Policies and paper trails -- our new best friends
This IT pilot fish works with lots of sensitive data -- and that means really sensitive, such as child abuse investigations.
"Until a few years ago, I had access to all that data, so I could write ad-hoc reports against it," says fish. "We 'systems' people were given access to everything, so we could troubleshoot application problems for the users.
"Then one day I was called into the CEO's office. He told me that according to the logs, I did a search against the Child Welfare data for a particular family on a date and time six months earlier -- and wanted to know why I did the search."
As best fish can recall, he was doing the search to troubleshoot a particular report that one caseworker was trying to run. To do that, he used his own workstation to duplicate the steps that the caseworker took to get to the error.