All Hyperion IT folks have access to salary info in Workforce Planning

Question

Most Planning Workforce applications store employee names and their salaries.
However, a very experienced/seasoned consultant friend of mine was adamant that private employee information not be loaded into Planning/ Essbase. He suggest that we explain to Lawyers in our Legal and HR department what we are trying to do and most likely they will not allow private information to be exposed to Riverbed managers & Planners. He claims that even employee names should not be in Planning/ Essbase, that we should load them as employee1, employee2 etc. Only HR should have the true names of employee1… employee5000.
Can anyone weight in with their opinions as to whether it is a good idea to store salary information in Essbase? A simple mistake in setting Essbase security could expose salary to the wrong budget managers. Also, all Hyperion IT folks have access to salary info . Is that "kosher" with companies in USA?

Answer 1

Typically when you have salary information in a planning application and it is done by employee (instead of position, or department), you ensure that you do not have both name and salary and you most certainly do not have social security information.
Oftentimes you will find yourself in a spot where one department or position has only 1 person in it... it is an unfortunate circumstance - but it is not uncommon. If you want to prevent that you often have to change how you plan - and that is not a great option. Whether this data exists in a relational database or a BI application is inconsequential in my opinion (because that still means it exists somewhere), it is just something that you're going to have to live with in that case.
Usually you mask the employee name with an employee ID. However, in talking to some folks I know, there is a company that currently would like to have the employee name as the alias of the employee ID, because the planners cant plan without knowing who they are planning for. If they are planning information in that manner right now (whether it is in an application such as Peoplesoft or even an excel spreadsheet), where all information is visible and it is not deemed a violation by legal/HR then it is probably fine. However, their old system probably had to go through a security audit of some sort - which means that you will probably have to have member-level security on multiple dimensions in order for this to work, and that's going to be a massive pain. Because, as we all know security filters in planning when pushed down to essbase all get manifested in 1 row... meaning if you have security to plan salaries for dept 123, and you have access to depts 124, 125, 126, and 127, you will also be able to see salaries for all of those departments, you cant specify (at least in an easy way through planning) I want to be able to see salary for dept 123 for 124, but see everything but salary for dept 125, 126, and 127.
With all of that being said I would strongly advise that you raise the issue to them, because this is not exactly keeping information 'secure' and confidential. If they have strict audit requirements, the design may have to become more complex to accomodate.
-Matt