Review of corporate information management

Introduction

Government organisations and the wider public sector find themselves increasingly confronted with many complex information management challenges and these are perhaps more pronounced for the Scottish Government (SG) given the pace of the increasing growth of the organisation and breadth and scope of its business model and services. In many ways, the growth of digital information has only compounded these issues for government organisations which can commonly include:

• a large number of disparate information management systems
• little integration or coordination between information systems
• range of legacy systems requiring upgrading or replacement
• direct competition between information management systems
• no clear strategic direction for the overall information or technology environment
• limited and patchy adoption of existing information systems by staff
• poor quality information, lack of consistency, duplication and out-of-date information
• little recognition and support of information management by senior management
• limited resources for deploying, managing or improving information systems
• large number of diverse business needs and issues to be addressed
• difficulties in changing working practices and processes of staff
• competing internal priorities impacting on the ability to coordinate corporate activities

Many of these challenges are relevant to the SG, not least through a very significant and complex landscape of numerous repositories of information stored in many different formats across various platforms hosted on the SCOTS infrastructure (SCOTS is the secure official SG network and infrastructure on which all the organisation’s technology solutions are hosted and supported).