The invisible archives: how the government got lost in its own data

At MY-LEX, we help governments clean up, connect and sustainably manage their data. This ensures that AI works with reliable and up-to-date information.

More than twenty years ago, the digital promise for the government really began to take shape. More efficient working, less paper and faster service. Governments made the leap to digital working with confidence. The cabinets with paper files could be closed, the archive became digital, and with that, overview and efficiency finally seemed within reach.

But looking back today, we see not only a lot of progress, but also the downside of digitisation: invisible archives, endless growth of data without any addition of archiving information, and duplicate storage. This has led to a quantity of data in which many governments themselves have become lost.

Where gigabytes were still being stored at the beginning of this century, municipalities, provinces and environmental services now have tens of terabytes of data. Files are scattered across network drives, mailboxes, case systems, DMSs and specialist applications that have often long since been written off. Documents exist in multiple versions, without it being clear which version is the correct one. What should have been a digital archive has turned into a maze where the path to reliable information is often impossible to find.

Among our clientele, there are plenty of examples that show how big these problems are in practice. For us, these are not isolated incidents, but symptoms of a broader reality.

Invisible archives do not have to be a permanent problem. With the right approach, a maze can be transformed into a foundation for policy, service provision and trust. At MY-LEX, we work with governments to make that transition. Want to know how? Get in touch: together, we can make your information findable again.