Survey Results Align With Feedback

In our July Newsletter – The Importance of IT Policies – we outlined the risks of not defining acceptable use, and management standards, for information and information systems. We then covered some of the key benefits of having well defined policies and procedures. However, if you put aside the points around risks and benefits and consider the feedback we most commonly get about IT Policies the top 3 are as follows –

1. Writing policies is not something we enjoy doing, we have little or no in house expertise in this area and ultimately we struggle to give this work priority.
2. There is a relaxed approach to maintaining or updating existing policies so that their content and context is often no longer current or relevant.
3. Getting agreement on the wording of policies and then achieving sign off can be very challenging.

In May this year we ran a short survey with the attendees at the SOCITM Wales Conference on the topic of IT Policies and some of the overall results aligned with these 3 themes.

CLICK HERE to view the survey infographic.

Making IT Policy Development And Delivery Easy

Protocol Policy Systems (PPS) has assisted many Local Government organisations in the UK, Australia and New Zealand address these 3 fundamental challenges. Our 2-phase delivery approach is designed to produce an outcome in under 8 weeks and sees us conducting an onsite workshop to engage key stakeholders in the policy development process.

When PPS deliver a final system to an organisation all policy statements have been written so that they are easy to understand and crafted to meet the organisations’ unique business requirements.

A drop down “Explanation” window provides users with more insight about the actual policy requirement.

The policies are also written explicitly to outline expectations for general users, managers and technical experts as the context of the policy wording for these 3 roles is duty-bound to differ.

All policies are mapped to a range of international standards e.g. ISO27002. Users can click on a button to view this standards information and demonstrate policy alignment with the mapped standard and confirm industry best practice is being followed.

CLICK HERE to view a walk through video of the IT Policy Software.

We Assist After Delivery 

Keeping IT policies up to date and relevant is key to developing a good security culture. Maintenance is handled by PPS in conjunction with our customers to ensure that key aspects of the software are kept current. Customers don’t have to find someone in their team to apply changes in policy wording, terminology, international standards etc. In a recent example we enhanced the policy and standards content relevant to the protection of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) for our customers so they did not have to develop and deliver this material in house.

Sign Off

The “Sign Off” process can often be a challenge and frustrating for a variety of different reasons, however we have some inbuilt options to simplify and streamline this crucial part of the overall exercise.

To discuss how our Policy Management as a Service makes IT policy development, delivery and maintenance easy contact us.