City of Edinburgh Council significantly reduces non-compliance, financial and reputation risks

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.”