Professionals experience problems too!
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Professionals have their own range of problems - arguably a wider spread, given the different roles they play and the different approaches to data protection taken by different professions.
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However, professionals have several problems in common when they work directly with residents, for example, when...
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their systems hold incomplete and/or contradictory information, and don’t provide a single view of the truth
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...and it's unclear which of two (or more) contradictory records is the more accurate, up-to-date or trustworthy
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they have to spend time and resource re-creating information that is already held by others
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other services (or members of the public) assume they have access to information, but they don’t
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it takes too long to track down information
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they have to make complex and nuanced decisions out of normal business hours, and can’t contact colleagues to ask for information known to other services or held on other systems.
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their organisation doesn't give them clarity about when and where data sharing is possible or necessary, and/or doesn't give them access to data held in other systems that is crucial to the person's role
Data Protection Officers experience problems when...
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they can't easily locate all the records held about someone when responding to a Subject Access Request
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staff aren't given the tools to manage data efficiently, leading to multiple disconnected records which are hard to update, correct, secure or delete when necessary
System administrators experience problems when...
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integrations between systems have to be created and maintained on a case-by-case basis, with no overarching integration architecture to support them
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they're required to maintain manual lookup tables for data that should be available automatically
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data is inconsistently and/or poorly structured, leading to cumbersome processes for data extraction, reporting and/or system migration
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Organisations experience problems when...
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data is unstructured and cannot be interrogated or analysed easily
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reporting is focused only on statutory returns rather than business intelligence
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an emergency event occurs, and they urgently need to know who is affected by it and how
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staff don’t seek out information that may be (or should be) out there.​​​​​​
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The next part of the discussion is about the specific data we're talking about here. It's easy to get sidetracked in the Data Zone - if you'd prefer to skip over it, feel free to move on to What GDPR actually says. Trust me, the Data Zone isn't going anywhere, and you can always come back to it.
