GIG Award 2020 : Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Knowledge & Information Team

The standard of entries for this year's GIG Award was incredibly high and show-cased the importance and diversity of work undertaken by KIM professionals across the government sector. 

Here you can read how the Knowledge & Information Team at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) pulled together in incredibly difficult circumstances to support the FCO's Coronavirus Taskforce, implementing automated record keeping to ensure critical information continued to flow to the right places. 

 

Shortly after the UK went into lockdown as a result of the Coronavirus/ COVID-19 outbreak, it was evident the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Coronavirus Taskforce - which had started off with a traditional crisis-like response – faced challenges with the huge flow of information into the Taskforce’s mailbox.  The crisis mailbox was overwhelmed with emails from each of the FCO’s 270 overseas missions in the form of daily Situation Reports (SitReps) supplied primarily to assist the Taskforce with prioritising the repatriation of British Nationals overseas back to the UK, but also providing insights into local medical situations, quarantine and social distancing arrangements as well as whether international travel was possible and what, if any, PPE (personal protective equipment) could be supplied to the UK.  In addition to impacting on data extraction for real time analysis, huge numbers of people were on one email Distribution List which grew longer every day.  So just after Easter the Taskforce reached out to the FCO’s Knowledge and Information Management (KIM) Team for assistance with managing their shared mailbox. 

 

Working iteratively with the Taskforce, four members of the KIM Team (Carryl Allardice, Hannah Hudson, John Bateman and Ashish Sharma working remotely from home, in bedrooms, a kitchen and a dining room table) – devised a way of automatically extracting information from the crisis mailbox and storing it in Microsoft Teams site, so that FCO staff could access the information in a single repository.  They effectively created a store - which they called the Covid-19 Library - with a variety of FCO COVID-19 products (e.g. SitReps, Diplomatic Telegrams, maps, Research Analyst reports and FCO Library open source information), by automating the movement of emails and attachments out of multiple shared mailboxes using Power Automate (an Office 365 app).  The data contained in the 270+ daily Sitreps was then aggregated daily, Monday-Friday, at 07:00 into a spreadsheet giving FCO staff access to all the latest data from across the FCO’s global network at a glance.  This allowed further data analysis for onward transmission to Ministers, Cabinet Office and No10 – data which fed directly into the daily televised Coronavirus briefings by No.10.  

 

The COVID-19 Library is the first time the FCO has attempted to bring such a wide-range of information products on a single theme together in digital form – a first step along the road to “data-driven diplomacy”.  It has also ensured that information is retained centrally and made data analysis more effective, but it has meant that important FCO records have been retained or “registered” without the need for human intervention.