The costs and disruption associated with complying with new legislation and regulation will be familiar to a lot of IT professionals. For many companies, adhering to the likes of Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II and MiFID often means a fundamental reorganisation of the way IT systems are run.
It may be heartening to know, then, that the compliance burden can be as big a headache to those public-sector organisations tasked with introducing new legislation as it is to those on the sharp end of new laws.
The Environment Agency is a non-departmental public body that is responsible for enforcing government policy around conservation and the regulation of the effects of heavy industry on the environment. When the Government introduced its pollution prevention and control regulation in 2002 — designed to ensure companies have sufficient waste production and disposal procedures in place — the agency was forced to consider whether its IT systems were up to the job of enforcing the regulation.
The person charged with making sure the changes happened was Gerry Kaspers, programme manager at the Environment Agency. The technology issues faced by the agency are not that different to those encountered by any company that has developed IT systems in a piecemeal way, she claims.
"We were looking at an organisation that had a lot of separate IT systems with very discrete query databases, primarily holding information about our customers and their permits,” says Kaspers. “A lot of them were about capturing information retrospectively, after we’d done an inspection of a customer site, for example."
The organisation’s existing IT systems and processes suffered from blockages in the flow of information out of its disparate databases. Staff would spend a lot of time matching records from a variety of sources to get a single view of each of the companies, or customers, it regulates, says Kaspers.
"We wanted to move towards providing operational staff with something that would support them in their daily jobs, managing information and the activities around the customers and sites that we regulate," explains Kaspers. "That way, we could offer staff joined up information with business-process support to get an overall view of each customer site we visit."
The creation of a brand new set of processes to manage the introduction of the pollution prevention and control permit scheme gave the agency the opportunity to examine how its existing IT was supporting staff in their day-to-day work. "We deliberately chose a new and complex process to test the strategy, which needed far less process re-engineering," says Kaspers. "The pollution prevention regulation meant we were going to be dealing with 8,000 sites using the new processes, and we just couldn’t have absorbed that change without upgrading our IT."
