BUSINESS CONTINUITY
“This would involve identifying the essential services which would have to continue and those which could be put to one side whilst the crisis is being dealt with.”
Despite identifying a few issues which needed attention around partnership working, the survey carried out by Alarm also identifies many positive aspects to risk management practices in Britain’s local authorities.
Between 72 and 79 per cent of respondents reported that their risk management strategies and policies are reviewed annually.
“Our surveys, which are carried out every three years, have shown that this is an improving situation with the 2009 survey confirming that risk management is becoming far more embedded in the operational level within organisations.
delivered by external providers.
“I think that this reflects the need for the message of risk management to be reinforced sometimes by an outside body, especially in the training of middle management,” says Dr Drennan.
“This includes making sure that authorities actually have effective risk management policies which are reviewed regularly and at the very least annually, instead of just being a dusty document which is filed away until the day it is actually needed.”
There were also some promising results around the training
of risk managers in local authorities, with the 2009 survey seeing an increase in those who believed that they were receiving appropriate risk management training.
The survey also identified that more than two-thirds of respondents prefer training to be
Although the take-up of risk management as a serious issue has been readily accepted by lower and middle management, Dr Drennan believes there is still a lot of work to be done to ensure that it permeates local authorities at every level.
“I want to see a situation where risk management is being considered at the very highest levels of leadership in local authorities, so that it is acknowledged from the very top down to the front line workers.”
Tell us what you think at
opinion@publicsectorexecutive.com EU INSPIRE Directive – imposition or opportunity? A
broad range of public sector functions will be obliged to publish
data under EU legislation that came into force in 2010. The INfrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE) Directive obliges member states to publish map-based data covering themes that span property and address records to transport infrastructure and administrative boundaries. Under INSPIRE, each affected data holder will be obliged to publish relevant data using standardised data models and Open web services that deliver the data in a system/vendor neutral form.
While it could be viewed as 58 pse
an unwelcome and costly imposition, the INSPIRE programme offers a simple and consistent method for undertaking data exchange by removing two key technical barriers that currently stifle real- time collaboration: difficulties translating between systems’ data formats; and, the need to resolve differences between systems’ data models.
The potential of INSPIRE to offer a cheap and flexible foundation for collaboration (both between neighbouring authorities and between different functions) has already been recognised. The EU is currently funding a study to extend the principals of INSPIRE to enable emergency responders to find and
connect to real time sources of information, spanning weather data to CCTV, in order to build richer and up-to-the- minute pictures of the unfolding situation on the ground during major incidents. In July, the Dutch national mapping agency and the German regional government of Nordrhein- Westfalia announced their use of Open web services for data sharing to enhance collaboration on functions ranging from emergency response to environmental protection.
Applications of this approach are currently being trialled in the UK in the areas of multi-
FOR MORE INFORMATION
For more information on INSPIRE and its applications visit: W:
www.intergraph.co.uk/government/INSPIRE.aspx
Jul/Aug 10
agency shared services and civil contingencies.
The attraction of harnessing INSPIRE for collaborative and shared applications is two-fold: the base work in establishing the underlying infrastructure needs to be undertaken anyway, so why not ensure that it is done do it in a way that supports broader applications (beyond simply publishing data); its use of Open web services and common data models makes it simple (in IT terms) to incorporate within an operational framework providing the protocols necessary to manage and control the data’s use.
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