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Do you feel that knowledge made available through the use of data warehouses should be disseminated to all employees in the organization?

Q: Do you feel that knowledge made available through the use of data warehouses should be disseminated to all employees in the organization?

Sid Adelman's Answer:

It entirely depends on the nature of the information. If the application has financial data and you are a publicly traded company, the financial data has information that would allow an unscrupulous employee to trade on insider information - not a good idea, so don't tempt your unscrupulous employees. If the application is HR and it contains employee evaluations or employee salaries, this should not be disseminated. If you are a health care organization, government regulations make it very clear that certain patient information cannot be shared.

Joe Oates' Answer:

I feel that knowledge should be made available to employees in an organization based on what is appropriate for each of them to see, as long as it helps each employee be more productive and effective. For example, there is information that is only appropriate for management to see. There is also information that is inappropriate for individual employees to see. For example, it may be appropriate for an employee to see his or her own payroll information, but it is inappropriate to see another employee's payroll information.

I do believe in "BI for the masses," but the effort should be made to determine what appropriate information each person or job title should see with the aim of making each employee more effective. Deciding what is appropriate for each person or job title to see is an issue for which it is difficult to gain widespread management or employee consensus.

Clay Rehm's Answer:

No. Where I feel each employee should be communicated to with as much information as possible, there is some data that is not needed by some employees, and they would spend their time analyzing and contemplating the data it when it was not necessary or a productive use of their time.

Anne Marie Smith's Answer:

Data becomes information when it is put into context, information becomes knowledge when it is used for decision-making/actions/etc. Therfore, information is not universally valuable, it is valuable in a context. Good data ethics and governance practices state that data and information should be made available to those who need it, but not disseminated to all. One of the "contexts" that turns data into information is the human context, the set of people who need the data for making valid decisions/valid actions. It is proper to restrict data in the data warehouse (and in all data sources) to those roles and individuals who have a valid need for it.

Tom Haughey's Answer:

The data in the data warehouse should be safeguarded like any other data: it should be made available on a need-to-know basis. For some data, this may mean it is open to everyone. In some cases, it should be restricted; in other cases, it should be an open book. Just because the data is in the data warehouse does not mean that everyone in the organization should have access to it. Traditional DBMS and OS security means need to be employed to ensure proper access rights, together with possibly some special data warehouse rights or entitlements tables to ensure that the right people have access to the data. Some data may be open not only to employees but even to outsiders like customers and vendors; other data must be treated sensitively. For example, you may have data on product sales patterns by region by product type by customer type. This data might be made available to customers and other vendors. On the other hand, say you are a consumer products company and want to manage disability payments. To help with this, you keep sales data and disability data in the warehouse. You figure that if salespeople work long hours (which is evident in their sales) they are likely to have a disability incident. So you will keep track of sales, including commission or other revenue data. This revenue data could include salesperson income data. Not everyone should have access to this data.

So, in summary, with all data, only those who have a need to know should have the right to know.


Anne Marie Smith is a highly acclaimed author and speaker in the fields of data stewardship, data governance, data warehousing, data modeling and metadata management. She holds a doctorate in Management Information Systems and has taught at LaSalle University. Smith serves on the board of directors of DAMA International and is an expert advisor to DM Review's Ask the Experts. Smith is the director of education at EWSolutions, a GSA schedule partner and systems integrator dedicated to providing companies and government agencies with best-in-class business intelligence solutions using data warehousing, enterprise architecture and managed metadata environment technologies (www.EWSolutions.com). She may be reached directly via email at AMSmith@EWSolutions.com.

Joe Oates is an internationally known speaker, author and consultant on data warehousing. Oates has more than 30 years of experience in the successful management and technical development of business, real-time and data warehouse applications for industry and government clients. He has designed or helped design and implement more than 30 successful data warehouse projects.

Sid Adelman is a principal in Sid Adelman & Associates, an organization specializing in planning and implementing data warehouses, in data warehouse and BI assessments, and in establishing effective data architectures and strategies. He is a regular speaker at DW conferences. Adelman chairs the "Ask the Experts" column on www.dmreview.com. He is a frequent contributor to journals that focus on data warehousing. He co-authored Data Warehouse Project Management and is the principal author on Impossible Data Warehouse Situations with Solutions from the Experts and Data Strategy. He can be reached at (818) 783-9634 or visit his Web site at www.sidadelman.com.

Clay Rehm, CCP, PMP, is president of Rehm Technology (www.rehmtech.com), a consulting firm specializing in data integration solutions. Rehm provides hands-on expertise in project management, assessments, methodologies, data modeling, database design, metadata and systems analysis, design and development. He has worked in multiple platforms and his experience spans operational and data warehouse environments. Rehm is a technical book editor and is a co-author of the book, Impossible Data Warehouse Situations with Solutions from the Experts. In addition, he is a Certified Computing Professional (CCP), a certified Project Management Professional (PMP), holds a Bachelors of Science degree in Computer Science and a Masters Degree in Software Engineering from Carroll College. He can be reached at clay.rehm@rehmtech.com.

Tom Haughey is the president of InfoModel LLC, a training and consulting company specializing in data warehousing and data management. He has worked on dozens of database and data warehouse projects for more than two decades. Haughey was former CTO for Pepsi Bottling Group and director of enterprise data warehousing for PepsiCo. He may be reached at (201) 337-9094 or via e-mail at tom.haughey@InfoModelUSA.com.

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