Reaping the rewards of compliance to the Freedom of Information Act

What does the Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) really mean to government departments? The top line is that government departments have a duty to provide any piece of information requested by a member of the public, if it exists, within 20 days of the request. There are issues associated with exemptions, such as information that falls under the data protection act and the ability to track who has what and when, but ultimately compliance to FoIA means that the government has had to take a serious look at reforming its information retrieval systems.

So what reforms has the government undertaken in order to meet January 2005 deadlines? Has it started to implement technology that enables the consolidation of all government information? Or is it relying on each individual department to streamline associated departmental specific data? Recent public sector research from Convera indicates that it is the latter – that Government is taking a segmented approach rather than a centralised one to compliance with the FoIA. “The level of preparedness among public sector bodies is mixed, at best. In general, central government organisations are best prepared, as they have embarked on the FoIA adoption process earliest. This will educate additional momentum for adoption especially among the late comers, particularly in the education and health verticals.”

With the education process underway it is becoming easier to create an understanding of the benefits of a centralised approach to compliance and it is important to note that departmental buy-in and understanding of the benefits of complying with the act can only be a good thing. The issue is as much a cultural one as one about the technology that will enable it. However, although the onus is on individual departments to comply and to be accountable for non-compliance, departmental streamlining should be seen as part of the bigger picture – the first phase in achieving the level of transparency that the Government is promising. Unless information centralisation systems are put in place, in the long term the Act will cause major challenges for most of the affected organisations.


Centralisation - the issues to be considered

For the government to meet deadlines and reap the associated benefits of compliance with the FoIA, it needs to implement technology that truly enables the sharing of all government information, both internally and externally, in context to specific requests.

The application of Content Management Systems (CMS) or Electronic Document and Records Management Systems (EDRMS) at departmental level alone is only solving part of the problem. The scope of the Act is more far reaching and needs to search for information that is not only stored within records and documents, but also publications, intranets, public websites, and databases – including information that is stored within the archives of other departments. Therefore, a rich set of meta-data traditionally added to a CMS or EDRMS system, however well formed, will have little impact on the rest of the information covered by the Act.

It is also important to note that the Act refers to information and not just the multitude of formats it is available in. Therefore, finding very specific information as a result of a request requires that nuggets of information within a document are returned, rather than the whole document itself which maybe very long and may not immediately appear relevant. Furthermore, parts of that document may have exemptions applied to information contained elsewhere within it, such as personal information of an individual that falls under the data protection act, and only non confidential information should be returned. It is therefore critical to the Act and imperative for Government departments to have the ability to balance what must be provided to the citizen against what is exempt. Ultimately it must be ensured that exemptions are consistent across Government, so that anomalous results from other parts of the organisation will not compromise information served already.

The problem of making information accessible, but only to the letter of the law, makes the issue of information retrieval an even greater challenge – and one that needs to be addressed at a central level. Only with a technology that can apply exemptions to information retrieved across technologically disparate systems and formats will Government departments be able to fulfil the strict goals of the Act and provide a comprehensive information set to a citizen within 20 days, without the work of an army of people.


The Solution – Mission Critical Enterprise Search and Categorisation systems

Overcoming the problems associated with information retrieval is difficult, yet the government need only look to its intelligence agencies to see that Mission Critical Enterprise Search and Categorisation systems have been successfully controlling the dissemination of relevant information for years. Despite the fact that the customers in this instance are other intelligence agencies, the same principles apply. With Mission Critical Enterprise Search and Categorisation systems intelligence agencies are able to:

 Rapidly retrieve very relevant information in order to process information requests quickly
 Incorporate a level of authorisation within the search to ensure that confidential information is not disclosed
 Search across geographically dispersed infrastructures from a single platform to return information in a variety of formats
 Identify important information in other languages without translating whole databases of documents
 Be able to search the same information in a multitude of ways and dynamically manipulate the results in order to pin point very specific results
 Generate clear audit trails, rather than multiple audit files from many systems

If the same abilities are possible for all government departments it is clear that Mission Critical Search and Categorisation systems are paramount in enabling Government to achieve the strict goals laid out by the Act. The information is out there, but currently there is no time to generate or even massage the existing metadata to give law-abiding results. Providing the government with the tools to perform these tasks in a mission critical manner is the key to success of FoIA implementations.


The benefits of a centralised Mission Critical and Categorisation system

Whilst some organisations have already deployed parts of the solution, these parts must be integrated together centrally to provide all departments with the whole picture in order to fully achieve FoIA compliance. This integration will involve linking information across different systems to support a single search and classification scheme, potentially including financial systems where the information can be paid for. Doing this without a single consistent view of all informational assets within government will cause more problems than it tries to solve.

The Act is as much about managing ‘access’ to information as it is about managing the information itself. For example, maintaining an audit of access to information across multiple sources using different search systems will be problematic, with audit information being held in multiple locations. With a centralised system a single point of search is the only way to achieve consistent results with maximum flexibility for both the public and the department’s needs.

Successfully complying with the Act is therefore about good information management based on sound information architecture that understands all the documents within the domain accessible to it. Only Mission Critical Enterprise Search and Categorisation systems can step up to the challenge of meeting the strict guidelines set out by the FoIA. These systems will be able to pull the disparate collections of relevant information toge