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Between Solari's departure and the completion of ECRMS, there had been considerable turnover among White House IT staff. This "high degree of discontinuity" according to an IT staffer who spoke on the condition that his name not be used, compounded White House technology problems.
Solari had been replaced after he resigned in March 2005 by acting CIO John Straub. Straub, in turn, left in May 2006 and was replaced by a new CIO, Theresa Payton, a former senior vice president and technology executive at Bank of America Corp. Three months later, just as ECRMS was ready to go live, Payton decided not deploy it. At first, she didn't give a reason for her decision. According to NARA records, at a February 6, 2007, meeting between NARA officials and Payton and Office of Administration (OA) staff to discuss NARA's need for knowledge of OA electronic email and other electronic systems managed by OA, Payton and the OA representative simply explained that ECRMS was not being implemented. Therefore emails were no longer being preserved in a formal electronic recordkeeping system and NARA would thus likely receive emails in multiple formats. "OA gives NARA no indication that there is a problem with any missing emails," the report states.
Subsequently, according to NARA records, NARA representatives met with Payton and four other representatives on October 11, 2007, at an OA conference room in OA's G Street NW offices. The NARA team, "asked if anyone had brought to the meeting the so-called '2005 report' which we understand constitutes an Excel spreadsheet of some sort." This was the report from the McDevitt-led team dealing with millions of missing emails. No one had a copy available. Asked if she had reviewed an electronic version of the report, "She (Payton) indicated she had not … out of concern that doing so would in some way compromise the integrity of the document."
When NARA asked if OA could provide a copy of the document, the EOP representatives said they would take that request "under advisement." On October 31, NARA staff members were provided a brief opportunity to view a paper copy of the report, but were not allowed to keep that copy.
It was at this meeting that Payton spelled out the reasons ECRMS had been cancelled, noting that ECRMS would have required 18 months to ingest that existing backlog of messages from the journal email folders in the Microsoft
Exchange system. She also claimed ECRMS made it impossible to distinguish records subject to the Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act from personal emails that were not. This matter had already been reviewed by OA counsel, which had ruled it wasn't a concern.
Later, testifying before the Oversight Committee on Feb. 26, 2008, Payton gave a seemingly different version of why she'd aborted ECRMS.
"After the transition to Microsoft Exchange, the EOP also considered implementing a hardware and software system called ECRMS (Electronic Communications Records Management System) in order to improve and expand the existing message archiving process already in place. However, in late 2006, after consulting staff in OCIO (Office of the Chief Information Officer), I determined that ECRMS required additional investments and modifications if it was to fulfill the EOP's requirements for records management and archiving. While testing the process of loading email records into the ECRMS system, the team also found performance issues. For several reasons, including the need for additional modifications, the identified performance issues, and projected costs, the deployment of ECRMS was cancelled. Some of the hardware, software, and technical expertise gathered during the project were then used by OCIO for other projects.
The White House did not respond to repeated requests by CIOZone to speak to Payton.
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