Compliance

Background

Public sector organisations have a responsibility to provide information in response to Freedom of Information, Data Protection and Environmental Information Requests. There are guidelines which must be complied with setting out what information should be released and in what timescales.

Challenges

Many public sector organisations have experienced challenges in ensuring they comply satisfactorily with these regulations. Although many organisations have gone some way to standardising their processes, defining taxonomies and even using a request logging solution, similar issues are arising from one authority to another which present the following questions:

• Requests for information can be made to staff anywhere in firm at any given time. How can we control/centralise these requests?
• What happens if I have over 1 million documents that could contain the required information - how do I know I am providing accurate information?
• What if I miss the deadline?
• When can information be refused? But, what happens if other organisations provide similar information - does this set the precedent?
• How can we track requests to ensure focus is given to the critical ones and the whole process is transparent within our organisation?
• Am I really compliant?

Our solution

Alpha Zero assume that every organisation will have different needs and our solutions are tailored and modular to suit these requirements. Alpha Zero Pathway provides a complete solution to your compliance needs that can handle request capturing, progress tracking, management reporting and information searching. Our solution utilises technologies that reduce the cost of responding to information requests and as a result help to minimise the impact on an organisation. Pathway can grow with your needs.

Components of the solution

Alpha Zero Pathway provides all the necessary functionality to process, manage and report on all requests for information. Consideration has been given to ensuring that the solution complies with Public Sector requirements. Emphasis has been placed on ensuring that the solution can easily be incorporated into the existing practices to accelerate adoption and compliance to the Freedom of Information Act, Data Protection Act and Environmental Information Regulations.

The solution is delivered using Alpha Zero Pathway, a web architected technology that eases integration to existing organisational infrastructures and increases flexibility of access.

Pathway Request provides a request management module that enables requests to be logged, tracked and progressed through defined workflows. Alerts can warn users when requests are reaching target dates to ensure effective management of requests.

Pathway Search provides an enterprise information and document search capability to help fulfill requests. It is a proven module that enables organisations to rapidly and simultaneously access both unstructured and structured data sources. Pathway Search is a simple to use, instantly effective solution that requires no changes to current practices, has no impact to existing systems and negates the need for intervention by users or any relocation of data.

Pathway Library allows the creation of virtual libraries and taxonomies of documents. Pathway Libraries help to simplify and automate the often complex process of building taxonomies and managing documents.

Pathway Publish extends the solution into document workflow management, authorisation, publishing, version control and distribution management, so organisations know that information being published for a given request has been fully reviewed and signed off.

Pathway Scan provides the ability to scan hardcopy requests into Pathway, enabling the scanned image to be linked to requests and by performing OCR allows searching on document content.