Northern Ireland Civil Service benefits from a collaborative approach to information management

Many companies are struggling to cope with a content explosion that continues to increase cost, management and storage complexity.

The onus to handle that unstructured data has traditionally fallen squarely on the shoulders of the IT department.

That has changed gradually in recent years, with many companies shifting responsibility to CEOs and the board of directors.

However, despite this new trend, 43 per cent of European companies still leave information management to the IT department, according to a report published this week from market research company Coleman Parkes.

And often the way information management is organised is haphazard at best, being scattered across multiple parts of the business (separately dealt with by finance, HR or sales departments for example) with no single owner and no formal policy in place.

Coleman Parkes' research was commissioned by HP and its conclusions are based on a poll of 641 corporate and SME business and technology executives across the globe conducted in February and March this year.

The respondents came from financial services, health and life sciences, manufacturing and distribution, communications, media and entertainment businesses, as well as the public sector.

Faced with very large volumes of information, and the pressure of having to deal with Freedom of Information (FOI) and Data Protection Act (DPA) compliance requirements, some government departments have revamped their approach to information management.

Following a rationalisation of the Public Record Office Northern Ireland (PRONI) that started in 2005 and is still ongoing, the Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS) has rolled out an electronic document and records management (EDRM) system using HP's TRIM enterprise records management software, which now contains around 11 million electronic documents, accessed by up to 16,500 users up and down the country.

"The scope of the project was to establish a single EDRM [electronic document records management] repository to contain all unstructured and/or personal information in email accounts, network devices and hard disks," explained Records NI project manager Mike Beare, with documents including anything and everything from Word documents to CAD and SPSS files.

"It goes back to the 1923 NI records act, but the coming of the FOI in 2000 sharpened our focus."

Though Beare's background is in IT and budget management, he was keen to bring in other areas of the NICS to take the inevitable strain off the IT department.

"For this project we had to set up a working group with the NI Public Record Office and other departments," he said.

"Now we have established an information governance board, as well as departmental forums that feed into that, and there is a big push on information assurance."

Ideally, EDRM projects would show clear return on investment (ROI) to justify the expenditure on relevant systems and reorganisation, but tangible monetary, as opposed to process efficiency, benefits are often hard to demonstrate.

According to the Coleman Parkes survey, 57 per cent of European companies say they are under pressure to cut costs on information-related processes and systems.

Beare says it is hard to put a definite ROI figure for the NICS EDRM project given the extent of workspace and server rationalisation and IT centralisation programmes going on at the same time.

"There have been [cost] savings but some of the benefits went elsewhere," he said.

"But we will shortly undertake a Gateway 5 process [assessment] which will concentrate on the benefits going back to the original business case, making sure we met measurable targets around efficiency savings and regulatory requirements."

PRONI is also looking into ways in which it can digitally preserve its own records, though it cannot dispense with paper documents for good: anything marked confidential has to be retained as a hard document, as well as an electronic record, while lower classified documents, such as restricted and below, can be stored solely in an electronic format.