When the Freedom of Information Act comes into force next year, IT
directors must ensure their data management systems are up to the
job. Danny Bradbury reports.
Traditionally, local authorities have had a reputation for
inefficiency when delivering data to the public. Whether that
reputation is deserved or not, it will have to change next year
when the Freedom of Information Act 2000 comes into effect in
January - and IT departments must be prepared. Under the act,
members of the public will be able to request any information a
local authority maintains on them and expect to receive it within
20 days.
Unlike the existing Data Protection Act, the Freedom of Information
Act applies to non-personal information, meaning that the two acts
will make a large percentage of government records available to the
public. To compound this pressure on local authorities,
Environmental Information Regulations will govern the provision of
information relating to the environment.
It is theoretically possible simply to drag paper-based records out
of a file when requests from the public start to arrive next year,
but no-one knows how many requests will be made and the cost of
retrieving paper-based records will be dramatic - if it can be done
within the Freedom of Information Act's 20-day limit at all.
The Freedom of Information Act and Environmental Information
Regulations coincide with the move towards e-government in which
local authorities and central departments are required to comply
with the e-Government Interoperability Framework (e-Gif) next year.
Some authorities are clubbing together to cope with the data
management requirements. Richard Stay, executive member for
information and systems at Bedfordshire County Council, who is
using mySAP to help deliver electronic government services, says
that five local authorities in the region have formed Citizone, an
initiative designed to pull together data systems and provide a
single call centre-based point of access. As part of the
initiative, the partners have created the Property Gazetteer
project, a standard reference format for every piece of property in
the county. As this nears completion, the partners will introduce
people into the data format, enabling them to integrate their data
records more effectively.
However, the organisation still has a long way to go. "We are not
Freedom of Information-compliant today," Stay says. When asked what
would happen if someone requested information, he says, "At the
moment we wouldn't have a clue. It would take hours of research to
answer that single question."
He adds that there could be many other agencies or bodies that hold
information on behalf of the council. "I am not convinced that we
will be there on the day and that has legal implications for us."
A September 2003 survey on readiness for the Freedom of Information
Act by the Office of the Information Commissioner revealed that
local authorities are largely failing to create policy statements
on records management - even though the Freedom of Information Act
included a code of practice statement on records management in
November 2002 and it was anticipated that they would be doing so
again this year.
Document imaging, document management and knowledge management
systems will go some way towards solving the problem, but Andrea
Simmons, an independent consultant working with public sector group
Socitm, warns local authorities not to put all their trust in this
type of technology. Document management systems do not always
impose proper audit management and retention controls as electronic
records management systems can, she says.
Intelligent use of metadata is one way to help manage records
effectively. Richard Pinder, sales and marketing director for
electronic search tools provider APR Smartlogik, says that the
government has published a local government category list for
councils, which is part of the e-Gif and e-government metadata
standard.
In an ideal world, this would enable local authorities to tag their
data for management and retrieval. According to Pinder, the problem
is that the local government category list fails to take into
account local language conventions and idiosyncrasies. For example,
perhaps a coastal local authority will need more detailed
categories for ports.
"There is also the manual undertaking of the people who are tagging
up this content," he says. "When that is included with records and
document management, your web content is just the tip of the
iceberg." Perhaps Stay's take on this is unsurprising, "I have a
healthy disregard for what most of central government says," he
admits.
As authorities consider deploying audit-capable records management
software, data and process modelling will feature high on the
agenda. Graham Kelly, corporate process analysis manager at Halton
Borough Council, used Popkin's Systems Architect software to help
unravel its workflow and to simplify the underlying data before
layering other applications on top.
"We have found databases that are old and difficult to interrogate,
so we reverse-engineered those to find what information is being
fed in," says Kelly. He can then query the owners of the databases
to find out whether they are being used out of tradition rather
than for any meaningful reason. "We are finding that the
information is duplicated in other areas so you can integrate with
those," he says.
Such analyses must take into account ad hoc data residing in
desktop spreadsheets, says Giffin Lorimer, marketing manager at CDE
Solutions. Only when proper data retention and integration
mechanisms have been put in place at a central level and made
easily available will it be possible to persuade employees to stop
using the desktop as a primary storage mechanism, he adds.
Many local authorities have a long way to go before their data
management and retention policies are in place, let alone the
systems necessary to support those policies. With eight months to
go until D-Day, the Freedom of InformationAct and other government
requirements are beginning to make the Y2K bug look like a weekend
maintenance job.