Over the past few years, the government has launched a
number ofinitiatives to promote data sharingbetween public organisations including the NHS, Whitehall
departments and police services. The government's determination to
overhaul information management was strengthened after a series of
scandals, including the
Victoria ClimbiéandSoham
murders, which occurred after warning signs
were missed because police forces and education and social services
did not share information.
The past twelve months have seen a series of high-profile data
leakages that have had the opposite effect - increasing public
concern over the storage and sharing of its data in electronic
form. This culminated last month in calls for the government to
scrap a database containing the details of every child in England
due to a report that suggested that it could not be secure. Just
this week, the BBC Scotland's Investigations Unit revealed a series
of data breaches affecting thousands of people - these included
lost patient notes, information on sex offenders and compromised
payroll data, plus the Information Commissioner reported 94 data
breaches last year. However, the vast majority of these breaches
are not due to hacks on the actual databases, but occur when
individuals use insecure means to share information, or share
information with the wrong people in the wrong way.
Information is only useful when it is shared, but this entails
taking just the right data, packaging it in a secure, but usable,
form, and ensuring that it gets to the right people in the right
timeframe. If this can be achieved then the benefits will be
enormous. If done correctly, information sharing will be the key to
providing better public services for citizens - helping, for
example, in the fight against crime and the provision of healthcare
and housing.
Most government legacy IT systems were designed to collect and
protect, not share information. As a result, many government
organisations still rely on manual processes - shuffling paper
documents informally around the office, printing, downloading or
copying data onto hard drives, CD-Roms or networks - which not only
increases costs and the risk of errors, but also makes cross-agency
collaboration less efficient.
But information sharing between government agencies is in the
public interest, as the Victoria Climbié and the Soham murders have
already highlighted. And simple technologies, such as document
management, already exist that address these concerns.
With notable advances in security around documents management,
from encryption to policy protection and digital signatures to
identity management tools, government agencies can be empowered to
share information with confidence and accountability. By extending
security to the document level, government agencies will be able to
share information and ensure that data remains protected.
Confidentiality, privacy and accountability policies travel with a
document so that agencies can control, open, view, print, copy, or
modify a document with the highest degree of confidence and
certainty that it is protected. Importantly, should a CD of
valuable data "go missing", you can set policy protection that
instantly denies anyone access to the material.
It is true to say that information is the lifeblood of every
government process but public confidence in them managing this
information - both securely and accurately - is at an all time low.
Government cannot be complacent and needs to put in place the often
simple steps to make sure document and information management is
not only accurate across departments but secure.
By Ian Cockerill, director of Public Sector Practice at
Adobe Systems