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What impact does data privacy legislation have on using and building customer/employee data warehouses?

Question: What impact does data privacy legislation have on using and building customer/employee data warehouses?

Sid Adelman's Answer: Begin with a discussion with your security officer. Bring a list of the data elements that will be in the customer data warehouse and the employee data warehouse (or data marts) and let the security officer tell you what elements have to be secured and at what level, primarily who can have access and at what level of granularity. For example, in the employee data mart, salary would have severe access restrictions at an individual level but not at an aggregated level. You may be told by the security officer that the customer data mart cannot contain complete Social Security numbers. The security officer might also want to include your legal department in the discussion and they are likely to add additional restrictions.

Chuck Kelley's Answer: It requires organizations to provide more security to specific information about any one customer/employee. However, it really does not change the basis of the data warehouse. You still want to be able to understand you customers/employees.


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.

Chuck Kelley is an internationally known expert in database and data warehousing technology. He has 30 years of experience in designing and implementing operational/production systems and data warehouses. Kelley has worked in some facet of the design and implementation phase of more than 50 data warehouses and data marts. He also teaches seminars, co-authored four books on data warehousing and has been published in many trade magazines on database technology, data warehousing and enterprise data strategies. He can be contacted at chuckkelley@usa.net.

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