Harlow Council: Delivering IT Assurance with MetaCompliance® Advantage

July 7, 2009

IT Assurance is of the utmost importance to Local Authorities, where information is fundamental to the delivery of essential public services. The biggest challenge for delivering IT Assurance lies in managing the ever present risks associated with employees; how can Local Authorities ensure that information is accessible to the right people at the right time, whilst ensuring its confidentiality and integrity?

User Awareness is the key, and one Essex Local Authority, Harlow Council, has implemented MetaCompliance® Advantage, the market leading IT GRC solution from Baronscourt, that will allow them to deliver best practice, sustainable IT Governance awareness, right across the organisation.

Working towards GCSx CoCo accreditation, the team at Harlow realised that delivering and maintaining the levels of user awareness required for ongoing compliance with the IT Governance framework would be impossible without the help of a dedicated compliance automation tool. Declan White, Senior ICT Manager at Harlow Council explains:

“With the introduction of the GCSx Code of Connection, Harlow Council needed an efficient way of communicating with staff that was auditable. It is not acceptable anymore just to use the conventional communication channels and can be expensive and time consuming to achieve total acceptance across the organisation. MetaCompliance® is a tool that will deliver auditable staff communication, and when implemented alongside our e-Learning tool [will have]the added value of identifying training requirements.”

MetaCompliance® Advantage enables Local Authorities to deliver on a number of objectives, in line with CoCo and the LGA Data Handling Guidelines:

Develop, automate and maintain a continually updated programme of staff awareness raising;
Verifiably communicate IT Governance messages to all users, right across the organization;
Ensure the automatic inclusion of new employees in the IT governance programme;
Periodically monitor and measure understanding and awareness of policies, procedures and data handling practices;
Undertake regular risk assessments to ensure the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information;
Enforce the compliance of 3rd party suppliers and contractors;
Provide evidence of due care to 3rd party auditors and regulators;
Automate the entire Governance lifecycle to ensure best practice, optimized IT Assurance.

If you would like further information on MetaCompliance® Advantage or other products in the MetaCompliance® suite, please contact us on 0207 017 9527.

_{*Source: LGA Data Handling Guidelines}

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