Information Commissioner’s Office Audit
Dear colleagues,
As some of you might be aware, we had a voluntary audit from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) from 14 to 16 January 2020. The ICO is an independent authority that upholds information rights in the public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals. You can read more about their work and interests on their website.
Our audit was constructive and challenging, and we want to thank those who helped organise their visit and those who engaged and provided information to the ICO. We’ve already been given some high level feedback, and the ICO are now preparing a more detailed report which will include prioritised areas for action and recommendations. We’ll receive this report over the next few weeks, and will be sharing the detail of it in due course.
Ahead of the audit, we had been working with an independent digital consultancy, Good Growth, to help us prepare and develop a prioritised action plan that will pick up on some of the points we anticipated that the ICO would raise in our audit. Encouragingly, the areas identified by the ICO are covered in the work streams of this action plan. Good Growth will now be working collaboratively with the key internal stakeholders including our Data Protection Officer, Information and Data Compliance, IT security and IT Services to begin implementing the action plan.
To help us achieve this body of work, we are going to be advertising for a ‘Chief Information and Digital Officer’ role, which will be a board level appointment. In the meantime, Tony Pauley from Good Growth is acting in an interim capacity as Chief Information Officer. As part of his role, Tony will be working with others to pull together a cross-university team to build on the work already underway.
Thank you again to everyone who played a role in the ICO audit, and you will hear more about the outcomes of the audit in the near future.
Stuart Croft
Vice-Chancellor
Rachel Sandby-Thomas
Registrar
21 January 2020