Keeping your intranet legal
| Date | 01 February 2000 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb040746 |
| Published date | 01 February 2000 |
| Pages | 19-23 |
| Author | Martin White |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
Keeping your intranet
legal
by Martin White, Intranet Focus Ltd.
This paper outlines some of the areas where
intranet managers need to ensure that they
have not inadvertently breached legal and
regulatory
requirements,
including issues
arising from the increased use of electronic
documents, ensuring that intranets can be
accessed by visually handicapped
users,
and
in particular that the intranet is compliant with
the requirements of
the
UK 1999 Data
Protection Act.
Introduction
Most intranets just seem to happen! Someone,
somewhere, must have taken the decision to role
out an intranet, but it is usually quite hard to find
the culprit. Once started they then begin to accu-
mulate information in the hope that by publishing
it on an intranet internal communications will
immediately be improved by several orders of
magnitude. In this article I am not dealing with the
design of intranets, but with some of the legal and
regulatory issues that can arise, often rather unex-
pectedly. At the outset I should state that I am not
a lawyer, and that the purpose of the article is to
make you aware of issues that might require either
a formal legal opinion, or at least a clear statement
of policy from your organisation or institution. In
the following article I have used the word 'docu-
ment' as a generic description of any
memorandum, report, letter, paper, handbook,
email or directory.
Document and archive
management
In the rush to add documents to an intranet, and to
make sure that they are published at the earliest
possible opportunity, little attention may be paid to
what happens to documents that are now
out-of-
date.
This can be of particular importance with
staff policy manuals. For the sake of an illustration
take the hypothetical case of a laboratory safety
manual that had been converted to intranet deliv-
ery. A laboratory technician is injured, and claims
that there were no guidelines in the safety manual
about what they should have done in that particular
situation. The current version does have clear
guidelines, but the accident happened a few
months ago. If this case comes to a tribunal are
you in a position to show what the content of the
manual was on the day in question, whether or not
the technician had access to it, and had in fact read
it. The situation can become more complicated
when the virtual handbook is updated in sections,
and considerable care needs to be taken to ensure
that all the individual sections cross-reference to
each other correctly, and that all users are aware of
what sections are new or revised.
Of paramount importance is that an effective
method of version control is instituted for all
documents placed on an intranet. The intranet is
often used to facilitate group working but without
using some of the more sophisticated document
management software applications. Sometimes a
document is posted on the intranet as a Word file,
with the intention of tracking changes through the
rather limited range of options available in Word.
The result can then be that no-one is quite sure
which version they are working on. At the very
least the header and footer fields should be used to
denote the version of the document, even if they
are then deleted in the final document. One
approach that is worth considering is to save final
versions of documents in a pdf format. Although
they can still be altered by anyone with the full
Acrobat software suite, few members of staff are
likely to have this available.
Advice on best practice for document management
can be found in the Code of Practice for legal
Admissibility and Evidential Weight of Informa-
tion Stored Electronically, issued in as BSI-DISC
Code of Practice PD0008 by the British Standards
Institution in 1999.
Security and confidentiality
With the exception of personnel records and
examination papers most people tend to make up
document security policies as they go along. This
may work (in theory) with paper documents, where
the process of copying may be in itself a deterrent
to wider circulation, but that is certainly not the
case with electronic documents. This is where an
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