responsive records with regard to records management specifically some of the responses include that agency records officers and chief FOIA officers you know work together on issues like certifying records coordinating on records schedules coordinating on their respective program policies refinements and guidance and coordinating with you know disposition schedules and notices of eligibility for destruction and so next slide please and over to you Kirsten. Thank you for both of you wishing to know more our the RMSA FOIA report is available on our website or it's at archives.gov forward flash oges so please have a look at it and here is our contact information feel feel free to contact us you can read our blog and follow us on twitter and we're also happy to answer any questions so i'm going to bump it back to Arian to see if there are any questions for us. Thank you Kirsten and on behalf of the records community let me thank you for the compliments that you passed on to us and compliment you guys for the work that you're doing as well the very important work that you're doing in the FOIA on the FOIA side. We do have a couple of questions that have filtered through first how can I find who is the chief FOIA officer at my agency? Oh that is a an excellent question so there you can go to FOIA.gov that's just FOIA.gov and there's a drop down there where you can create a request and in creating the request there'll be a link to the agency FOIA website. The chief FOIA officer's name and contact information is sometimes listed there but I will say this caveat that not all agencies list their CFOs there they're chief FOIA officers so alternately you can go to the Department of Justice FOIA reports page it's at justice.gov forward slash OIP office of information policy forward slash reports dash one there's something called a chief FOIA officer report that every agency is required by law to submit every year and they included in the reports is the name and contact information for the chief FOIA officer for each agency. Thank you the next question is has the chief FOIA officer's council published any reports that may be of interest to the records management community? Sure so the chief FOIA officer's council has a technology committee and we two reports that they've published that we think will be of particular interest include a recent report by the technology committee white paper called FOIA searches key challenges and findings and also the committees February 2020 report best practices and recommendations that particular report and you know looked at the utilization and deployment of technology at federal agencies to see how agencies were using technology to you know improve and enhance the FOIA process and these reports are available on the chief FOIA officers council webpage and we can paste the link into that into the chat. Thank you checking as a reminder to viewers if you have a question please type it into the chat and we will we will address to we will get to it at the end and since you guys were sort of the end we'll now transition over to our wrap-up Q&A session where we'll tackle all the questions that have come up and let me pull those up. The first question is has NARA or OMB made a decision on extending the 2022 deadline and I'll open that up to any of my colleagues who wish to answer and I see Lawrence is joining. Yes thanks Arianna yeah I'll pop in I've been listening attentively to all the presentations but there's a question that I've had to answer quite a few times so I figured I'd jump in and and respond. So 2022 long and short is we have heard all of you loud and clear on your concerns of meeting these 2022 targets in M1921 but where we are right now is no decisions have been made. I think like all of you we acknowledge that COVID has had an impact on agency operations including transferring records to FRCs and I think we heard Cindy talk a little bit about this earlier in her presentation and also on digitizing records on on site and in this respect NARA as an agency is really facing the same challenges that all of you all of you are facing in getting the digitization done getting the analog records the legacy records taken care of but the reality is from a policy perspective NARA cannot independently modify the targets that are in effect in M1921. Our plans just you know at this point are to share what we are hearing from all of you with OMB and by that I mean in meetings that we've had with individual agencies the data that we've collected through the annual reporting and we do intend to share that and along with our proposals to modify the memo and extend the targets. One of the things that I have said consistently is you know as we've been working through this pandemic and we're coming up on two years I think the two years is a reasonable amount of time that we need to take into account and give back to agencies to get back on track so that is that's what we're thinking and just wanted to let you all know that we have some more work to do on this within NARA before we are ready to engage with and coordinate with OMB. So in the meantime I encourage all of you to continue your efforts on the goals in the memo because the work is critically important and we need to work together to continue to make this transition to fully electronic government. So that is where we are with the memo one thing that I do want to add because it usually comes along with the same question and it has to do with exceptions to those goals related to 2022 and I just wanted to say with respect to that exceptions which include exemptions or extensions to those 2022 targets my advice is to follow the guidance that we issued in NARA Bulletin 2020-01 and develop your requests for submission to NARA. We are more than happy and we have staff standing by that are able to provide feedback on your request and discuss your request and provide feedback but at this point our first priority right now is to see what we can do in coordination with OMB to modify the memo and adjust the target date. So I'll leave you with that and just let you know rest assured as soon as I have new information to share about the status of a memo status of the targets or more information around exceptions or the goals themselves you all be first to know. Thank you Lauren. Thank you Laurence and I guess the third leg of that stool is the latest update on permanent paper records digitization the regs. Yes so we continue to work on that internally we have been for some time been reviewing the comments and working with our liaison our regulations liaison and we're happy with where we are and anxious to get it moving forward and we are hoping that you know sometime in the next week we will be able to get it through final review through senior management at the National Archives and then over to OMB for their review. So it's still in process I would encourage you if you have any questions about you know what you should be aligning your processes to we do have the proposed draft out there with information that you can use as a guideline which is based on the FADG 3 star requirements there will be obviously a final rule at some point which will reflect all the final comments and final adjudication and we hope to get that out soon in the coming weeks. Thank you we have another question it's a GRS related question and it comes from one of our records officers I was just asked what is the latest status on NARA's GRS updates regarding vaccination records? Yeah thanks that's a that's a good question and a very timely question so the update to the the GRS for the testing of vaccination records is currently on its way to posting in the federal register and we'll be up on regs.gov we spent a lot of time working on it and coordinating with OPM and and we are ready to move it through the process. One thing that I want to note is that there is additional work on GRS chapter 2.7 which is employee and health records which we are developing on a separate track and will follow after we are moving forward in proceeding with the testing and vaccination records so keep your eyes open it will be out soon. Thanks Lawrence for coming in from the bullpen there to answer a few questions is Gordon still here we've got some questions that are FRC related okay thanks Gordon has NARA considered changing the period of performance for IIAs since new agreements are rarely provided before the start of the new fiscal year this reduces the risk of violating the Anti-Deficiency Act when new agreements are not readily available well you know actually the the customer determines the period of performance on IIAs we have we have customers who are not on a fiscal year term so you know as a revolving fund we're funding for you know 12 months I mean it's just revolves around so the customer selects the period of performance and we can work with any period they select we don't select the period of performance although we do our terms and conditions we do it based off the fiscal year but we would also if you know the rates may change if someone offsets or uses a separate 12 month period there could be some change in rate but that's all worked out usually in the beginning when we work the agreement and if there's some change in rate I mean that's a part of that agreement thank you we have another question even though the FRC is not going to be able to physically dispose of records will the status of records approved for disposal be updated to reflect the agency approval of disposal yes that that's happening we are any submission for disposals that's going under the normal process those folks are teleworking reviewing that data and that's being treated just as normal now that we're getting back open we're starting to dispose of process but the our current status we've been doing all year is stopping the charges when we're supposed to after I think it's a 90 day period after concurrence between NARA and the agency thank you and we also have another question around the current size of the backlog of records going into the FRC's I don't know if you had a chance to round up a number or have a sense of that number yeah um I don't have that I don't know if Chris did Chris make it on today Chris here you go Gordon can you hear me yeah you can't hear you Chris yeah so I mean we are facing substantial backlogs we're going through a pretty exhaustive data collection exercise as we determine recovery plans for each individual center um it's probably most daunting when it comes to disposition right now but individual center directors have been charged with putting plans in place and we like I said or Gordon said we took items off the customer bills as we hit the regular 90 day cycle and we will then do our very best to get caught up on the physical destruction as soon as we were fully reopen each center okay thank you both for weighing in on on that response I'd like to bring Matt and Derek back up we have a couple questions around the annual move that have come in so the first one is there an action that needs to be taken after the annual move is activated if yes how do you know when the next action is necessary okay um yeah so we've we talked about how the transfer requests were loaded into eRA in draft status and how you wouldn't you wouldn't want to rely on eRA notifications to uh to tell you that you have TRs in the system you'll want to do the advanced search for 2022 annual move and that'll be a much better way to see your TRs and then backing up in our presentation we sent out a list of candidates which are the transfers that are eligible or becoming eligible in May so that was that was you know ahead of time to let you know these are going to be put into eRA everything else is kind of a status base you know how do you figure out what status things are at and I went and looked in the user guide and Appendix G does a really good job of explaining the the various statuses and and I would just recommend that you would go to Appendix G in the user guide and take a look at you know what what what the TR needs to be I talked about the first status being draft the next status being SFAA submitted for agency action that's still an agency status and then the next status after that is a NARA action it's ready for approval so you know the button is called submit but the status for each of those TRs will change at various points and if you take a look at Appendix G that'll be the best way to understand you know what's that if you're TR thank you Matt we have another one will the annual move continue to work on TRs from past annual moves I'm aware of past TRs that are still awaiting NARA review great great I think I have like a two two-fold answer here one is like the backlog right I think I would ask the question before you know how much and what will you do you know that there's we are not able to move records from the record center to an archivability and then that so that can't can't be done at this time and we really can't make any we can't have you know a solid plan until we get back to normal operations and assess what we need to do so once we get back to normal operations um for a period of time we will be able to make some good plan but but for right now um we're we're kind of in a holding pattern until our facilities become available again but the other part of that question was um you know what um what about past TRs even you know prior uh into the system um and we do continue to work on those TRs if you submit them when you submit them um to the extent that we can our priority is to stick with the timeline right right now the priority is going to be on the 2022 annual move and those that get proposed by December 1st those will be the priority for um January the January approval deadline for for our side and um but we continue to work on other TRs um that have been submitted deadlines and prior annual moves if you submit them um you know like I said while while you're in ERA uh take a look at past year's annual moves it should be about um two two years past of annual moves um if there are any still in draft status will they need to be addressed at the same time that would be that would be ideal and then our priority is for the current annual move and then based upon our resources available will we be getting to other TRs as that as our resources become available anything else thank you matt um I'll ask you this one and maybe gordon will want to weigh in I don't know exactly which one of you will have a better answer any information on when NARA will begin accepting direct offers from agencies i.e permanent records that are still in agency custody yeah um I can you know I can do that one um because that's like an archives type of um action direct offers being the agency has them physically in their custody and they want to send them directly to uh an archive um using ERA so you know I think you can queue up your that you know a direct offer much like we're queuing up uh annual move um it's a good time to do something like that uh and that that that process in ERA to document the approval process can can continue um but but like I said before um we are just not able to address the backlog until we get it returned into a normal operating status um and so I you know fingers crossed that's going to be uh that's going to be soon and then we can we can begin to address you know direct offers annual news uh and in some kind of uh uh communication or something to you guys at a future date thank you uh and gordon this is one a comment that has come in I was not sure if you have given the status of OPF records record request from NPRC I heard you said that the FRCs are working under staff just wanted to check on the status for an OPF request yeah our uh the uh civilian personnel record center in valmyre illinois uh is also operating now at a 25 capacity uh and their status is tracked on our website we'll update that uh as frequently uh as we can but their status is also geared by the uh uh COVID levels that uh that I mentioned earlier for all FRCs it is open uh up to 25 percent of our staff um pre-covid will be in that building uh servicing uh records I would say this on um for all all of our uh federal record centers as as we are coming back online and starting to handle some of the reference requests and some of those things I sure like to uh encourage our customers to ensure that we know that they are open there are still a lot of federal agencies not open uh because certainly uh someone has to be on the other end to receive records so we um absolutely want to be sure when we do that our folks may reach out to some of the agencies just to ensure that also because we want to be sure that we do protect the records but if you could let us know it'd be nice to know as the agencies come back online themselves thanks thank you gordon uh we have one for Cindy and Don um sort of as uh under the rmsa umbrella uh so it's do you do we know when the 2021 rmsa will be due um yeah so we were the january through march time frame uh similar to last year is what we're targeting uh once we have those dates finalized we'll send out notification but that's what we're targeting likely the first second we can january to launch and i guess sort of related to that uh there's uh that's when you'll send out the at the annual draft reports or the template will cut the temp between the sao or n template comes out on whatever opening day is and as don says first you know right mid january the first part of january um and we try to get the rmsa questionnaire and the maturity model out uh sooner than that hopefully in december but it does have to go through o and b for approval so and we're working through our internal approvals uh the maturity model will not change other than the cover sheet and the dates um so that one uh you should you could use last years if you want to know in advance what it's going to be asked that's not going to change the rmsa itself changes a little bit um we add some questions and take some questions away but looking at previous questionnaires also gives you a good idea of what was what's going to be asked and we're hopefully by the december bridge we should be able to give out more definitive target dates thank you both laurence we've got a question a follow-up on the grs for vaccination records what is the proposed retention for the testing and vaccination report records can we hear it before publication oh i know inquiring minds always want to know and uh honestly i know we've had some discussions about it but i would have to look it up i mean i know we're looking to try and keep the retention uh on the shorter side we know there's a lot of pii and personal information that we don't want to have a longer retention um and similar to like what we would have in the grs for other you know short term temporary records it's going to be in line with that and i think it's something that you know we're going to be putting up for comment so it will have to see what what the public and um what comments we do get about the proposed retention before we nail it down but that is the direction that we're heading in trying to keep it to a shorter retention um that is in line with a lot of the other grs so you could you could expect to see it around the three-year mark um that's pretty standard we don't try to go much shorter than that and any longer than that does present some additional risks and challenges that we're trying to avoid so again that's where we're heading it will be up for comment and um we will go from there thank you lauren so we have one that sort of strikes me as a more general or broader question um yeah and i guess anybody can chime in maybe is there an agency that has a blueprint for implementing erm goals that we can utilize i will put in a plug that uh that sounds like another that sounds like a great bridge topic yeah i i agree aran and certainly you know one of those topics where it would be ideal to have some agencies to have their blueprint in hand come talk to other agencies about what they are doing and what they're working on you know it's difficult for us in the national archives to say there is one blueprint i mean obviously we're working with micro agencies all the way up to the department of defense and those blueprints for those kinds of agencies based on the size complexity and resources available are all different um we have tried to issue success criteria and um i believe the the document that we issued um around the 2019 goal a couple years ago where we talked about policy systems access and disposition are still relevant and provides a good framework for how agencies might think about building their own blueprint that's specific to their own agency but i i agree i think at a future bridge it will be wonderful to have some agencies talk about how they've implemented that and aligned it to to those um for sort of criteria for success um or any other approaches that agencies may have so uh why don't we take that as a note aran and we'll see if we can't uh jennison support for such a discussion agreed we'll we will do that and if you want to volunteer your agency to present at a bridge meeting email rm.communications.nara.gov and we'll be happy to to get you on stage absolutely there's a another floating comment around the vaccination uh records are we thinking of being about including the vaccinations like the i9 eligibility records since they are employment records so maybe another drill down into that yeah that's a that's a drill down question which i don't know if i can answer that on the spot um i would encourage you though um for that question and any other specific questions you have about the grs and where we are going with uh covet related quest um covet related um items or not um grs team at nara.gov is the place to send them um and they are very responsive in getting back to you with uh any questions you might have about the grs so i encourage you to send it to the group mail box and they will uh respond with the answers thank you laurence i think i've exhausted the questions uh that have come in i'm relying on the sort of all the team behind the scenes to help make make sure i didn't miss anything i don't think i have and with that uh if we could go to the next slide yes that that one uh so i i just wanted to put out a last call for questions and remind folks and sort of our next meeting will be on tuesday december 14th note that we are going to move the time forward in the day uh so it will be at 1 30 eastern 10 30 pacific uh we'll move to an afternoon east coast time later in the morning west coast time starting with the december 14th meeting i just wanted to make sure everybody was aware of that there will be more communications coming from our office in the form of an uh memo from our office that'll go out uh soon and with that i'd like to thank you all for participating uh we will work on getting the slides and transcripts up at when they are available uh to that webpage the archives.gov records management meetings webpage and that's also where you'll find the 2022 the schedule for 2022 that's going to be another communication that's also coming from our office so with that i'd like to thank all the speakers for presenting today um and all of our viewers for watching today and commenting there was a robust discussion in the chat we always like to see that thank you all very much and i hope you have a great afternoon


The president will announce new dates for the national population and housing census that was postponed in April. Chairman of the National Population Commission, MPC Nasir Akwara, disclosed this to State House correspondents after his delegation debriefed the president at the presidential villa, Abuja. President Inibul's meeting with Akwara comes weeks after the census, was postponed by the administration of former president Muhammad Abu-Hari. For my president, Muhammad Abu-Hari, GCFR, when a decision was taken to postpone the census to allow the new administration to not just partake in it but to own it and drive the process to its logical conclusion. Today, I had opportunity for briefing our new president who has so far taken right steps in the right direction and we consider this step as a right step. So we briefed him fully on the level of preparedness, the outcomes that we envisage and I'd like to say that Mr. President has graciously approved to support the commission in the conduct of the census and our preparatory activities were not stopped at all but he has given us the courage, the impetus to upscale our preparation. Notified about fresh news updates


Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Splunk.conf 19, brought to you by Splunk. Okay, welcome back, everyone. So theCUBE's live coverage are our day three of our three days of coverage of .conf from Splunk. This is their 10th anniversary and theCUBE has been there along the way, riding the data wave with them, covering all the action. Our next guest is Jill Terriastro, who's a product stretch of the anomaly who also has a sister in cyber. So she's got the cyber sisters going on. Jill, great to have you on. Looking forward to hearing about your story. Great, thanks, I'm glad to be here. I've been in the security industry for about seven years now. I started when I was 19 and my sister had started before me. She's a few years older than me and she started out doing defense contracting on the cyber side and she just kind of ended up in the internship looking for a summer job and she fell in love. And as I got to kind of learn about what she was doing and how it all worked together, I started to pursue it at Georgia Tech. And I joined our on-campus hackers club, Gray Hat. I was the first female executive, that was fun. I ended up getting an internship from there with ConocoPhillips and Bishop Fox and moved on to the vendor side eventually with a brief stop in security operations. And so you have a computer science degree from Georgia Tech, is that right? I do and I'm actually pursuing my masters in their online masters in cyber security program right now as well. Awesome. Georgia Tech, great school. One of the best computer science programs been following it for years. Amazing graduates come out of there. Yeah, we've got some pretty impressive graduates for sure. So you just jump right into cyber, okay? Male dominated field. More women are coming in more than ever now because there's a big surface area in security. What attracted you to cyber? So I love that it's evolving and it allows you to think about problems in different ways, right? It's a new problem. There's new issues to solve. And I'd been exposed to technology from a young age. I went to an all girls high school which had a really strong focus on STEM. So I took my first computer science class at 15 and it was in an environment of all women that were incredibly supportive. I actually started a scholarship at our high school to get more women to look at technology longer term as career options. And I go back and speak and teach them that technology is more than coding. There's product management. There's customer success. There's sales engineering. There's marketing. There's so much more in the space than just coding. So I've really tried to help the younger generation see that and explore other options. You know, that's a great point. And you know, when I was in the computer science back in the 80s, it was coding. And I got lucky with systems also. A lot of operating systems and Linux revolution was just coming on the scene. But it's more than that. There's data, data analytics. There's a whole creative side of it. There's a nerdy math side. There's a cognitive- The user experience. A huge area. Workflows and processes is something that is so needed in the security industry, right? It's how you do everything. It's how you retain knowledge. It's how you train your new staff. And even just building processes is something that can be tedious, but it can be so powerful. And if that's something you're used to doing, it can be a great skill to build. Well, we were here, it's our third day at the dot-com, our seventh year here. What's your take of Splunk? Because you're coming in, guns blaring in the industry. Yeah. You got your cyber sister. She's at AWS. You see Splunk now. They got a lot of capabilities. Yeah. What's the security conversations like? What are people talking about? What's the top story in your mind here at dot-com for security in Splunk? Yeah, so I'm actually a Splunk certified architect as well. Splunk was one of the first security tools that I really got to play with, so it's near and dear to my heart. And I get to work with, I'm able to read Anomaly, which is a threat intelligence company. And I get to work with our own, our Splunk integration. So what we do is we enable you to bring your intelligence into Splunk to search against all of the logs that you're bringing there to help you find the known bad in your environment.  So the component's really easy to work with and we help you manage your intelligence a little bit more effectively so you can significantly reduce your false positive rate while working within the framework you're comfortable in. And one of the- What's the problem statement you guys solve? Is there one specific thing? Yes, there's quite a few issues, right? I would say the biggest thing that we solve is enabling our customers to operationalize their intelligence. There's so much information out there about the known bad and CISOs and CEOs are sending emails every day. Are we impacted? Are we safe? And we enable you to answer those questions very easily and very effectively. One of the other big trends we see is there's an issue in knowledge gaps, right? The industry is evolving so quickly, there's so much to know, data on everything, right? So we have another way that we can work with Splunk that is in a direct integration and it's our product called Anomaly Lens. And what it does is it uses natural language processing to interpret the page that you're on and bring the threat intelligence to you. So if you're looking at a Splunk search page, investigating an incident on brute force and you have a seemingly random list of IPs in front of you and you need to know what does everyone else know about these to make your job easier, you can scan it with Lens and it'll bring the information right there to you. You don't have to go anywhere else. You can stay in the Splunk UI that you love. What's some exciting things you're working on now that you think people should know about that if maybe covered in the press or in the media or in general? What are some exciting areas that are happening? Yeah, so Lens is pretty exciting for us. We just launched that last month. We're doing a lot. So we also have a product called Anomaly Match which is purpose built for threat intel because often what we see is when a breach happens the indicators that you need to know if they're in your environment, they don't come to light until six months to a year later. And then being able to go backwards in time to answer that question of where you impacted can be very difficult and very expensive, right? Anomaly Match is purpose built to answer those questions. So as the indicators become available, you know immediately was I impacted on the order of seconds. So it just enables you to answer your CEOs a little faster, right? And get better visibility into your environment. So when you look at data to everything, how do you see it evolving? As more volume comes in, there's more threat surface area out there. Right, and getting used to increasing space. How should people be thinking about it? As they zoom out, I think architecturally, I got to lay out my enterprise strategy. I bought a few tools that try to be platforms, but I need a broader playbook. I need something bigger to help me. You've got to take a step back and get a little altitude, right? Yeah, take a little step back, yeah. Yeah, so threat intelligence should really be driving your whole security practice. We already know for the most part who's attacking who and what they're trying to do. And so threat intelligence shouldn't just be an integration into Splunk, although that is a critical component of it. It should be informing your security practices, where you stand up offices. There may be locations that are higher risk for you as a particular type of entity. And all this information is available, but you have to just get access to it. You need one place to stop where you can Google the threat intel. And that's what Anomaly Threat Stream, our flagship product aims to do. And Lens just makes it more accessible than ever. Rather than having to go look it up yourself, it brings it to you. And so we're trying to augment the knowledge base without having to memorize everything. That's what we need to do, is we need to find ways to bring this information and make it more accessible so you don't have to look in three tools to find it. So I got to ask you to change topics as the younger generation comes into the industry. One of the things that I'm seeing as a trend is more developers are coming in. It's not just so much dev ops, because cloud's great, we love dev ops, but ops, network ops and security ops are also a big part of it. People are building applications now. So like, you're seeing startups, there's been tech for good startups coming out, where you're seeing great examples of people literally standing up applications with data. What's the young generation, because there's a hacker culture out there that can move fast, solve a problem, but they don't have to provision a lot of stuff. That's what cloud computing does. But now, splunks of the world, data is becoming more accessible. Data is the raw materials to get that asset or that value. What are developers, how do you see the developers programming with data? So they're looking at their jobs and saying, what am I bored doing that I have to do over and over every day? And how can I automate it? So there's a lot of sore technology, Splunk also has phantom, and that's enabling our developers, our younger generation, who grew up around Python and coding to quickly plug a few pieces together and automate half their jobs, which gives them the time to do the really interesting stuff. The stuff that requires human intervention and interpretation and analysis that can't be coded. And it's just giving us more time and more resources. What kind of things are they doing with that extra time? Creative things, pet projects or critical problems? Oh God, so many pet projects. God, what are you interested in? I've seen things being done to like mine Bitcoin on the side, right? To make a little extra cash, that's always fun. I've seen people automate their social media profiles. I've seen threat researchers use scripting to help them find new information on the internet and reshare it to build their public brand. That's a really big component of the younger generation that I don't think was as big in previous generations where your public brand matters more than ever. And so we're bringing that into everything we do. It's not just a job, it's a lifestyle. Sharing's a big ethos too, sharing data. How important is sharing data in the security culture? Oh, it's critical. So, I mean, sharing data's been happening for forever, right? Company A has always been calling up their friend company B, hey, we see this thing, you might want to take a look, but you didn't hear it from me, right? But threat intel platforms, not just that stream, but all of them allow you to share information at a larger scale than ever before. But it also gives you the ability to remain anonymous. Everyone's really scared to put into writing, hey, we saw this at our company because there's the risk of attribution, there's legal requirements, right? But with automated sharing, you can retain a little bit of, you can be a little bit anonymous so you can help the others be protected without exposing yourself to additional risk. Jill, you're awesome to have on theCUBE, love to get the perspective of the young, up and coming. Thank you. Computer science, cyber, cyber sister? Cyber sister. You guys just, where does she work, Amazon? She's over at AWS now. She just moved over a couple of weeks ago. We actually used to work together at Anomaly. She did pre-sales and I did post-sales. It was a lot of fun. And she hooked you into security, didn't she? Oh, she did, for better or worse, although I hope she's not watching. She will, she'll get a clip of this, I'll make sure. Jill, final question, thesplunkthisyear.com. What's your takeaway? What are you going to take back to the office with you or share with your friends as they say, hey, what was the big story happening at Splunk this year? What's going on here this year? The big thing is the data. The data is more accessible than ever before, so we're being challenged by Splunk to find new ways to use it, to innovate new ways. And I think that's kind of been, they're messaging the whole time. Hey, we're giving you the power to do what you want. What are you going to do with it? This is my third Splunk conference in a row, and every year it just gets more and more exciting. I can't wait to see what next year holds. They allow people to deal with data, messy data to good data. Clean it up, make it easy to search across multiple data sources from one command line. Their user experience is the most intuitive I've used in terms of the log management solutions. Jill, great to have you, great insights. Thanks for sharing the data here on theCUBE. Sharing data on theCUBE, as we do. We bring the data out of the guests, we try to create it for you, of course. We're data-driven, we're cube-driven. I'm John Furrier, here from dot-com, the 10th anniversary we've been here from the beginning. Riding the data tsunami waves, waves plural, because there's more waves coming. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.