CII Benchmarking & Metrics Confidentiality Policy and Procedures

This page consolidates CII policy and procedures that have been developed over the years to address access, use, and publication of data submitted to CII for benchmarking purposes, including data submitted for our corporate-level safety survey.  Company data submitted to CII for benchmarking are considered “Company Confidential” and provisions documented herein are provided to minimize the risk of data compromise.  Data submitted to CII will be used to support CII benchmarking, research, and related academic activities in accordance with the access, use and publication procedures provided below. 

Access to the CII benchmarking database and files:

• Access to confidential benchmarking data is limited to essential CII staff and graduate research assistants working for the staff.  This access is also extended to Principal Investigators (PIs) and students working in Research Teams (RTs) conducting CII benchmarking projects. CII staff, PIs, and students must comply with UT Austin data security policies and are required to treat these data as sensitive.
• Access to CII benchmarking raw data will not be granted to CII Research Teams (RTs) or to any external organization. CII may provide access to the tools available in the Data Warehouse system, which provides aggregated results based on the guidelines described here.

Use of individual project and company data:

• Reports and data files containing only individual project data and/or individual company data are considered confidential and will not be published by CII or used to support research activities, conferences or other such gatherings without the expressed permission of the CII Board representative from the company.

Publication of reports, conference proceedings and presentations:

• Reports, presentations, and proceedings containing statistical summaries of aggregated project and company data will be used to establish norms for performance and practice use and to establish the value expected from the use of best practices.
• To protect the confidentiality of companies submitting data, all data published and/or presented must reflect the aggregate of at least 10 projects and must have been submitted by at least 3 separate companies.  In cases where a disproportionate amount of the data are provided by a single company, CII will suppress publication of results until the data set is sufficiently large enough to mitigate confidentiality and bias concerns.

Exceptions to these rules may be made on a case-by-case basis such as for the sharing of data between two companies to accommodate alliance partnerships.  When such cases arise, CII will obtain the expressed permission of each CII Board representative and will implement custom confidentiality agreements as appropriate.  Exceptions may also be made concerning use of the data to support joint research activities with other universities, agencies, or industry organizations.  Each request for CII participation will be approved by the CII’s leadership prior to the commencement of the activity. The CII staff will review these procedures periodically to address changes and to ensure they remain current with the best interest of member companies and other companies benchmarking with CII.