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APPENDIX 16. GOVERNMENT INFORMATION LIFE CYCLE MANAGEMENT 

GOVERNMENT INFORMATION LIFE CYCLE MANAGEMENT: 

The Mission, the Needs, the Operational Requirements, and the Roles

Written by F. Woody Horton, NCLIS Consultant 

INTRODUCTION7

Many of the most important findings of the Commission's four panels, as well as a reading of the 

dozens of prior studies that have been undertaken in the last several decades aimed at improving the 

management of government information, have one common, underlying thread. That thread is the need 

to modernize and put into operation the concept government information life cycle management as a 

practical computer-assisted information handling tool that meets the full-range of government 

information life cycle needs by all agencies, by all branches, and by all government officials. 

Disseminating government information is only one stage in the government information life cycle. 

Moreover, when it is undertaken, how it is undertaken, and, ultimately, how successfully it is 

accomplished, is dependent on, and inseparable from how effectively and efficiently the preceding 

steps in the life cycle have been accomplished. Additionally, how effectively it is accomplished will 

impact how successful the following stages of the life cycle are, including reuse, storage and retrieval, 

archiving, and permanent disposition. In short, information dissemination is not some kind of 

"afterthought" task that occurs when everything is else is finished and the janitor is ready to turn out 

the lights. Information dissemination is an integral element of Information Resources Management 

(IRM), and must be planned, budgeted, managed, and controlled from the very beginning stages of 

creating new information products or services. 

In the Commission's view, what has been "missing" from the public debates surrounding how to 

improve both internal and external (public) government information resources management is a clear 

statement of what the federal government's mission is when it comes to the public information life 

cycle, what the specific needs of agencies and officials are, what the operational requirements of an 

information resources management system are, and what the roles of the public and private sectors 

might be in planning, designing, developing, testing, and implementing such a system. 

This "white paper" endeavors to put forward one approach to meeting all of these needs, for public 

review and comment. Ultimately, the Commission will include the substance of the paper's contents in 

the form of one or more conclusions and recommendations, in its final report to the President and the 

Congress, due December 15, 2000. There is therefore very little time to try and upgrade the quality of 

the contents herein to an acceptable minimal level of defensible logic for that purpose. 

BACKGROUND 

Information, whether government information or any information for that matter, having a life cycle is 

not a new idea. A useful analogue often mentioned is the concept of the product life cycle. That is, in 

 

7

 Available at http://www.nclis.gov/govt/assess/assess.appen16.pdf. This appendix was last revised on October 13, 2000. 
U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science 

3-26 

the business world, as taught in business schools, a product is "born," "matures," "demand levels off," 

and then customer disinterest sets in and product sales decline and finally the product is taken out of 

production and off the shelves. Another analogue sometimes used is the biological life cycle. That is, 

an organism is born, grows, matures, declines, and eventually dies. 

Applied to the creation, handling, disposition, and archiving of information, the life cycle concept 

follows a similar circular path, which is both endless and continuous. However, the usual starting point 

is when information is first created, whether that is a document, an e-mail message, or anything else, 

regardless of format or medium. One useful portrayal of the steps in the life cycle follows, although 

the authors concede there may be many variations of this graphic: 

Government information is: 

• Step 1: Created and produced (by authors in all agencies, in all branches, at all levels, and in many 

different formats and mediums). 

• Step 2: Cataloged and indexed (metadata tools applied). 

• Step 3: Temporary and permanent availability and entitlement established (ownership and 

disclosure rights of creators, publishers, disseminators, licensees, franchisees). 

• Step 4: Published in the public domain or withheld from disclosure pursuant to a wide variety of 

statutes, internal agency policies, foreign agreements, and so forth. 

• Step 5: Put into files, databases, collections, holdings, and other storage repositories. 

• Step 6: Communicated, disseminated, and distributed. 

• Step 7: Searched for and retrieved (full text, abstracts, key words). 

• Step 8: Used for decision-making and problem solving. 

• Step 9: Archived. 

• Step 10: Re-used over and over again by government officials, journalists, archivists, researchers, 

citizens, and others (information recycled). 

• Step 11: Disposed of (temporarily or permanently).

• Step 12: Expunged or destroyed if permanent retention period exceeded.

• Step 13: Need for new information to replace old information established. 

Figure 1 is a graphic of the information life cycle. 

Obviously the above steps in the Information Life Cycle could be expanded or compressed, depending 

on one's particular purposes. Moreover, there is certainly room for debate has to how we've framed the 

sequence of specific steps or stages, and depicted their inter-relationships, and admittedly rather 

cryptically defined them. Nor do we mean to imply simply because the steps are schematically 

portrayed as a circle that all steps necessarily always occur iteratively in the same "prescribed" 

sequence. Oftentimes some steps may proceed in parallel, one or more steps may be "leapfrogged," or 

the consequences of dealing with the information in electronic formats and mediums are different than 

those used when the data is in pre-electronic forms. But, for working purposes, notwithstanding these 

caveats, we would like to move forward with our discussion using this twelve-step methodology. 

Perhaps one of the benefits of this paper will be to refine and improve the above construct. 
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THE MISSION AND THE NEEDS 

Next, what is the federal government's mission when it comes to government information? Simply 

stated, the Commission believes that government has an obligation to maximize its information flows 

and holdings for the benefit of the public, including: individual citizens, academic and scientific 

Archiving 

H 

Di S(l o si tion 

START HERE 

Preservation in Appropriate 

FormaJ,s & Mediums 

Tem11orary 

Creation & 

Production 

Cataloging & 

MetadaJ,a ------+- Imlering 

Y \ Permanent Public 

Accessibility St,ai,us 

Public or Private ~ Availability & ---------,,.- En ti tlem EU t 

Domain Determined/ 

Permanent Records 

Retention St,ai,us 

AuthenticaJ,ion 

Determined 

H 

Publishing, 

Communicatu1g, 

Disseminating & 

Distributing 

Searching & 

Retrievii1g 

Figtue 1- The Govenunent huol'lnation Life Cycle 

(17,is is an illustrative schematic subject to customiwtion hy each federal agency/program) 
U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science 

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research, for-profit business opportunities, state and local governments, and other sectors of the 

society. 

In a word, government information is absolutely essential to a free and open democracy, and the 

public has a right to government information. The government should: 

1. Maximize the availability of its information to the public. 

2. Minimize information withheld from the public, subject to appropriate statutory safeguards and 

restrictions relating to national security, privacy, confidentiality, and so forth. 

3. Permit easy, fair, and equitable access to government information. 

4. Ensure the integrity, authenticity, and preservation of its information. 

5. Simplify searching for government information across agency websites, files, and other sources 

and storage facilities for its data, documents, and literature. 

6. Work together with the private sector in partnership arrangements that encourage business to assist 

government in searching for, retrieving, using, and archiving its knowledge holdings. 

There is one need that is paramount: To create a comprehensive government information resources 

management system that makes it efficient, cost-effective, and economical for information authors 

to satisfy as many operational requirements as possible when their information is first created. 

THE OPERATIONAL REQUIREMENTS 

Modern information technologies enable the government to manage its information life cycle needs in 

a highly efficient manner, but unfortunately information requirements are currently addressed in 

piecemeal fashion without any overall unifying management framework. Government must: 

1. Develop the operational requirements for an information resources management system at each 

stage of the information life cycle. 

2. Maximize the number of requirements that can be satisfied when information is first created, but 

allowing entry into the information life cycle at any point later in the cycle. 

3. Afford the three branches, and their respective agency entities in each branch, the policy authority 

and flexibility to customize their own unique operational requirements in lieu of being forced to 

utilize a "one size fits all" policy. 

4. Assign authority and responsibility for the overall leadership and coordination of the design, 

development, testing, and implementation of pilot tests of an information resources management 

system in the Executive Office of the President, but with co-equal participation by representatives 

of the other two branches. 

5. Allow 18-24 months for the design, development, and testing period to ensure adequate time for 

consideration of not just the technical, but the organizational, procedural, policy, and other 

considerations that inevitably will attend such a major undertaking. 

6. Utilize private sector contractors to the maximum extent to work with government in a partnership 

mode to plan, implement and control the undertaking. 

7. Periodically report progress and problems to the President, the Congress, and the Judicial Branch, 

as well as to the citizenry. 
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THE INFORMATION RESOURCES MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (IRMS) 

The Information Resources Management System (IRMS) must be built on the following principles: 

1. Both agency internal (for official use) and agency external (public use) information resources must 

be included in the system because they are inseparably inter-related, and decisions made in one 

domain inevitably affect the other domain, at each stage of the information life cycle. 

2. An Information Life Cycle Manager (ILCM) software package should, ideally, be developed 

based on three levels of "profiles:" government-wide, agency level, and individual official level. 

Each profile would be comprised of a customized to a set of decision option choices based on the 

most common and important types of communications an agency official initiates. These 

"profiles" will be developed taking into account all three levels of requirements, and designed in 

such a way so that a series of "defaults" can be pre-determined, and pre-programmed (but later 

changed if necessary) for each decision option. A full menu of decision option choices would be 

presented as prompts when the software module is first initialized and loaded (see illustrative 

decision options below). The "electronic envelope" concept would then be utilized for 

standardizing the formats for capturing and identifying the data values unique to each 

communication.8

 The "electronic envelope" is a way of standardizing and automating format rules 

for different kinds of communications with different profiles. In this way, the number of redundant 

and repetitive decisions that must be made each time a piece of correspondence, an e-mail 

message, a posting to an online database, some kind of government-public electronic filing 

transaction, or another kind of information instrument, is created by the same sender. For 

example, ideally, such a profile for, let us say, an e-mail message created by a senior agency 

official would "instruct" the ILCM software to answer the following kinds of decision (menu 

choice) options with a "yes" or "no"; these are illustrative examples at this point, and obviously 

the precise menu choice options, as well as the selection of the preferred default for each set of 

choice options, would be worked out for each official based on the three levels of requirements: 

government-wide, agency, and individual official:

• If you are either creating new information, or acting upon information received from 

someone else, is the information purely for personal use (the default will normally be set 

as "no")? 

• Can the information be shared with others within the author's immediate office (the 

default will usually be "yes")? 

• Can the information be shared more broadly, within the agency in general (the menu 

choices might be "yes," "no," and "perhaps" with allowable conditions specified, such as a 

draft that the author may not be ready to share publicly)? 

• Is the information sharable with the public; that is, is it in the public domain (the default 

will normally be "yes")? 

• If the information is not in the public domain, which statute(s) governs its exemption or 

exclusion (e.g. FOIA, Privacy Act, national security laws, etc. (the menu choices would 

usually involve one, but could involve more than one choice)? 

• If the information is in the public domain, should a GILS record be created (the default 

will usually be "yes")? 

 

8 The electronic envelope concept was first espoused by William H. Price in an article entitled "The Electronic Envelope," 

Information Management Review (IMR), Vol. 2, no. 2 (Fall 1986), pp 43-53. It is available at 

http://www.nclis.gov/govt/assess/elecenv.html.
U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science 

3-30 

• If the information is in the public domain, should an official agency record be created (the 

default will normally be set as "yes", but conceivably a non-record choice, such as a 

convenience copy of an already existing record, might result in a "no" choice)? 

• If an official agency record is created, what is the applicable retention schedule and what 

is the retention period (each individual and office is normally provided with a limited 

number of applicable program-based schedules from which the choice is made)? 

• Should the information be permanently publicly available (the menu choices could 

conceivably be partly based on NARA appraisal guidelines, partly on GPO FDLP 

guidelines, partly on NTIS guidelines if the information is STI, and partly on agency 

policies)? 

• Should the information be furnished to a central federal information depository or 

clearinghouse for redistribution, such as NTIS, GPO, the Library of Congress, a national 

library, or other institution or program (the default may include distribution to more than 

one repository or clearinghouse)? 

• How will provision be made for the information's description and content definition and 

access tools, including, for example, title, data, issuing office, category and indexing 

terms, and so forth? 

• How will authentication of the information be ensured (the menu choices here will be 

partly government-wide based, and partly agency based)? 

• How will the information be preserved in the event of obsolescing formats and mediums 

(the menu choices may require the author to seek technical consultation from within the 

agency)? 

• If the information is to be added to an existing database, for example, a bibliographic, 

numeric, or statistical database of some kind, is the "standing profile" adequate or should 

it be modified? 

• If the information is a transaction occurring between government and the public within the 

context of an established electronic filing system, is the "standing profile" adequate or 

should it be modified? 

3. Officials will be enabled to enter the ILCM at any stage of the information's life cycle, not just at 

the time the information instrument is first created. Thus, when a revision to an existing document 

or publication is created, there may be a need to revise one or more profiles because the menu 

choice may change, or the default may change. For example, if a records retention schedule is 

changed because of a change in an official agency record medium or format, a profile (meaning a 

menu choice option and/or the default selection to a certain preferred option) may need to be 

changed. 

4. Agencies should be allowed to customize their profiles to the unique needs, missions, authorities, 

and responsibilities. For example, if internal reviews, clearances and concurrences are an 

important step, perhaps an additional prompt might be "if this is a draft message or memorandum, 

default to immediate office head only for review and approval," or, "default to immediate office 

head and division chief." 

5. Profiles will need to be created for each of the major types of information transactions. For 

example, one profile might deal exclusively with routine e-mail messages, another for public 

domain publications, another for internal agency memoranda, another for external memoranda 

going to other agencies or EOP, another for Congressional correspondence, another for the media, 

and so on. There is a trade off between how many profiles that would be required and the burden 
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of having to change default settings because of variations in information transaction types. There 

is a point of diminishing returns, for example, when the burden of changing so many default 

settings in a profile outweighs the benefits that would accrue if a separate profile were established 

for a commonly occurring transaction. 

6. If a FirstGov were in place and effectively operating as a major government-wide portal, then 

obviously the agency information resource entity should be identified and cataloged, and metadata 

applied to it (such as a GILS record) in such a way as to facilitate "transparent" indexing, 

abstracting, and tagging to facilitate ready location and ease of retrieval.