How to use smartApps anonymously

Overview

If your purpose is to identify skill gaps only on a strategic level, not on a personal one, or perform strategic workforce planning, you may use smartApps with anonymized data.

To this end, you can apply a pseudonymized employee’s identifier as well as avoid using specific data. Instead, it is possible to use high-level data. For example, department names can be replaced with team names or the exact location (Munich) can be replaced with the country (Germany). Such granular data as the birth day and month can be removed, and you can define only the birth year or even a birth year group.

You may secure your data with AES-256 encryption. 256-bit AES encryption is technically the most secure because of its key length size.

During the encryption and decryption processes, AES requires the use of secret keys meaning you have the unique identifier for connecting data across the different systems. As a result, your data get pseudonymized. To get, for example, a real employee’s email, you need to decrypt the data with the help of the secret key.

Let’s consider an example of pseudonymizing user’s data.