COVID19 has struck Federal government organizations like a thunderbolt.
The rapid spread of the virus means content is being generated and shared at an unprecedented scale between both public and private sector entities. The move to a remote workforce means that organizations need a way to quickly and accurately manage their growing and unstructured data stemming from COVID-19 activities. Much of the content may fall within privacy and confidentiality, public safety, and other important regulatory and legal frameworks.
Adding to the information management complexity, documents related to COVID are currently being stored in numerous repositories including GCDocs, Microsoft SharePoint, email servers and inboxes, file shares, and even on personal devices.
Because the virus poses exceptionally difficult challenges to both privacy and public health, and the government and private sector response raises significant privacy and regulatory concerns, we expect there will be a tremendous increase of volume and complexity of Access to Information and Privacy requests. This may threaten to overwhelm ATIP staff when they resume their full duties.
Active Navigation and MetaData Solutions have provided many federal organizations with market-leading file analysis software solutions for content discovery, compliance, tagging and ongoing governances. Our customers include:
- Treasury Board Secretariat of Canada
- Department of National Defence
- Agriculture Canada
- Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions
- Heritage Canada
We now offer a set of complex rules that can flag unstructured content relating to COVID 19. The rules will:
- Identify specific high-value keywords pertaining to the pandemic and the potential impacts
- Flag potentially sensitive or privacy-related content
- Expedite requests for information to ensure that vital information is identified and available, yet properly protected
- Help government departments rapidly respond to ATIP requests and reduce the time and cost burden placed on staff and resources
- Allow further customization to reflect the organization’s individual mandate and needs
You can learn more about the use of Active Navigation COVID-19 Rule-Pack for public and private entities here: https://activenavigation.com/new-covid-19-rule-pack-available-for-managing-personal-data/
We believe these new rules and technology can significantly augment a department’s existing ATIP process to help clear any backlog of information requests that arises from a COVID-19 related bottleneck.
We would be pleased to discuss this in further detail and even fully demonstrate this process on a representative set of data in a real-world COVID-19 scenario.