This article is from the April 2004 issue of Update.
People in the private sector are impressed by the drive and effort which government departments are putting into information management, and their courage in creating teams to take the lead in this area. Those who have applied for posts in the new team at the Inland Revenue have indicated their admiration for the initiative, and their enthusiasm about being a part of its development and successes.
The Inland Revenue has been collecting tax for more than 200 years. Recently, it has also taken on responsibility for paying out tax credits and Child Benefit. Around 74,000 staff are employed in the department, of whom 65,000 work in more than 400 local offices arranged in 65 areas, dealing with the affairs of 40 million individuals and companies. Others work in Head Office roles mainly in London, Nottingham, Telford and Newcastle.
Although it has for some time had individual libraries and learning centres serving different aspects of its many complex activities, there have been no information specialists responsible for developing an overall strategic approach to data and information management and knowledge sharing. This changed in September 2002 with the appointment of its first Director of Information Resources reporting directly to the board — Gwenda Sippings. Not only is Gwenda a qualified information professional and Fellow of CILIP, but she was brought in from the private sector where, most recently, she was Head of Information at Clifford Chance.
In organisations like the Inland Revenue, the issues of managing large volumes of data and information against a background of rapid technological change are complicated by the importance of handling customers’ personal information in a secure way, in line with legislative requirements. The benefits of sharing information and knowledge and cross-government working need to be realised within a framework of secure information handling. There has for some time been high-level recognition within the Revenue of the value of information management. Nonetheless, it was not until Gwenda’s appointment that resources were made available at an appropriate level and with a remit to review information needs, in their broadest sense, across the entire department. This was to enable her to appoint staff to address the information management issues that would allow the Revenue to get the most out of the IT resources in which it was investing
The Inland Revenue ensures that everyone understands and receives what they are entitled to and understands and pays what they owe. A number of recent policy initiatives spurred it — indeed all UK government departments — into action on the information strategy front. They included targets for implementation of electronic government, and the Freedom of Information Act, in addition to the broader policy initiatives laid out in the influential 1999 white paper, Modernising Government.
The strategy
Gwenda’s first task was to conduct a review that would enable her to make a statement of strategic direction. To the views articulated by members of the department who gave their time to outline their needs and experience of the issues, she added her own knowledge and experience. Entitled ‘Information Riches’, the final strategy was presented to the management board and approved in February 2003. Its impact was enormous. ‘It was described as "quite outstanding — clear, tough where it needed to be and genuinely strategic",’ she says. ‘It was what they had been waiting for.’
The strategy explicitly recognises that ‘to manage our data information and knowledge efficiently and effectively is mainstream in our business’. It points out that improving internal processes and systems will provide significant benefits to customers. It will enable the Revenue to obtain the ‘information it needs to ensure that everyone contributes to the UK’s needs’. And it will enable it ‘to meet the demands of initiatives for public service reform and e-government and services’.
The strategy is based on three principles:
- encouraging everyone to work together to manage data information and knowledge as a shared corporate resource;
- ensuring that the people who work with data information and knowledge can do so quickly, easily and cost effectively; and
- ensuring that the data, information and knowledge they have is accurate, up to date and complete.
In the context of the UK’s tax system — one of the most complex in the world — the ambition of the Revenue’s information strategy statement should not be underestimated.
The vision for the future emphasises the business benefits of good information management. It assumes a corporate-wide (rather than just an individual or indeed team-based) ethos, shared access to, and participation in, the creation of corporate information resources, confidence that data and information is ‘comprehensive, accurate and up to date’, better understanding of customers and more authoritative advice to ministers. This will be achieved through an enhanced ability to capture, retrieve, submit and publish information quickly and seamlessly. The introduction of a more structured electronic environment should give people the confidence to manage their own workloads more effectively, enable them to use their computers simply as tools (because they will trust the systems) and allow managers and policy makers to make better-informed decisions from the larger amount of accessible information.
Gwenda has now appointed a small team. She identified the roles she needed to take the lead in implementing the activities outlined in the strategy, and recruited a multiskilled team, including tax and information professionals, representing expertise from the public and private sectors. The group works on strategy, developing policy and delivering standards. It identifies existing good practice in different parts of the Revenue and augments and harnesses this for the benefit of the whole organisation. Its remit allows it to bring together teams and individuals previously working in an uncoordinated or isolated way and, with a small staff and budget, it influences the practices of individual business areas to ensure consistency of approach and the development of corporate standards. Ultimately, the team will be judged by the extent to which the Revenue as a whole adopts its recommendations and realises the benefits of good information management in practice.
First steps
‘Information Riches’ proposes five key strategic aims (with a number of individual ‘workstreams’):
- to promote the value of data information and knowledge as corporate resources which should be shared;
- to ensure that the information collected and processed meets business needs and can be easily retrieved and analysed for a variety of users and purposes;
- to establish policies and practices on processing and storage of records that enable the Revenue to meet its legal obligations;
- to provide easy desktop access to key information sources;
- to ensure that the Revenue has the necessary information- and IT-handling skills to do its work.
In reality, some of these areas overlap, and some are contingent on other developments. Some may be the responsibility of a particular individual in the team, others shared between several members. The theoretical framework is tidily structured, but work in progress is more pragmatic and opportunistic. A priority has been a need to look for ‘quick wins’ to build employees’ confidence in the strategy team, to raise awareness of what is going on and secure organisational co-operation. And, most challenging of all, to do so making improvements through changing ways of working, rather than adopting yet more technology.
In fact, an ability to make the most of what is already there is an important feature of developments to date. The improvements currently being achieved are not a showcase for new technology, but a showcase for the principles of good information management -- for what can be done simply by introducing a team of information professionals with a strategic remit and management support. Given the size of the government department in question and the complexity of its operations, it is remarkable that so much can be done by so few.
Technology
Stephen Latham, Senior Information Systems Manager, is an information professional and has a pivotal role delivering ‘quick wins’. In spite of organisation-wide recognition of the need to invest in new information systems, there are other high-priority demands for limited funds. So the challenge is to achieve maximum impact with what they’ve got. That has meant looking at their ‘vast and complex’ system. ‘How can we quickly use it more effectively, e.g. by using shared folder structures more effectively?’ he asks. ‘There are no corporate guidelines, so we are working with the business to develop some. We are trying to encourage best practice for sharing information in a structured way in shared folders, linking in the departmental taxonomy. You can do quite a lot with what is in place, just by reorganising the way people work.’
It does not all involve starting from scratch. ‘You need the time and enthusiasm to go round the business to talk to people about how they are managing their information. They have all sorts of job titles but actually they are doing information management.’ This enables Stephen to pick up best practice, bring together ‘isolated strands’, use a formal, more corporate approach and then disseminate it to people who have no information management knowledge. The problem with the fragmented approach of the past is that the solutions individuals have devised in isolation may not fit together.
There are limits to what can be achieved without improving the technology in response to the changing environment. Until now, there has been no electronic records management system, but this is now higher up the departmental agenda. The problem is quite big. ‘Eighty thousand people are creating e-documents, most of which can’t be retrieved through keyword searching,’ Stephen says. ‘People sometimes struggle to find what they need to do their job. With Freedom of Information we are going to have to be able to search those documents. An electronic records management system would help us to work in a more structured way.’
Stephen had a staff of 45 in his previous job at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. In the new team at the Revenue, the challenge has been to ‘work with people in the business, understand what they are doing, put them in contact with other people, provide advice, corporate governance and frameworks’. The only way to cope has been to deal with information management problems by devising and articulating a corporate framework to replace the old individual departmental approach. ‘We are very much enablers, facilitators, influencers and communicators, as opposed to having more traditional management-type roles.’
He is building the organisation’s metadata strategy. A taxonomy has been developed, which will do part of what is wanted. Enhancing it involves contacting a lot of people to identify overlaps and synergies. And three sets of guidance on good practice are being issued — on email management, shared drives and electronic records.
With such large budgets involved, it is important that staff embrace the new approach. ‘We want to measure impact — how much people are taking things up. If we put out all these guidelines and people ignore them we won’t have achieved anything. We need to justify the resources being devoted to this activity.’
A key outcome should be time saved and freed for other things. ‘People will be able to find things more easily and so be more efficient. It’s not our money we are saving. It is very difficult to quantify the benefits when they are spread across the organisation.’
The intranet modernisation project
To raise its profile and secure organisational co-operation, the Information Resources team wanted to win the trust of employees by demonstrating its ability to improve working life from the word go.
One of the first opportunities for improvement was the intranet. This was a ‘first generation’ intranet holding vast amounts of content published by most of the teams in the Revenue, some of whom tended to ‘compete’ on design and navigation styles, duplicated content and generally tended to ‘stove-pipe’ (i.e. keep in silos) the material available to users. The intranet service was being run by a team within ‘business services’ — which at the Revenue includes IT services.
‘There were standards and templates in place and training was provided to authorised publishers. The publishing software was MS FrontPage and some publishers created new designs for their sites; the lack of governance arrangements meant that they had the freedom to do this. In fact, the intranet felt more like a collection of separate websites for each team, not one service for the whole of the Revenue.’ The intranet did provide access to centralised corporate information — manuals, guides and codes (known as ‘the Library’), and the HR manual. Indeed, one reason why the intranet had originally been set up was to save money by providing information in manuals electronically.
But there was a desire to do something much better, according to Rachel Alexander, whom Gwenda brought in to give the intranet a makeover. ‘It needs to mature and be more consistent, less of a free-for-all. To deliver this it needs to have a documented and owned strategy, governance standards and style and design guides, and the users and publishers need to understand how to find what they want and be able to trust that what they find is true.’
Rachel and colleagues, including those in business services who were responsible for intranet delivery, carried out a lengthy review, which culminated in a report. It identified a number of areas where they could work with the business to improve access to information.
All agreed that a modern intranet needs:
- a robust content management system (which the Revenue had already determined and selected);
- people publishing properly and applying correct metadata — so that the search engine works;
- management information — about who is reading what, and what is most popular, so that content and navigation structure can be audited;
- personalisation;
- subscription;
- security;
- access to newsfeeds.
One of the intranet’s key problems was that, to find anything, users had to know which team was responsible for a particular issue or topic in order to drill down from a team site into associated subject knowledge. The content needed regrouping, so Information Resources decided to focus on the principle of ‘separating the subject from the team associated with creating the information about it’. Several critical business areas, which span a number of operational teams, are now looking in detail at how to reorganise and consolidate their subject content into logical groupings that will let users quickly identify the content they require for their day-to-day work.
Rachel thinks that ‘because we tend to be facilitators, negotiators and influencers, we cannot always show the results of what we have done. It is all done through influencing how others deliver’. In other words, the team comes out and delivers something small that motivates others to do more themselves.
In fact, the Revenue’s staff were desperate for something to be done. ‘It’s really been fun,’ says Rachel. ‘People wanted direction and something to happen. No one has said: "Why are we bothering to do this?’’’
Better data management
The Inland Revenue has work in hand to improve its ability to manage the data it receives to benefit customers and to generate further internal efficiencies. Data standards are being reviewed, and electronic processing and storage issues being addressed. Data is currently fed into a variety of purpose-built data repositories. Funding has been allocated to make some fundamental changes, and a programme team led by senior civil servant Nick Down is working to implement the improvements.
‘Information Riches’ identifies other problems familiar to information professionals. Data is gathered, but not always stored in a way that enables it to be shared as effectively as possible to support wider business needs. Local technical solutions are not consistent, nor necessarily scaleable to a wider audience. And not everyone who ought to be is sure about the full range of information sources available to them. There is still scope to co-ordinate activities more effectively, identify and eliminate unnecessary duplication and to collaborate more fully with cross-government initiatives for knowledge sharing, such as the Electronic Library for Government. ‘We are trying to get our heads round the re-engineering process, to make it work more effectively — for example, looking at ways of licensing the integration of commercial data into internal systems, to pull all the information together in a convenient way. It is very complex and we need to consider lots of issues,’ Nick says.
Knowledge management and sharing
Jenny Coombes is responsible for KM. An information professional, she too is new to working in a government department. Perhaps not surprisingly she is not too concerned at this stage in the process of rationalisation by the absence of all-singing, all-dancing technology. ‘We will be in a better position when we have got it, because it makes things easier. It forces you to do things in a specific way — for example, to add metadata to content added to the intranet. In the meantime, we are working out standards so that people will have begun to think about how to manage their knowledge and share it when more effective technology becomes available.’
So, KM started in a very practical way, with the groups most interested in organising and sharing their knowledge. The Information Resources team wanted to have something that was working well to use for educating others. The idea was to establish some generic guidance, then get different groups around the department to follow it and debate it, and publicise and implement any standards they developed. ‘You can have information standards and ways of operating, irrespective of the technology,’ says Jenny.
A problem for the Inland Revenue is the complexity of its operations. Head Office deals mainly with policy, providing technical guidance, strategy and planning, and dealing with the impact of new legislation. It interacts regularly with other government departments and with representatives from business and from regulatory and trade bodies. The network of regional offices deals with the tax affairs of individuals, businesses and employers, while its Large Business Office manages the relationship with the largest employers in the country. The Special Compliance Office looks at individuals or groups where the Revenue suspects irregularities which may need further investigation. And of course the Revenue does not only collect taxes and facilitate the process — it also looks after National Insurance contributions, the paying of tax credits and policing the national minimum wage. So employees have very differing information needs, on companies, industries and on thinking and commentary from other organisations on development of tax law and policy.
An interesting aspect is the extent to which staff have relied heavily on their own information searching and data sourcing, rather than going to a group of professionals in a department dedicated to this service. ‘They basically support themselves and rely on their own business sources. There are researchers, but they’re called by other names. There are people in a variety of intelligence teams, but they do not sit within any central group. There has been a lack of co-ordination,’ says Jenny, who hopes to sort out third-party licensing arrangements so that all those with a business need can access the resources they want. ‘We’re trying to make things more co-ordinated, to facilitate communication and to get better decision-making information to the desktop.’
At the moment there are several libraries and learning centres, including the Head Office departmental library (which supports the policy-making function), but only the Information Resources team has a cross-departmental remit. Libraries sit in the different functional areas of the Revenue, as do the people doing information gathering or research. This means the people delivering a research service are close to, and understand, their business area and are well integrated with it so that it is customised for the activity of the people they serve. ‘We are encouraging and supporting a growing number of specialist knowledge and information management roles in the business areas — and some are recruiting information professionals to work alongside business area experts.’ However, in this type of environment, the challenges of co-ordination, prevention of duplication of effort and, indeed, sustained professional development are tough. Most people working in an information or research capacity have a background in tax rather than as research professionals; awareness of information sources and intelligence gathering can be fairly ad hoc. Jenny will be working with qualified information professional Helen Davies, the recently appointed head of the main library and information service, to ensure better communication among the various researchers; establish information requirements across the Revenue; assess appropriate information products; and determine how these can best be delivered within the organisation.
Complying with new legislation
Recent changes in the legal environment have implications for large government departments like the Inland Revenue, which holds enormous quantities of highly sensitive personal and corporate data. The Revenue must observe data protection principles and, at the same time, comply with the Freedom of Information Act. The new culture of openness in government requires a change of mindset. The default position should be that information is available and the exemptions should not be used to ‘block’ disclosure.
Traditionally, disclosure has mostly involved what Data Protection Act jargon calls ‘subject access requests’. Many of these — between 12,000 and 15,000 annually — are for National Insurance contribution records only. To be able to answer them properly, customer records must be managed efficiently. The team’s Data Protection Unit, led by Terry Tierney, deals with these and gives advice to the department. The large volume of records — the department deals with nine million self-assessment customers, 30 million employees and two million companies — is challenging in terms of records management, according to Caroline D’Cruz, Information Policy Manager. She is a former tax inspector and was appointed from within the Revenue because of her considerable practical experience of introducing new ways of working in different business areas.
The Revenue’s remit has changed considerably over the last few years. It absorbed the Contributions Agency in 1999. It took on responsibility for handling tax credits from the old Department of Social Security (it is responsible for handling Family Credit). And last April it took on the payment of Child Benefit. As Caroline says, ‘all three were very substantial areas of work’ with, additionally, the staff and records that accompanied this migration across government departments.
FOI requests are anticipated from pressure groups and the press. At a more general level, there are always requests from research students, questions from members of staff —and enquiries from ex-members of staff. The policy issues are far more complex than an outsider might think.
Eventual migration to electronic records management will help — as will progress in ‘managing’ emails — but in the meantime, as the Revenue gets up to speed, there is a need to communicate the message, set up support and give guidance, steered by a central authority. Caroline’s particular headache is to ensure that the processes set up (human and electronic) comply with legislation — and to convince staff that investing time and money to get the new processes established will pay off in the long run.
Tax inspectors have to learn tax law and apply it. So, ‘learning new law and applying it to the same processes isn’t a big jump,’ she says. The other major piece of legislation that raises compliance issues is, of course, copyright law. ‘People have to be made aware of how we use information from the internet, or from research publications. It has implications for marketing and communications, and people in an outward-facing role.’ Sharing her expertise with the technical knowledge of the information professionals is rewarding and contributes to the team’s success.
Historical context, and the archive
The move to e-government implies a new way of life. Those who work for the Revenue are dedicated public servants, proud of the fact that, if they did not manage taxes so efficiently, public services would not be delivered. Their pride is reflected in the literature and documents they have preserved (in addition to records intrinsic to the job). This material is much more than a source of fascinating historical insights into the activities of tax inspectors and their changing roles. It is also a rich source of research material on individual household incomes, how businesses have been run over the last couple of hundred years, and general social history — what sort of questions people asked the Revenue, where they lived, parish boundaries, and so on.
So it is gratifying that the Revenue has decided to set up a brand new archive to preserve this rich paper heritage when it goes electronic. For the first time the value of saving or coding older documents has been recognised. Tass Montgomery, an information professional and archivist, joined the team to organise the job.
Policy files are, in any case, reviewed (the ‘second review’) after 25 years — a responsibility under the Public Records Act. (Information about ‘living individuals’, subject to the Data Protection Act, is only to be retained as long as it has a business purpose.) But archiving electronic materials is a different sort of operation, and there were a number of sound business reasons for needing to bring together older, paper-based materials. Tass was surprised by the amount that had been preserved. It needed evaluation and cataloguing. ‘It included inspectors’ personal notebooks, notes for inspectors, circulars, weekly departmental notes and staff lists. There was family history, assets database material, and certificate and tax returns of various kinds, going back a long way. Staff had squirreled these things away. There were little collections everywhere. People were reluctant to throw away something that was 150 years old.’
Tass did a records review and is using her library skills actively. ‘We are trying to make it all consistent, and set up facilities for storing records outside the tax office.’
But the items that are most exciting historically have been put on display in cases in the library. This is part of a deliberate strategy to tempt users in, and to promote the notion that information and the gathering of knowledge assets is now a central concern. The new archive was launched officially by the Chair, Nick Montagu, in early December, with an enthusiastically supportive speech from Stephen Bibby, current President of the Union of Senior Revenue Officials. (For confidentiality reasons, the archive is only accessible to Inland Revenue staff.)
Publicity and training
Publicising what the whole strategy is all about plays a key role in implementation — not surprisingly, given the small size of the strategy team. The person responsible for communications, Michelle Wyer, is a tax professional with 13 years’ experience of the Revenue, a good working knowledge of how many parts of the department work, and indefatigable enthusiasm. She was head-hunted within the Revenue for this job. She has used every resource at her disposal — the internal newspaper, the intranet’s home page, senior management teams’ conferences, workshops and awareness-raising events. She is trying to build up a virtual network with communications officers within the Revenue.
She also brings to the team an awareness of how Revenue policy works now, and what might be required in future. One of the problems has been that, at the higher levels, staff move around a lot. When they move on, much of what they have learned or could pass on is lost. One of the challenges is to put in place entry and exit strategies for gathering knowledge from these staff. ‘Anywhere where you need to transfer knowledge or evaluate knowledge, you need to assess what you have learned. Is it useful to the business? We need to have a strategic and consistent long-term vision. For our managers, we need management standards for information that are predetermined, consistent messages that we are comfortable with.’
Training will be essential. There are huge ambitions and plans for the future. Michelle is devising information-awareness packages and working with the HR department on a number of initiatives, including recruitment schemes and a career planning intranet site. A longer-term strategy is to include KM training as part of the induction package for new entrants— ‘the point is to get them when they’re fresh’. Training materials have been produced. They aim to increase the staff’s awareness of business-specific information; of documents that will need to be preserved; of the effective use of email; of the difference between a record and a communication; of the presentation of information on the intranet; of data protection and copyright legislation; of how to deal with FOI requests; and so on. The intranet and, it is hoped, the HR department’s information systems, adapted or extended to include a learning management system, will play an important role.
Michelle has barriers to overcome, the biggest being the time taken up by training, and its impact on the targets to which people work on a daily basis. Information literacy is a huge issue; she has found that one way to engage people in the process is to run workshops looking at scenarios that staff can relate directly to their own working experience. ‘A lot of it is about engaging the imagination as well as senior stakeholders.’ But there are many issues. ‘There is a huge knowledge sharing issue — we need to communicate the clear business benefits. How do you make sure that what staff learn is used? How is the knowledge spread? How do we run online courses? How can we exploit the benefits of the new desktop portal the department is developing?’ A big advantage of the intranet modernisation project, she says, has been that ‘it introduces the concept of ongoing responsibility for information management’.
Which brings us back to our all-important underlying theme. Good information and knowledge management may use technology to facilitate good information-sharing practice. But for the technology to be used effectively, an organisation needs a strategy and standards, and staff awareness and collaboration. Gwenda says that it’s been very exciting building the new team from scratch, and seeing activities starting up which are making a real impact on people’s approach to information management. She’s also delighted at the practical support for the strategy demonstrated by the contribution of a number of senior directors to the Information Resources Strategy Governance Group she set up, which board member Helen Ghosh chairs. And government is repeatedly stressing how fundamental good data, information and knowledge management is to its business, and how important are activities which will improve matters within and between departments. Which is why the new, very small, team at the Inland Revenue is already in such demand, and making such valuable contributions to the department’s future.