Chelmsford Borough Council: Guaranteeing IT Assurance with MetaCompliance Advantage

January 4, 2010

Chelmsford Borough Council joins the growing group of UK Local Authorities that have implemented MetaCompliance Advantage, the leading IT Assurance solution from Baronscourt.

User awareness is essential to Chelmsford Borough Council’s IT Assurance programme. Like other Local Authorities, they are working towards Code of Connection accreditation and best practice IT Governance in the form of ISO27001. They were aware that traditional means of communication, such as email and corporate intranet, would fail to deliver the levels of awareness required to fulfil their regulatory obligations. The Information Governance team at Chelmsford Borough Council realised that in order to achieve best practice requirements, they needed a dedicated compliance automation tool, one that would deliver continuous and repeatable user awareness and accountability right across the organisation.

Chelmsford Borough Council manages 1,200 employees. The workforce consists of office based, mobile and remote workers, all of whom must be consistently included in the IT Assurance awareness programme. Beside this, the Council required an uncomplicated solution that would be easy to implement, straightforward to manage, and would allow them to achieve quick wins in best practice user awareness, with GCSx deadlines firmly in mind.

Chelmsford Borough Council reviewed a number of products on the market and selected MetaCompliance, from Baronscourt, the market leading IT Assurance awareness solution.

Martin Jimmick, ICT Technical Services Manager, explains why they chose MetaCompliance;

“Chelmsford Borough Council takes a best practice approach to information assurance, and user awareness is, of course a fundamental part of this. We simply can’t achieve and sustain compliance with CoCo without ensuring that all employees in the council are aware of their responsibilities with regards to the handling of information. Traditional means of communication, such as email, fail to deliver the levels of awareness required for CoCo certification, MetaCompliance Advantage is the councils preferred solution that provides us with the guarantee that all users have received, responded to and understand IT Governance communications”.

Implementing MetaCompliance will bring a number of key benefits to the IT Assurance programme at Chelmsford Borough Council:

All borough employees that have access to information, including 3^rd
Automated risk assessment and measurement of IT Assurance posture will deliver sustainable, best practice IT Assurance, and allow the organisation to streamline Information Governance expenditure;
MetaCompliance is certified to Windows 7, the technology benefits realised from this has allowed Chelmsford Borough Council to future proof their IT Assurance programme.

Ian King, Network Services Officer was very impressed with the ease of installation and general usage of the MetaCompliance system;

“The actual installation was quick and painless and there were no issues, we have also seen a marked decrease in IT staff time spent on auditing the end user response to our IT policies.

From being another IT based application, we now have corporate buy-in from several other services within the Council, including HR and Legal, who have all discovered uses for the software and are actively seeking ways to work with IT services to fully utilise the product.

Chelmsford BC are extremely pleased with MetaCompliance, and the relationship we have formed with Baronscourt, and we look forward to continuing this relationship, and further developing our usage of MetaCompliance.”

Employee awareness is the single biggest differentiator between nominal and best practice information governance programmes, and is an essential factor in maintaining regulatory compliance and IT Assurance. Traditional methods of communication, such as email and corporate intranet, simply won’t deliver the necessary levels of awareness that are required. Organisations must look to specialist compliance automation tools to ensure that they develop an educated, vigilant workforce that properly uses, values and protects the data held within its perimeters.

Baronscourt Press Contact: Chelmsford Borough Council Press Contact:

Emily Greenhill Laura Ketley

Tel: 0207 917 9527 Tel: 01245 606795

Email: egreenhill@eu-baronscourt.com Email: laura.ketley@chelmsford.gov.uk

Web: http://www.metacompliance.com/ Web: www.chelmsford.gov.uk

About Chelmsford Borough Council

Located 31 miles northeast of London, the borough of Chelmsford is lively and thriving. It has an area of 130 square miles and includes the large town of Chelmsford - the county town of Essex - plus open countryside, attractive villages, and the flourishing town of South Woodham Ferrers.

The borough has a population of just over 157,000 and is the focus for government, business, retail, leisure and culture in Essex. It will continue to be a major centre of development, with an estimated population of 169,400 by 2022.

About Baronscourt

Founded as part of the Intertech Group, a subsidiary of Intergraph Corporation USA (www.intergraph.com), Baronscourt was spun out of the group in 2006 after Intertech was acquired by AIM listed Maxima Holdings PLC (MXM.L).

With its International Headquarters in London and its software development center in Ireland, Baronscourt has a focus on enabling organizations to achieve IT Assurance. The company develops software for Enterprise and Government that automates the increasing regulatory mandate of IT Assurance regulations and the related user awareness requirements that have become a significant burden on modern business. A key driver for our solutions is our design requirement to reduce the complexity of Compliance and improve the effectiveness of I.T Security in the organizations that we work with. Baronscourt solutions meet the requirements of all sizes of organisations, in terms of complexity and scale.

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