EDS adds records deal to NMCI

Records management—long derided as a federal mandate without a budget — received a huge boost June 22.

Electronic Data Systems Corp. officials signed a records management subcontract with Australia-based Tower Software to add the company's product to its $6.9 billion Navy Marine Corps Intranet.

"This obviously dwarfs anything else in records management," said Frank McGovern, president of Tower Software. EDS will use Tower to supply electronic documents and records management software to 360,000 users.

Navy Department officials required the winning NMCI vendor to provide desktop records management software to all users, McGovern said.

If EDS eventually calls on Tower Software to provide services, the subcontract could be worth more than $100 million over the next eight years, McGovern said.

The Defense Information Systems Agency's Joint Interoperability Test Command has certified Tower Software's TRIM under the Defense Department's 5015.2 records management standard. TRIM assigns a unique code to each record and identifies records that have to be delivered to the National Archives and Records Administration.

Although the scale of the project appears daunting, it will be manageable under NMCI, said Charley Barth, program manager for records management in the Navy Department's office of the chief information officer.

"We're in the position where we determine the requirements and EDS goes in the back room" to give users what they need, he said. Tower's workflow capabilities should help the department improve its electronic Freedom of Information Act responses and correspondence work, he said.