Challenges Facing Information Management in Emerging Countries’ Government Agencies

A comprehensive analysis of the challenges facing Ministries, Departments, and Agencies in emerging countries and the urgent need for Enterprise Content Management solutions.

Executive Summary

Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs) are critical bodies designed to unlock economic potential and advise governments on policy formulation and execution across various sectors. However, these organizations are struggling with fundamental information management challenges that threaten their ability to fulfill their core objectives.

Recent research across multiple government departments reveals three critical issues: cultural barriers to information sharing, security vulnerabilities, and severe accessibility and findability problems. With government directives mandating full digitalization by 2025, addressing these challenges has become more urgent than ever.

The Foundation: Why Information Management Matters for Government Agencies

Information is an organization's most important asset. For government agencies specifically, resources, skills, and environments remain key elements for information to be processed as data, collaborated through workflows, and stored as archives. This is information management—or more precisely, content management.

This precision is what characterizes information security through access control, ensuring that authorized users can administer systems while maintaining audit trails for all administrative actions performed on information.

The Hybrid Work Reality

Today, hybrid work arrangements have emerged as the new standard—a direct outcome of the pandemic. Virtual workers and virtual teams can be as productive as their in-office counterparts, if not more, provided they are set up properly to succeed. These virtual teams may operate within the same geographic area and time zone or span the globe, raising several critical issues that fall squarely under information management.

The success of virtual teams depends entirely on having access to the necessary tools. Some collaboration tools are synchronous—instant messaging, text messaging, and web conferencing—requiring everyone to be available simultaneously. Others are asynchronous, like email, designed for use by different people at different schedules. However, as we'll explore, email brings its own collaboration challenges.

Four Critical Challenges Facing Government Information Management in Emerging Countries

1. Cultural Barriers: The Information Hoarding Problem

This study examines collaboration issues that are either unique to or exacerbated by working across verticals such as MDA boundaries. From a cultural perspective, issues arise when information workers resist changing the status quo or have concerns about losing control over their information assets.

It's not uncommon for departments to jealously guard "their" information and keep it from prying eyes elsewhere in different MDAs and organizations. This is precisely where we encounter the most significant cultural challenges.

Research Findings: Our study revealed that 80% of information workers across various departments are reluctant to change established processes or fear losing control over their information domains. Perhaps even more striking, 90% of survey respondents identified cultural biases as obstacles to productivity through information hoarding practices.

2. Security Challenges in Information Sharing

The second major challenge stems from a security perspective, particularly around access control. While this is a common issue that can be addressed through cross-functional teams and steering groups determining appropriate security levels, the reality is more complex.

Consider this sobering fact: email remains a key collaboration tool across MDAs, yet once you email something to an external party, you no longer have control over it. Recipients can save attachments indefinitely, forward them to anyone, edit them however they want, or distribute them without restriction.

Current Security Status: While all survey respondents indicated that some level of security exists within their agencies, critical security measures require significant improvement. These include access controls, data encryption, regular security audits, and employee training, with the majority of respondents prioritizing enhanced access control measures.

3. Accessibility and Findability: The Search Problem

Accessibility and findability issues pose tremendous challenges for MDAs, particularly larger organizations where paper-based processes still dominate business operations. Compatibility issues frequently arise in MDAs that have standardized on Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat platforms.

The problem compounds when different departments approach classification structures and folder organization differently. Metadata structures vary significantly between different systems within the same organization, creating information silos that hinder effective collaboration.

The Scale of the Problem: Research data shows that 33.3% of respondents rated information findability as low, compared to only 11.1% who believe information can be found with ease. Almost 80% of respondents find it very difficult to access information within their agencies, with the 11.1% rating accessibility as moderate typically coming from IT and technical functions that aren't heavily paper-based.

4. Email as a Collaboration Tool: A Necessary Evil

Email presents significant problems for information management, yet many people use it as their primary storage system. The result is chaos when multiple people attempt to use email to discuss topics or develop projects collaboratively.

The Email Dilemma: We encounter "reply-all" versus individual replies, responses to first messages versus later messages in threads, and email volume that exacerbates these issues. Survey observations show that when employees send or receive more than 100 email messages per day, critical communications can quickly disappear in the flood of information.

Email creates several specific challenges:

• Distraction Factor: New incoming emails distract knowledge workers, forcing them into reactive mode instead of strategic and creative thinking
• Lack of Information Filters: Beyond spam filters, there's no way to prioritize truly important messages
• File Sharing Limitations: Organizations must arbitrarily limit attachment sizes (typically to 5 megabytes)
• Attachment Proliferation: Email threads create multiple copies of the same documents

The Paper Problem in a Digital Age

Despite digitalization efforts, paper documents continue to present significant collaborative challenges for government agencies:

• Access Issues: Paper files are time-consuming to access and risk being lost or destroyed
• Tracking Difficulties: Physical documents are difficult to monitor and audit
• Space and Cost: Paper storage requires significant physical space and ongoing maintenance costs
• Security Limitations: Paper documents cannot be encrypted or protected with digital rights management
• Disaster Recovery: Paper offers extremely poor disaster recovery options

Digital Document Challenges: Volume Without Organization

Paradoxically, digital documents within MDAs often create problems that dwarf those associated with paper records. The sheer volume of digital documents far exceeds paper records, but without structured information management systems, these documents become problematic.

Digital Landfills: Documents are often stored on network shared drives or unmanaged SharePoint platforms, creating disorganized "digital landfills" filled with multiple versions, outdated files, personal content, and general clutter. Locating specific information becomes as cumbersome as searching for a paper file in a crowded cabinet.

Digital Preservation Challenges

Digital preservation presents three critical issues:

1. Storage Media Obsolescence: Storage media and reading devices quickly become outdated (remember floppy disks and magneto-optical disks)
2. Media Degradation: Time-dependent physical and chemical changes result in data loss
3. Format Obsolescence: The most pressing problem—how to read data stored in obsolete formats, especially proprietary or complex file formats

Migration Issues: When MDAs attempt to migrate legacy content from one system to another, they encounter file format issues, system dependencies, data quality problems, process complications, and decommissioning challenges.

Research Methodology and Findings

Study Design

This quantitative research employed cross-sectional methods to collect data from departments during the second quarter of 2022. The methodology offered advantages in being relatively quick, cost-effective, and less ethically challenging than longitudinal studies.

Sample: Ten individuals from nine departments were selected based on a 95% confidence level with a ±5% margin of error from an agency population of 120. Sample sizes were chosen based on public sector work experience, providing a representative population range.

Survey Methods: The questionnaire employed a combination of 5-point Likert scales, numerical scales, and dichotomous scales. Open-ended questions were minimized due to the political nature of the study environment and respondent caution regarding information dissemination.

Key Research Findings

The data reveals significant challenges across all four areas of information management:

• Findability: Rated as low by the majority of respondents, primarily due to paper-based processes creating heavy dependence on clerical personnel
• Accessibility: Nearly 80% of respondents find information access very difficult within their agencies
• Cultural Barriers: 90% of respondents acknowledge that cultural biases limit productivity through information hoarding
• Security: While some security measures exist, all areas need improvement, with access controls being the top priority

The Urgent Need for Enterprise Content Management

Why ECM Is No Longer Optional

The combination of research findings and recent government directives makes Enterprise Content Management (ECM) implementation not just beneficial but essential. In Nigeria, The Office of the Head of Civil Service of the Federation's mandate for full digitalization by 2025 transforms ECM from an option into a necessity.

Addressing Core Challenges: An effective ECM system directly addresses the identified challenges:

• Breaking down cultural information silos through standardized processes
• Implementing robust security measures while maintaining appropriate access
• Providing intuitive search and retrieval capabilities
• Ensuring long-term digital preservation and accessibility

Implementation Considerations

Government agencies must develop comprehensive information management strategies as the foundation for ECM implementation. This includes:

• Change Management: Addressing cultural resistance to information sharing
• Security Framework: Balancing protection with accessibility needs
• Technical Infrastructure: Supporting both current operations and future scalability
• Training Programs: Ensuring staff can effectively utilize new systems

Supporting Research and Global Context

Similar research conducted in Turkey by Eroğlu and Çakmak (2018) supports these findings. Their study of a large-scale public institution revealed comparable challenges in information asset management, particularly regarding cultural biases, security, findability, and accessibility. Their research emphasized that information management requires robust information systems to overcome institutional challenges.

The Turkish study developed a checklist for organizational information assets (emails, web content, physical records, and electronic records) and found that institutions need significant improvements in human resources and decision-making practices—findings that align closely with our research in Nigerian government agencies.

Conclusion: The Path Forward

The challenges facing government information management are clear and urgent. Document retrieval complexities, compliance issues, limited office space, process inefficiencies, incomplete information dissemination, administrative time waste, and disorganized legacy systems all underscore the critical need for robust Enterprise Content Management systems.

The Bottom Line: With government directives mandating full digitalization by 2025, implementing ECM solutions is essential for resolving these challenges, enhancing operational efficiency, and enabling seamless collaboration both within agencies and with external stakeholders.

Success requires more than just technology implementation—it demands a comprehensive approach that addresses cultural barriers, security concerns, and accessibility issues while building the foundation for sustainable digital transformation in government operations.

Government agencies that act decisively to implement proper information management strategies will be positioned to meet digitalization deadlines while significantly improving their operational effectiveness. Those that delay will find themselves struggling with increasingly complex information challenges that threaten their ability to serve their constituents effectively.

References:

1. Eroğlu, Ş., & Çakmak, T. (2018). Information as an organizational asset: assessment of a public organization's capabilities in Turkey. Information Development, 36(1), 58-77.
2. Association for Intelligent Information Management AIIM (2024) Study guide
3. The Nigerian Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, HoSF (2023) NO EXCUSE ON DIGITALISATION FOR ANY MDA

Banner image by Ovinuchi Prince Ejiohuo, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.