The draft FY 2022-2926 Strategic Plan posted for comment by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) aligns with ISOO’s FY 2020 Annual Report to the President by highlighting the need to expand workplace innovations developed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Both NARA’s 2022-2026 draft Strategic Plan, and ISOO’s 2020 Annual Report to the President underscore how challenges that agencies faced during the pandemic have accelerated the modernization required to provide globally competitive services and to replace outdated policies and processes.
NARA’s proposed 2022-2026 Strategic Plan reaffirms the agency’s mission, vision, values, and goals, by updating the current strategic plan in force for 2018-2022 with a new emphasis on improving social equity, providing up-to-date customer experiences, and implementing the digital solutions needed to manage and deliver public access to the ever-increasing wealth of electronic records received by the National Archives.
NARA’s Strategic Plan for 2022-2026 seeks to promote social equity by working with historically underserved communities in prioritizing Federal records of the greatest relevance to those communities for archival processing, description, and digitization. The new Strategic Plan seeks to develop new relationships with underserved communities, and commits to fostering, improving, and sustaining these community relations into the future.
As well as expanding community engagement, the new Strategic Plan proposes agency-wide objectives to improve customer experience by modernizing services and communications in response to the full gamut of customer needs. In the plan, NARA acknowledges the importance of developing a more unified response to customer demands across every line of service provided by the agency.
To achieve these goals, the proposed Strategic Plan calls on all NARA programs to build on the modernization initiatives spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic. Above all, NARA proposes accelerating the shift from outmoded paper-based work processes to digital solutions for electronic records management. The plan would expand virtual engagement and online access for the public, while increasing staff productivity, both internally and in working with agencies across the Federal government.
When implemented, these goals will help to address what the 2020 ISOO Annual Report identified as a need for a coordinated interagency effort to modernize key policies and processes that govern the Classified National Security Information (CNSI) and Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) programs.
Through August 20, 2021, NARA invites comments and feedback to its draft Strategic Plan for FY 2022-2026. To support and improve the modernization initiative advanced by the plan, please submit your views by email to strategy@nara.gov; and/or via Github, at https://usnationalarchives.github.io/strategic-plan/feedback/.