Unfortunately, it has had two unintended side effects with regard to White House email:

• It forces White House staffers to use private sector resources for communication, bypassing all of the government's security resources, and
• It gives politicians in the White House an excuse for bypassing Presidential Records Act requirements

Question: Has the Hatch Act been used as an excuse to bypass government servers, thereby giving a reasonable-sounding excuse to circumvent the Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act?

Amateur-hour IT
Email management in the White House today seems shoddy, at best. It is beyond comprehension that an archiving policy stated in a presidential press briefing should consist of "printing it out" or forwarding email messages to another account.

In my professional opinion, it was completely irresponsible for the White House to change email systems during the build-up to war.

And, of course, the idea that many White House staffers are sending email messages via some podunk ISP in the middle of Tennessee -- well, that'd be funny if it weren't so sad and true.

This form of unsupervised information technology management, with IT teams that change as administrations change, and with procedures that are clearly ad hoc at best -- this is at the root of why excuses like "we lost the messages during migration from Notes to Outlook" seem plausible to outsiders.

Question: Is IT management at the White House as incomprehensibly unprofessional as it seems -- or is a pretense of cluelessness being used to divert questions of disclosure?

Next steps
Last week, we promised to provide our recommendations. But as this article was being written, it became clear that we needed to discuss our priorities in how we'd go about dealing with these problems and understand more about the root causes of the problems. That discussion became this article.

Next week, we'll dive right into our recommendations. There are six key actions that need to be taken. If taken soon and with appropriate care and oversight, these actions should resolve the problems we've seen and prevent some of the disastrous scenarios we've explored.

Michelle LaBrosse is the founder and Chief Cheetah of Cheetah Learning. In 2006, the Project Management Institute selected Michelle as one of the 25 most influential women in project management, one of only two women selected from the training and education industry. Michelle is a graduate of the Harvard Business School's Owner & President Management program for entrepreneurs, and is the author of Cheetah Project Management and Cheetah Negotiations. To contact Michelle and learn more about Cheetah Learning, visit http://www.cheetahlearning.com.