Experience gained from managing Freedom of Information requests has led the City of Edinburgh Council to make changes in the way that it deals with all requests from its citizens – whether general enquiries, complaints or legitimate requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act.

Simon Haston, planning, strategist and relationship manager at the City of Edinburgh Council, says that the council receives a wide-ranging amount of requests.

‘Everything from councillors’ expenses to planning information,’ he says. ‘Even if we do not think that it is a request, we will still put it through the process – otherwise you get too het up with the legislation and not get on with the job.’

Two years ago, when faced with the act, the council made a strategic decision to concentrate on refining the process for servicing requests, rather than investing heavily in additional technology.

As part of its Smart City strategy, Edinburgh Council had adopted a collaborative knowledge and content management system – Datum’s KnowledgeWorker management tool.

Using its intuitive search engine together with the workflow engine the team set about automating the business processes associated with managing FOI requests and responses.

‘We had an existing infrastructure and application that we were using in our call centre,’ says Haston.

‘We just added extra rules, reconfigured the workflow, installed new templates for responses and extended the system into the back office.’

Each division of the council now has access to KnowledgeWorker. And the system not only allocates requests, it also carries out progress chasing.

‘If time is running out, the system will alert the appropriate people and this has allowed us to ensure that we respond within the 20 days allocated,’ says Haston.

Differentiating between complaints and FOI requests is one of the difficulties that the council experienced, so it has decided to merge its enquiry and complaints procedures with its FOI requests.

‘One of the benefits is that it goes into a system and people know that it is being tracked and actioned’, says Haston.

‘The only difference is that we deal with enquiries and complaints within 10 days, not 20.’

A key cost for the council is in manually looking for information.

‘We are now ready for an electronic document management system,’ says Haston.

‘We looked into it two years ago, but culturally and organisationally we weren’t ready. Now we have the processes in place and know they are working, we can take the next step.’