The traffic-clogged streets of Whitehall and Victoria seem a million miles away from the National Archives in Kew. Visitors approach via quiet residential streets before arriving at a campus-style building situated behind a lake and nicely landscaped gardens. The idyll and sound of gently running water is spoiled only by the fact that the flightpath to Heathrow is directly overhead.

Natalie Ceeney is probably too busy to notice the noise of the aircraft, however. The chief executive of the organisation for 18 months, she is fully focused on delivering the Archives’ vision to lead and transform information management, ensure that today’s information survives for tomorrow, and to bring history to life for everyone.

Ceeney, who was previously at the British Library, is enthusiasm personified. “During my time at the Library I became absolutely fascinated by the information industry,” she explains. “We’re going through a paradigm shift in the way that information is used by society and by individuals. As information is the lifeblood of government, this raises fundamental challenges to the way government operates and also engages with citizens. The National Archives is really well placed to support this change agenda – as an agency we haven’t got a huge amount of bureaucracy. We’re small enough to move rapidly, yet at the same time we can be influential across the whole of government and in one of the most rapidly changing industries in the world.”

The information industry has not been a lifelong passion, however. Born in Essex, she grew up as something of a maths prodigy, taking her A-levels at 16 before going on to Cambridge University. Once there she decided to switch to politics, a degree she took in conjunction with a role as sabbatical president of the students’ union.

“I realised very quickly that I liked running things rather than talking about what needed to happen,” she explains. “So a year in politics was enough. Ironically, I decided that I didn’t want to be a civil servant, as I thought they just pushed paper. So I joined the NHS instead as a management trainee and was given an amazing range of opportunities as soon as I was recognised to be a pretty good manager. At 22 I was managing the closure of long-stay mental health institutions, and at 24 I was managing medicine at Great Ormond Street.”

Ceeney spent seven years in the NHS and she remains thankful that this was her career’s first port of call. “At Great Ormond Street I managed about 300 people and I learned so much. The NHS was then very much a sink-or-swim environment – but I can’t think of anywhere else that I would have learned any better how to manage, motivate people, and get results.”

Then why did she move on? “I got to the stage where I thought that if I wanted to become a chief executive, and a really good one, I needed to know more about strategy as well as delivery. I wanted exposure to different industries and to learn from the best – and I wasn’t sure that the NHS was where cutting edge management really was.”

A skim of the Sunday Times jobs section preceded a move into the private sector to consultancy with McKinsey and Company, a role she fulfilled for four years. “This gave me exposure to a completely different range of issues, and the opportunity to develop new strategic skills,” she recalls. “The maths degree came in useful given McKinsey’s analytical approach to problem-solving, and my work included supporting the successful merger of FTSE 100 pharmaceutical companies, pricing strategies for consumer goods companies, and marketing/customer insight across a wide range of industries. I was on a vertical learning curve, and am not sure I could have learned as much anywhere else.”

It was an illuminating period, she says, and it made her realise how similar the management challenges in the public or private sectors are. “It gave me the confidence to come back to the public sector knowing that good management is good management – wherever it is,” she observes. “McKinsey also gave me a set of tools to break down really complex problems and come quickly to knowing what the issues are and how to analyse them. It’s a set of strategic analysis and problem-solving skills that have proved invaluable.”

But she missed running things. One look at the Sunday Times later and she was applying for the position of director of operations and services at the British Library, responsible for the Library’s services, including both its reading rooms and its remote delivery services, as well as 1,200 members of staff. Asked about her return to the public sector, Ceeney says it is really beneficial to possess experience of both sectors. “Some of my British Library colleagues had never worked in the public sector before and had to quickly try and understand union consultation processes and public sector accountability rules and found it far from easy. On the other hand, I worked with colleagues who had only worked in the public sector and didn’t have the confidence to consider really innovative ways of doing things, as it was outside of their range of experience.”

She was at the British Library for nearly five years and they were, at times, turbulent to say the least. “A significant part of what I was managing was a document-supply service in terminal decline due to the advent of e-publishing,” she explains. “One of my roles was to help ensure that we didn’t go bankrupt as a result. It was quite tough, and we had to make redundancies, but we managed the document supply service’s decline without jeopardising the rest of the Library’s operations or our financial standing.

“We were also grappling with trying to democratise the reading rooms. The perception (and a strong element of reality) was that researchers had to have a PhD and a letter from a supervisor to use the Library’s reading rooms but I changed that so anyone could get in, and this proved quite controversial. There were letters to the Times on a daily basis and I received about five personal, and often very vitriolic, letters a day. Many scholars felt that the British Library should be a preserve of specialists but my view was that we’re all taxpayers and that the British Library was a publicly funded institution, so access should be equal.”

Ceeney’s interest in the information industry was prompted by her stint at the Library and this inevitably shaped her decision to join the National Archives. The official archive for England, Wales and the central UK government, containing 900 years of history from Domesday Book to the present, with records ranging from parchment and paper scrolls through to recently created digital files and archived website, the Archives are also increasingly playing an important role across government.

“Our role has expanded through a series of mergers but also as a result of the changing nature of government information,” says Ceeney. “In 2003 we merged with the Historical Manuscripts Commission which looked after historical records outside of central government, and last year we merged with the Office of Public Sector Information, formerly part of the Cabinet Office. We did this to bring together all the strands of government information management.”

“If you go back 20 years,” she says, “Whitehall managed its information very differently. People looked at just the one file, added to it, annotated it and then returned it. In our reading rooms you will find these single files, telling everything you need to know about that one subject, which was the official record of government. The paper system worked very well because it followed the work flow in Whitehall. The electronic work flow is very different, with multiple versions, multiple owners and multiple locations of what might be critical information. This is already causing departments major headaches in providing evidence-based policy advice, managing FOI and providing audit trails, let alone the challenge of providing historical records. We need to address these issues, and urgently.”

A related challenge is the pace of technological change. “We’ve got the Domesday Book here, which dates back 900 years,” she points out. “By contrast, the 1986 BBC Domesday Book was unreadable within 10 years because it ran on 12-inch laser discs on BBC micros – and, of course, you can’t get them any more. Information stored on floppy disks can often no longer be read, and many databases operate on old and obsolete platforms which can stop functioning.

“Most government information is now created in digital format and much of it is put on the web but, unlike paper records which have lifespans of centuries, electronic records are far more vulnerable. The whole nature of information has fundamentally changed. We are now only really starting to grapple with the issues of how we record and safeguard the information being created.” Ceeney is pleased that the National Archives is already making a difference. Earlier this month the Archives announced that the government has committed to setting up a shared service for digital preservation, making sure that information remains accessible for as long as it is needed, even after the format in which it was created has become obsolete.

“One of the challenges in this field is that no-one’s got all the answers,” points out Ceeney. “I know that the UK is cutting edge – I spend a lot of time talking with my counterparts in Canada, the United States and Australia where we’re all dealing with these issues. We work very closely with the Transformational Government team in the Cabinet Office, with industry and with information managers across the UK. Unfortunately, there are no answers we can just grab off the shelf.” And government across the world is very much leading the way on this, she adds. “Our standards of accountability and probity have to be very high in the public sector, and there are often significant risks to government in terms of both the financial and reputational damage of losing key information.”

Ceeney and her colleagues are keen to raise the standards of information management across Whitehall and to be seen to deliver solutions as well as raising challenges. “We want to take information management out of the basement,” she says. “Record and information management used to be something done by clerks, but that is a completely inadequate solution to today’s challenges. We want to raise government’s capability in this field. To do this we’ve recently launched information-management assessments – based on the concept of capability reviews, but much smaller in scale.

“A team from the Archives will work with teams in each government department to look at how they manage their information and to study the risks that their current approach poses to the department and then feed it back at permanent secretary level, with suggestions and offers of help. We’ve also set up a Knowledge Council. This is being championed by Jonathan Stephens, the DCMS permanent secretary, and reports to the Delivery Council and the Chief Information Officers’ Council. Within the next 12 months we’ve committed to publishing a strategy for government on information management, to support the lead already taken by Transformational Government.”

Ceeney is also focused on ensuring that everyone can enjoy unfettered access to its material. “The change that technology has driven isn’t just a story of risks, it’s also a story of major opportunities. Over the past decade we’ve seen a phenomenal growth in the relevance and accessibility of historical material,” she says. “Before the web, you didn’t really come to an archive unless you knew how to research – but this has completely changed. Roughly the same number of people use our reading room as ten years ago – 250,000 – but for every document accessed in our reading room, 100 are now downloaded online.”

History, she adds, has become democratised. “The barriers to use have come down – within a click of a button you can download the information you need. This, alongside TV programmes like Who Do You Think You Are? has led to far more excitement about history and what it can bring. The National Archives has been at the forefront of this revolution. We work with commercial partners to push any content we can out there, including material such as censuses, First World War soldiers’ records stories and more. About 90 per cent of what is asked for is now available online, and our learning services – including using actors to bring history to life for pupils – are increasingly popular.”

And, she adds, it’s no longer just about ancient history. “One of our other roles is to champion the ‘reuse’ agenda. You don’t now have to wait 50 or 100 years to get the benefit of public sector data – we use it every day in SatNav systems, or through services like ‘They work for you’ (run by My Society), or Google Earth. There are new, and tremendously exciting opportunities emerging for society and for government through the combination of new technology and government data, and we’re only now starting to see their potential.”

The Archives, which last year won a number of government and industry awards for its access work, is always looking to be innovative, she says. “We’re the only archive in the world to have launched a wiki. We encourage our users to enter their work on our wiki (‘Your Archives’), so we can capture their knowledge to go alongside ours, and to help us improve our descriptions and literature.” This sort of development means that the Archives will continue to meet rising customer expectations, she adds. “The public now expect a certain level of standard – whether they are dealing with the public or private sector. You expect your bank to work 24/7 and to be able to download information 24/7. We have to meet their expectations. It’s a challenge, but extremely exciting.”

Ceeney, who is also working on a £3m redesign of the Archives’ reading rooms in Kew to improve access, is clearly set for a long stint at the Archives. “I honestly think I’ve got the best job in government,” she says, smiling. “My career planning revolves around the fact that whenever I get bored I open the Sunday Times – but it will be a long time before I get bored here!”

Pictures: UPPA/Photoshot