The most important thing about a system
William McKnight brought up an interesting point about life in the information business. Namely, that access needs to be balanced with accountability for a system to be secure. However, I think there is one thing that missing in this analysis, and this is true for any information delivery system:
The most important part of any system is the people.
No amount of technology, policy, or security will keep a system clean unless the people running it are above board. Interestingly, living in Austin I have heard some details about about this case through the grapevine, as the BI community just isn’t that big. Evidently, this case was broken when an alert employee was looking at their P&L statement and questioned some resources. They were pooh-poohed by the the data warehouse manager but wouldn’t let it go. This person continued to press things and chased after the answers until the whole thing began to unravel. I think that this just solidifies my view on the importance of people.
