10 - Awareness and Engagement

Summary

Introduction

This chapter explores the role of information law awareness and engagement from both an operational and strategic perspective. It will be of importance and interest to LIK workers, who may:

• ◆ require ongoing training themselves in information law compliance issues, such as copyright, data protection and freedom of information

• ◆ have responsibility for raising awareness and ensuring engagement amongst their colleagues, students and possibly volunteers

• ◆ need to make the business case to senior management for training and development as a long-term commitment on behalf of their organisation

• ◆ need to develop a long-term strategy, supported by a business case, for maintaining high levels of awareness and engagement beyond training

• ◆ need to find a budget to support ongoing training and awareness activities.

High levels of staff awareness and engagement with information law issues are essential to organisational compliance with the law, whilst the proceeding chapters have also discussed the relationship between legal compliance and proportionality regarding risk. This means that inefficiencies and/or mistakes in the management of information law issues and the lack of awareness and staff confidence in managing rights, permissions and consents can increase risk, hamper opportunities and duplicate efforts, increasing overall costs and reducing the impact of information law policies and their implementation, as well as reducing access to information. Thus, raising awareness and engagement with information law issues is both an operational and a strategic imperative. It's an operational issue because awareness of information law compliance and its application to a specific organisation enables staff to do their jobs better. It's also a strategic issue, because organisations with limited resources for training, awareness raising and engagement need to ensure that they plan how they can optimise staff understanding of the issues, who to target and also achieve the long-term embedding of such know - ledge into the corporate memory. Moreover, legal compliance issues often require the maintenance of high levels of staff awareness so that long-term investment is made in retaining good levels of awareness amongst current staff, whilst also training up new starters.