Definition

What is privacy-preserving organizational intelligence?

Privacy-preserving organizational intelligence is the practice of learning from people in an organization without making their individual sensitive responses available to the organization.

The objective is not to know less about the organization. It is to know less about each person than is necessary to understand the organization.

That distinction matters when the subject is sensitive: workplace experience, demographic information, organizational culture, technology adoption, trust, risk or other questions where people may reasonably care who can see their answer.

The information problem

Organizations often need population-level answers. Where are experiences different? What changed? Where does confidence fall? Which assumptions are wrong?

Those questions do not necessarily require a file containing every individual's response.

The privacy-preserving approach

A privacy-preserving design separates the information needed to invite people from the information needed to understand their answers.

In SafePorter, identity stays on systems controlled by the organization. SafePorter receives responses without names or email addresses. The organization receives aggregate results, and groups that cannot be reported safely are withheld.

What this is not

  • It is not the same as removing a name from a spreadsheet.
  • It is not a promise that an administrator will refrain from opening individual responses.
  • It is not appropriate when the organization must identify and follow up with a particular respondent.

It is an information architecture for situations where the pattern is necessary and the identity is not.

How SafePorter does it →   Protecting small groups →