Layers of security and encryption imply a considerable amount of systems administration overhead.
Owens & Minor receives a licensing and maintenance fee for the service.
A hospital can then make full use of its business-intelligence software to mine and analyze purchasing data. "We capture data out of a hospital's materials management system and load it into our data warehouse," Stoller explains. Wisdom was such a success that Owens & Minor decided to go into the intelligence business with the launch of Wisdom2 in the spring of 2000. This meant we had to set up specific customer and supplier security tables, and we had to maintain new, secured universes in Business Objects." "We had to make absolutely sure that Johnson & Johnson, for example, could not see any of 3M's information. The result was Wisdom, a portal that lets Owens & Minor's suppliers and customers access their own transactional data and generate sophisticated analyses and reports from it. In 1998, Owens & Minor moved quickly to take advantage of Web-intelligence software from Business Objects that's designed to Web-enable business-intelligence systems. "This meant we had to build a separate security table in our Oracle database," says Stoller.Ī few years later, when the company wanted to open its systems to suppliers and customers, security became even more important. To guard against such a breach, Owens & Minor used role-level security functions in the Business Objects application that clearly define who has access to which data. "For example, a sales executive in Dallas should only have access to analyses from his region."ĭean Abbott, principal at Abbott Consulting in San Diego, adds, "Don't give access to anyone who doesn't have a definite need." It is always possible that someone who has legitimate access will abuse that trust, but analysts say you can minimize that potential by strictly limiting access to only those who need it. "From the beginning, we were aware of security issues around this information," says Don Stoller, senior director of information systems at Owens & Minor. In late 1996, it started mining data internally using business-intelligence software from Business Objects SA, whose U.S. A $4 billion company, Owens & Minor counts some of the nation's largest health care organizations among its customers. Business intelligence is big business at the Reston, Va.-based medical supplies distributor. "Have most IT shops really thought through the security issues around BI?" asks Rasmussen. Michael Rasmussen, an analyst at Giga Information Group Inc. "Securing your business-intelligence information and systems is often an afterthought at best," says Cate Quirk, an analyst at AMR Research Inc. The problem is that business-intelligence data is as hard to protect as it is important. Many companies lack the internal controls to prevent that information from leaking. What's to prevent that data set from walking out the door or falling into the wrong hands? These jewels can be a business's most valuable intellectual property, which makes them very valuable to competitors. They're the keys to the kingdom.It's no secret that in a back room in the typical Fortune 500 company, there's a team of analytical wizards running sophisticated queries that mine for gems such as data about the company's best customers - those top 20% of clients that produce 80% of the company's profits. But these rules unlock the power of the Senate. Everything is so rushed, so many demands on a senator's time. Not many people bother to learn them these days.
Compare also King James Bible Matthew 16:19, "I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven." Originating from the concept of resources that were the means of obtaining control over an actual kingdom, i.e., a realm under the rulership of a king.