Publify Co-Operation Can Solve GDPR Related Challenges.

It will hardly have escaped anyone’s attention that the General Data Protection Regulation is on its way and will bring more strict requirements about the use and handling of personal data from ultimo May 2018. This further increases the requirements demanding changes in the company’s IT systems and in the way the company organize its operations.

Even though the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is not yet effective it is already on everybody’s lips and minds. A lot has already been said about what GDPR means and what it will bring. Everybody is writing articles, arranging seminars and workshops, and commenting on the regulation and everybody (including Kruso) has an opinion on, what GDPR means for the future.

But even though everybody seems to have an opinion, it does not change the fact that nobody has seen the actual effect of the General Data Protection Regulation. In this way we all share the same challenge. Hence, for a longer period after May 2018 there will be several parts of the regulation that needs testing and it will become clear which practical implications the regulation brings. It is inevitable that there will be some parts where the answer of what we can and cannot do is not ready yet – simply because the question has not been asked before.

Rules regarding the right to be forgotten, agreements between data controller and data processor, and criteria of relevance for storing personally identifiable is relatively easy read and understood. What can be a bit difficult is to convert this into, “what can we actually do?”. This question was asked by the members of the municipal digital community of development, OPW, back in autumn 2017.   

The community of development consists of 13 municipalities working together on developing a CMS platform based on Umbraco with Kruso. The municipalities continuously prioritize and evaluate, what is most important to focus on regarding development. The strength of the community of development is joint action and that the participating municipalities in all hold and share an extensive amount of knowledge about which key tasks are the most important and thereby can prioritize the efforts of the community accordingly.

It is the community of development’s natural and well-tested ability to share knowledge and prioritize together that makes it extremely good at solving this shared challenge – that is managing the work with web with the new General Data Protection Regulation.The members asked Kruso to facilitate a work with a view, with the municipalities members, to point out which initiatives that makes sense to focus on in the community. Together Kruso and the community of development mapped out more than 25 different initiatives. Each initiative is expected to contribute to getting the members ready to work with their web solutions under the new General Data Protection Regulation. The strength of the community of development becomes clear in several ways:

• Partly, you share the financial expenses connected to the development now and forward.

• Partly, the community of development holds an incredible amount of knowledge and capabilities making it possible to solve challenges within an area that is new and complex to everybody.

Put in another way, instead of each municipality struggling with the challenge of getting ready for GDPR, the members and Kruso have created a method together to handle both known and future GDPR related questions regarding CMS support.