Case Study: FOI Commissioner (Scotland)

Customer

The Office of the Scottish Information Commissioner (OSIC) is responsible for promoting and enforcing the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 and the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004. As such, the organisation has a key responsibility for investigating complaints made by members of the public.

Business Issues

The staff of the OSIC required an IT system which would support their work including administration functions, complaints handling, responding to enquiries, investigations and management. However, since the organisation was a relatively new one, not all business processes and procedures had yet been finalised and a first priority before the deployment of a complaints handling system was to define the organisation's requirements. Primary business needs included:

• Efficient investigation throughput times
• Provision of tools to support staff productivity
• Monitoring performance against business objectives
• A management information tool to support the organisation

CAS solution

The first task was to work closely with members of staff representing all functions i.e. administration staff, investigating officers and management to understand and document their Requirements. A PRINCE2 Project Board was set up to ensure the project was controlled with project timescales, deliverables and costs monitored throughout. The software application was customised to the OSIC's needs, data migration performed, software installed at their offices in St. Andrews and staff were trained in the use of the application. The application is supported by CAS on a day-to-day basis.

Benefits

• CAS worked with representative staff members encouraging user buy-in from a very early stage. The system is easy and intuitive to use for non IT professionals.
• The system provides staff with the ability to track cases through set procedures and provides alerts when deadlines are approaching, this allows them to manage their workloads effectively.
• Management have all the information at their fingertips to allow performance reporting against KPIs, spot trends and have access to all cases which may be of interest.

"CAS spent time understanding our business needs and we have a customised system which tells the whole story - details of all cases and their stages, correspondence/emails etc all together in one repository" commented Kevin Dunion, Scottish Information Commissioner.

Margaret Keyse, Head of Investigations adds "CAS worked closely with us and to tight deadlines to ensure the system would be 'live' for our staff to use when the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act came into force."

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