City of Edinburgh Council significantly reduces non-compliance, financial and reputation risks
Customer Success Stories
Iron Mountain® Policy Center provides a user-friendly way for the Council to know its retention obligations, build cross-department support and show compliance.
Industry
Healthcare
Challenge
Difficulty getting departments to buy into the timely disposal of unnecessary paper records, resulting in spiralling storage costs and associate risks
Solution
Iron Mountain® Policy Center provides a user-friendly way for the Council to know its retention obligations, build cross-department support and show compliance.
Value
- Less risk of non-compliance, fines and reputational damage
- 44% reduction in retention rules
- Less time spent managing spreadsheets and emails
- Simpler, shorter compliance audits
- Faster realisation of storage cost savings
Central to the success of Scotland’s 21st century capital
The City of Edinburgh Council is committed to ensuring the highest standards when it comes to education, social work, housing, economic development, green spaces, culture, sport, events, transportation, and more.
The relationship with Iron Mountain® goes back almost 20 years to when the Council realised it was more cost- and time-efficient to outsource document storage.
Centralised in Iron Mountain’s highly secure Livingston facility, those operations originally involved some 55,000 boxes containing 155,000 files which are recalled with ease by a thriving community of 300-plus users of IM Connect™, Iron Mountain’s online records management portal.
Need for a more collaborative and effective IG approach
Over time, that archived estate of paper records reduced in size by around 6%, despite significant office closures reducing local document storage, with plenty of scope for further savings.
To drive that next phase of transformation, the partnership turned its attention to improving information governance (IG) and better addressing the legal and regulatory requirements for records management.
“Although our IT team produced retention schedules with clear destruction dates, less than half of those schedules were acted on by departments, wasting effort and resources,” said Henry Sullivan, Information Asset Manager at the Council. “Also, it was hard to update retention rules with confidence. And even harder to recall historical reasons behind policy changes when challenged by auditors and regulators.”
Although our IT team produced retention schedules with clear destruction dates less than half were acted on by departments, wasting effort and resources.
Keeping retention and privacy policy current
Eliminating over-retention and ensuring records are always held for the correct period of time is enabling the City of Edinburgh Council to significantly reduce the risk of non-compliance, financial penalties and reputational damage.
“I can thoroughly recommend Policy Center,” added Sullivan. “It’s ideal for organisations with wide-ranging retention policies and diverse operations.”
Other benefits include increased productivity gains and less time spent on compliance audits. “It’s so much easier dealing with requests and making changes,” added Sullivan. “We also have a clear audit trail and can quickly refer back to notes and previous retention rules.”
Now able to dispose of information with increased confidence, the Council is strongly placed to accelerate savings on records management and storage costs.
“Iron Mountain is like the Amazon of physical and digital records management,” concluded Sullivan. “They are reliable and resilient and always have capacity and expertise available. No project is too big.”
Less time managing spreadsheets and emails
After consulting with Iron Mountain IG specialists, the Council decided to implement Policy Center - a cloudbased retention and privacy policy management platform.
“Iron Mountain Policy Center has enabled us to replace clunky spreadsheets and time-consuming emails with a much more efficient and effective cloud-based approach,” added Sullivan.
As part of the project implementation, Iron Mountain helped the Council to port data and set up the new platform. That work included the creation of 850 different record classes, a three level taxonomy and 500 retention rules (from 900 previously)./p>
“We’ve reduced our retention policies significantly,” noted Sullivan. “Finance is a good example. Now, we only have a few rules, instead of twenty plus.”
Iron Mountain Policy Center has enabled us to replace clunky spreadsheets and time-consuming emails with a much more efficient and effective cloud-based approach.
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