UK children's charityBarnardo'shas upgraded the identity management capability of its IT
systems to link directly toContactPoint, the government's planned
database of all children in England.
Barnardo's will be one of the first non-government organisations
to
federate employees digital identities to the database designed
to improve communication between children's support services.
ContactPoint is part of the government's
Every Child Matters programme set up in response to the public
inquiry into death of eight-year-old
Victoria
Climbié in London in November 2000.
The inquiry recommended in 2003 that the government investigate
the feasibility of a database to provide the contact details of
practitioners or services involved with any child. A lack of
co-ordination between services within several local authorities
largely blamed for the failure to prevent the death of Victoria
Climbié as a result of abuse by her guardians.
Bob Darby, information services director of Barnardo's, said the
organisation supports anything that will help communicate with 150
local authorities to "connect the dots" to improve services to
children. "If a straightforward, obvious, sensible IT system gets
us there, we are absolutely for it. We don't want another case like
Victoria Climbié and we have proved it works in trials," he
said.
The government said ContactPoint will provide a quick way for
practitioners across education, health, social care and youth
offending to find out who else is working with the same child.
Privacy groups have raised concerns about the children's
database after several
public data leaks, but the government has said it will contain
only basic information and no case details.
The government has also set strict security requirements for
access to the system, including a full audit trail,
two-factor authentication, and secure exchange of
authentication and authorisation data.
To meet these requirements and to enable access to ContactPoint
through its own case management system, Barnardo's is to implement
Oracle's Identity and Access Management (IAM) software.
Darby said it would have been impractical for the internal
identity management team to take on the extra responsibility of
access to ContactPoint for more than 3,000 practitioners in 400
services.
"The Oracle software will automate the whole process as well as
provide standards-based tools for integration with our own ERP
system and other external third party systems in future," he
said.
Darby said the software will help position Barnardo's for the
likely trend of increased multi-agency work requiring integration
with other IT systems.
The implementation of the Oracle IAM software at Barnardo's is
expected to go-live at the same time as the ContactPoint early
adopter programme towards the end of 2008.