We live in a digital age and one that is constantly evolving and changing. This has brought huge opportunities to government and the wider public sector, enabling dynamic service delivery, greater interaction with the citizen, and faster communication in more engaging formats. But it has also created a huge challenge for those who have to manage and maintain information.
That challenge is to make sure that information essential to business remains usable over time and through change. And IT is at the heart of the solution.
Digital continuity in brief
This ability to use digital information over time and through change is called digital continuity, and it isn’t currently being managed in a consistent, coherent way anywhere in the public sector.
Without action digital information can easily become unusable – a liability not an asset. This matters to the public sector because it increasingly depends on its digital information to operate accountably, effectively and efficiently, to protect its reputation and deliver better public services.
Fortunately, help is at hand. The National Archives is developing a service that will enable the public sector to understand and manage digital continuity, and to make sure information can be used over time and through change. This will include guidance for IT professionals, and a flexible Framework of technical tools, services and consultancy that you can draw on to minimise procurement costs.
Digital continuity in practice
Digital continuity needs to be addressed as an integral part of good IT management, change management and information management. Digital continuity needs collaboration between these professions to ensure that information is:
- Complete: everything you need, and its context, is there
- Available: you can find what you need
- Usable: able to be used in the way that your business needs it
Each of these three components can move out of alignment particularly during change and over time – and that’s when continuity can be lost. The technology used to create most public sector information is constantly changing and evolving but these changes need to be managed in a way that provides continuity and ongoing use of existing information assets. This can mean for example, ensuring that information is not left in obsolete formats or systems, or in applications that prohibit effective information re-use, and that important metadata is maintained when you upgrade technology or migrate data.
To achieve this it is essential for IT to work collaboratively to ensure that an organisation’s technical architecture supports the required information assets, and the way the business needs to use them. The challenge is to address the rapid pace of technological change and ever changing business requirements, while the pressure is to focus on immediate technology to address today’s needs, rather than on support for and management of future change.
Supporting digital continuity
IT can support digital continuity by understanding your organisation’s technological environment, your data formats and structures, and how these need to support your business information requirements.
To do this you need to work with your information management colleagues to ensure that the organisation has an overall picture of the information assets it holds and the technology that supports them. An Information Asset Register should detail all the information assets you have, how and why you need to keep and use them over time, and the technology currently being used to support this use.
You then need to manage changes to your technology environment in a way that ensures you can continue to access your information assets as needed – and manage your technology environment in a way that gives you flexibility to reduce the risks of change and seize on the opportunities it brings. This could mean standardising platforms and data and planning for change, building in digital continuity requirements, moving towards open information standards and avoiding technology lock-in where possible.
Another key way of ensuring digital continuity is to develop and use your Information Asset Register in your ICT Services Contract; something which is now included in the Office of Government Commerce’s ICT model agreement. Draft guidance is being developed, and is available on The National Archives’ website.
Within an ICT services environment, the Information Asset Register identifies information assets as distinct configuration items which relate to the technology that enables them and the business outcomes that they are required to support. With this under active management, the impact of change on information assets can be more easily assessed, ensuring that business outcomes continue to be delivered, both at the time of the change and for the duration of the ICT services contract.
If you are about to initiate procurement of ICT services using the OGC Model Agreement and want further information on how to incorporate the Information Asset Register, please contact the project team at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it for advice and support.
Digital continuity project
Part of the service being developed by the Digital Continuity project will be a Framework of technical tools, services and consultancy that IT professionals can call on to manage digital continuity.
The tools or products they are looking to include in the Framework will help you to:
- Understand your information assets – so could include file characterisation, database characterisation, metadata extraction, information modelling, content analysis and asset usage analysis.
- Change your information assets – so could include file format conversion, content transformation, database migration, digital asset de-duplication, data quality enhancement and operational archiving.
- Understand your technology assets – so could include technology inventory, licence management, software usage analysis and content configuration.
- Change technology – so could include data management, hardware virtualisation and viewer software.
Procuring this Framework collaboratively is central to ensuring that the project provides value for money for government in helping it to manage its digital continuity. It estimates that, on average, for every purchase from the Framework, a department will save several weeks in time, and between £30,000 to £55,000 on an independent procurement process.
The Digital Continuity project is also aiming to embed digital continuity into ‘business as usual’ to make it as easy as possible for you to take and monitor action. Managing continuity should just be another part of IT best practice. It should help you to justify taking a longer-term view in planning and is one more business driver to ’do the right thing’. That’s why as well as including digital continuity in the OGC model agreement, the project has worked with OGC to integrate digital continuity into ITIL. Digital continuity is also included in the CESG Information Assurance Maturity Model (IAMM) – this provides guidance to your Senior Information Risk Owner, helping to ensure that digital continuity is taken seriously across the organisation.
Cost savings and cost avoidance
Digital continuity is an essential part of good information management and supports the benefits we expect from good information management – the ability to deliver outstanding public services and take informed decisions; the ability to be accountable, operate legally and transparently, and to work effectively and efficiently.
Being able to use essential digital information for as long as needed underpins information assurance and is at the heart of operational efficiency. Where digital continuity adds value is that it will help the public sector to make sure it is managing information well not just for today – but through the changes and challenges of tomorrow as well.
Managing digital continuity effectively could enable you to reduce costs, for example by reducing your storage requirements, eliminating unnecessary licence costs, reducing the cost of finding essential information, or of having to re-create it and reducing the number of formats that need technical support.
In addition, by addressing loss of continuity issues and risks now, rather than fire-fighting at the point of loss, departments avoid costs – for example the costs of recreating essential data, or of restoring reputation and the public’s faith in government’s ability to operate accountably and efficiently.
For more information
Web: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/digitalcontinuity
