AC 28 2021
Date: August 2, 2021
Memorandum To Federal Records Management Contacts: Opportunity for Comment on NARA’s Draft Strategic Plan for FY 2022-2026
On July 30th, NARA posted its new draft Strategic Plan and is inviting feedback from many stakeholders, including the federal records management community.
The deadline for comments is August 20, 2021. Comments may be submitted by email to strategy@nara.gov or via GitHub at https://usnationalarchives.github.io/strategic-plan.
Feedback received from external stakeholders will be collected and considered. The draft plan will be revised and shared with the Office of Management and Budget by September 13. The final Strategic Plan will be published in February 2022 and will become NARA’s official plan for fiscal years 2022 through 2026.
Background
All federal agencies must issue a new Strategic Plan every four years. NARA’s draft plan reaffirms our current Mission, Vision, Values, Transformational Outcomes, and Strategic Goals (see Strategic Plan (FY 2018–FY 2022). The draft plan updates the agency’s strategic objectives to focus agency resources on improving equity, providing a world-class customer experience for all customers, and using our experiences during the pandemic to accelerate agency modernization.
NARA’s draft Strategic Plan commits to new outreach to traditionally underserved communities and to work with these communities to identify the NARA records that are most important to them. Once identified, NARA will prioritize those records for archival processing, description, digitization, and online access. NARA is at the beginning of a process to build new relationships with underserved communities and this draft plan reflects the agency’s intent to maintain and foster those relationships over time.
The draft Strategic Plan revitalizes NARA’s customer service activities by addressing the entire customer experience. NARA has proposed agency-wide objectives to better understand customer needs and expectations and modernize services and communications channels. These objectives will drive cross-agency activities to provide a unified, responsive experience for customers across all NARA services lines.
The draft Strategic Plan challenges NARA programs and agency records management functions to continue modernization activities that were started during the COVID-19 pandemic. NARA recognizes that making more of its work processes electronic and online will allow the agency to fulfill more of its mission remotely, making the agency more resilient over time. NARA also commits to modernize its records management policies to keep pace with changes in how federal agencies create and manage a new generation of electronic records.
LAURENCE BREWER
Chief Records Officer
for the U.S. Government