FAA loses 119,000 planes: A lesson in records management and ECM
I read with interest Friday how the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has lost track of 119,000 aircraft. In case you missed it, the Associated Press reports “119,000 of the aircraft on the U.S. registry have ‘questionable registration’ because of missing forms, invalid addresses, unreported sales or other paperwork problems. In many cases, the FAA cannot say who owns a plane or even whether it is still flying or has been junked.” Holy high-flying cow. Now, I’m pretty new to the world of enterprise content management (ECM), but I have to believe the FAA has some sort of document management system in place. What it is, I don’t know, but at first blush – or in the way it’s described by AP’s intrepid reporter – it doesn’t seem to be working. Or on second thought, maybe it’s working all too well. Could be the FAA’s system includes a component like exception reporting, which either confirms the existence of required documents or spots broken transactions and missing documents, then notifies the appropriate stakeholders about said missing items. It’s up to the stakeholders to go looking for them. Can you imagine the look on someone’s face when that exception report came through? Gulps are rarely audible, but I bet this one sounded like a bass drum.