LO1. Gather Data/Information

Information Sheet 1.1: Organizational Protocols

In any organization, protocols and policies are essential to maintaining order, ensuring compliance, and fostering collaboration. However, the difference between protocols and policies is often misunderstood or overlooked. In this article, we will define protocols and policies, explore their importance, highlight key differences, and provide examples of their application in various industries to answer the question: what is the difference between protocols and policies?

What are Protocols?

Protocols are a set of rules or guidelines that dictate how tasks are performed or how communication takes place in an organization. They are usually specific to a particular process or department, and they outline the steps or procedures that should be followed to ensure consistency and efficiency.

Having protocols in place can be essential for organizations that require a high level of precision and attention to detail. In the healthcare industry, for example, protocols can be a matter of life and death. In emergency situations, doctors and nurses need to be able to rely on established protocols to guide them through complex procedures quickly and efficiently.

What are Policies?

Policies, on the other hand, are broader guidelines that set out the rules and expectations for behavior within an organization. They are usually more far-reaching, covering multiple departments or processes, and they often relate to compliance, security, or ethical issues.

Having well-defined policies can be crucial for organizations that need to comply with legal and regulatory requirements. For example, financial institutions need to have policies in place to ensure that they are complying with anti-money laundering regulations.

Importance of Protocols and Policies in Organizations

Protocols and policies are essential components of any well-functioning organization. They provide a framework for order and consistency, ensuring that everyone knows what is expected of them.

This, in turn, allows tasks to be performed more efficiently and effectively, reducing the risk of errors, delays, or miscommunications. However, the importance of protocols and policies goes beyond just establishing order and consistency.

Establishing Order and Consistency

Protocols and policies are critical in establishing order and consistency in an organization. By defining the rules and guidelines for behavior, they ensure that everyone is on the same page. This helps to maintain a high standard of performance, which is essential for the success of any organization. It also helps to create a culture of accountability and responsibility, where everyone is aware of their role and responsibilities.

Ensuring Compliance and Security

Protocols and policies also play a vital role in ensuring compliance with regulations and laws. By setting out the standards for behavior, they help organizations to meet legal and ethical obligations. This protects against fines, lawsuits, or reputational damage. In addition, they help to maintain security by setting out guidelines for data protection, access control, and risk management. This ensures that sensitive information is protected and that the organization is prepared for any potential threats.

Facilitating Communication and Collaboration

Finally, protocols and policies facilitate communication and collaboration within an organization. By setting out the channels and expectations for communication, they ensure that information is shared effectively and efficiently.

This creates a culture of transparency and trust, where everyone is encouraged to share their ideas and thoughts. It also enables teams to work together more effectively towards common goals, leading to increased productivity and better outcomes. They also help to ensure compliance with regulations and laws, maintain security, and facilitate communication and collaboration. By implementing protocols and policies, organizations can create a culture of accountability, responsibility, and transparency, leading to increased productivity and better outcomes.

Information Sheet 1.2: Confidentiality

Confidentiality is a set of rules that limits access or places restrictions on the use of certain types of information. It is usually executed through confidentiality agreements and policies.

What is confidential information?

Confidential information includes non-public information disclosed or made available to the receiving party, directly or indirectly, through any means of communication or observation.

Examples of confidential information are:

Medical information.
Names, dates of birth, addresses, contact details (of staff, clients, patients, pupils, etcetera).
Personal bank details and credit card information.
Images of staff, pupils or clients that confirm their identity and can be linked to additional personal information.
National Insurance numbers.
Payroll numbers.
Exam results.
Business and marketing plans.
Information received from third parties.
Company initiatives.
Customers’ information and lists.
Company financial accounts information.
Information relating to intellectual property, invention or patent.
Research data.
Passwords and related IT information.

Why is confidentiality important?

It builds trust.
It promotes confidence (in the healthcare system, in the school system, in the workplace etcetera).
It prevents misuse of confidential information (illegal or immoral use).
It protects reputation.
Employment may depend on it (e.g. non-disclosure agreement).
It ensures compliance with the law.

What is considered confidential and proprietary information?

Confidential information refers to information that is meant to be kept secret within a certain circle of people and not intended to be made public.

Proprietary information relates to property or ownership, as proprietary rights.

All trade secrets (secret formulas, processes and methods used in production that gives the company owning them an advantage over others that do not know the information) and confidential information are proprietary information, but proprietary information may also include intellectual property rights such as copyrighted information and patents which are not necessarily kept secret.

It is important for employers to develop and implement confidential and proprietary information policies. During the course of their employment, employees may inevitably have access to their employer’s confidential and proprietary information as well as confidential information (including personal data) about customers, clients, suppliers, partners or colleagues.

A policy should establish some ground rules on how to handle this information as well as the consequences for unauthorized disclosure or use of confidential information.

What is a confidentiality policy?

Confidentiality policies are needed to:

Ensure employees, clients and users understand how their own personal data is being used and who has access to it.
Clarify how employees should handle confidential information which is disclosed to them during the course of their employment.

Failure to protect and secure confidential information may not only lead to the loss of business or clients, but it also unlocks the danger of confidential information being used to commit illegal or immoral activities.

A confidentiality policy should include:

The scope: organizations set out confidentiality policies mainly to comply with the law (e.g. personal data protection and patient confidentiality) and to protect their competitive advantage.
What is considered confidential information: depending on the organization, confidential information could include bank details, patients’ test results, pupils’ exam results, payroll numbers, secret formulas, client lists and contacts, passwords etcetera.
Confidentiality measures in place: how personal data is handled and how workers should handle personal information disclosed to them. Some examples could include locking away or securing confidential information at all times, putting non-disclosure agreements in place, and not keeping confidential documents when no longer needed.
Exceptions: when confidential information can be disclosed for legitimate reasons (e.g. in case of a safeguarding concern, if it is required by the law or for public safety) and what procedure should be followed on these occasions.
What a breach of confidentiality is and how to report it.
Disciplinary consequences for breach of confidentiality policy: disciplinary action, dismissal and potentially legal action.

What is a breach of confidentiality?

A breach of confidentiality is when private information is disclosed to a third party without the owner’s consent.

A breach of confidentiality can result in:

Court cases.
High costs: fines and loss of trade.
Tarnished reputation.

Some examples of breach of confidentiality are:

Sending an email containing sensitive information to the wrong address.
Leaving a document containing someone’s personal data on a photocopier.
Throwing a document containing confidential information in general waste instead of shredding it.

It can happen accidentally to anyone. Protecting confidential information is essential for maintaining trust and ongoing business with clients. There are exceptions as to when confidential information can be disclosed for legitimate reasons. It is very important that these exceptions are outlined in detail in confidentiality agreements, confidentiality policies and non-disclosure agreements, together with the procedure to follow on these occasions.

Information Sheet 1.3: Accuracy

There are many varying definitions of “data quality”, with some definitions defining it with terms such as “accurate data” or “timeliness”, but we take a more robust approach to defining data quality to help you inform your data management strategy for you to avoid all possible data quality issues.

What is data accuracy?

Data accuracy is one of ten dimensions of data quality, and one of three dimensions that influence data integrity. Data is considered accurate if it describes the real world. Ask yourself: Do the entities actually exist in your data collection, do they have the attributes you describe in your data model, and do events occur at the times and with the attributes you claim? Accuracy is fractal, so it’s important to examine each level of abstraction.

What Immediate Steps Can You Take to Improve Data Accuracy?

Some immediate steps I recommend would be:

Conduct a data quality audit. Find out the top five issues affecting your data quality. Some of the most common issues you’ll find would be duplicates, incomplete information and data stored in multiple silos with more than half of them either obsolete or long lost forgotten.

Measure the estimated impact. Say you have a thousand new leads this month. How many of those leads are actually usable? If it’s just a two, or three hundred, you’re losing revenue.

Measure the manpower needed to fix this data. How much time are your reps spending in verifying and fixing information? Are they doing it manually? How many phone calls are being made and what is the average duration of each call? Assess the cost of manually fixing this data. If it’s taking your team a month to verify, clean, deduce and fix a 1,000-row data set, you need to look for a faster, more automated solution.

Opt for an automated solution: While auditing your data, you might realize you need a data match solution that can help you remove duplicates and perhaps consolidate multiple data sets from multiple sources into a consolidate, golden record. Most organizations use Data Ladder’s DataMatch Enterprise solution for data matching and to deduce data. Along with that, they also get to profile, clean, standardize and prepare their data.

Hire a data analyst to manage data preparation: You may think of hiring a data analyst and let them do the cleaning, but that’s hardly the right use of their skills. Your data analyst must be empowered with the right tools and resources to help them help you get accurate data. They must be the thinkers and the strategist while the solution you equip them with is the doer. Your analyst must not spend 80% of their time doing janitorial work (experts claim data cleansing as data janitorial work and that’s not fun!). Let the solutions do the cleaning and let your analysts do the thinking!

Focus only on specific data sets to fix as opposed to a whole data source: It’s impossible to perform a blanket operation on your entire data source or database. Not only will that be useless, but it will also be a waste of effort. Instead, focus on optimizing data you need for immediate tasks – such as cleaning data of the last six months to prepare for a bi-annual report, or data of the last quarter to prepare a promotional campaign. As you focus on fixing the important data first, you’ll gradually get around to sorting other data and get to decide what you want to keep and what you want to discard.

With these immediate steps, you can prepare your teams to handle essential business operations such as an upcoming migration initiative, a major promotional campaign or a business intelligence report. The fundamental goal to possessing accurate data is to ensure data integrity. Your data can make or break your business.