CONFIDENTIALITY
By Bill Huseby, President & CEO
In this episode, I discuss how important client confidentiality is to our business. I share details about why we take confidentiality seriously and what sorts of processes are in place to ensure it.
I hope you enjoy the video. As always, please feel free to share your thoughts about what you found interesting or what you’d like to hear more about next time.
Cheers,
Bill
WELCOME
At SIGMADESIGN, confidentiality means keeping the project work of our clients safe and secure.
Hi, I’m Bill Huseby, Owner and CEO at SIGMADESIGN. Welcome to another video version of the President’s Corner.
Many of the companies we work with are leading the way in their specific industry. Therefore, we must protect their IP which may be competitive in nature.
As a product development firm providing solutions from concept through production, we work on many innovative products. We cannot share these because of client confidentiality. We love working on these innovative projects because we are charged with helping to define advances in technology and product design.
We maintain strict confidentiality about the design work we do because it is important to our clients.
ENSURING CONFIDENTIALITY
Some of the ways we ensure confidentiality include:
- The creation and documented use of policies and confidentiality agreements
- Provisions of regular training
- Project teams that are segregated from other groups so that they can work together in confidence
- Make sure all data is on secure systems
- Fully secured facilities or areas including badge access, cameras and independent networks
Sometimes our work is strictly confidential because it includes innovative designs and/or patents. Other work may be designated as ITAR, work that involves defense and space-related services. We work on a number of ITAR controlled projects. So, everyone in the company is required to go through ITAR training every year.
HOW CONFIDENTIALITY AFFECTS OUR OPERATION
With confidentiality being a big part of the way we do business, there are several things that are worth noting:
- We take agreements on confidentiality seriously. Therefore we do not display our client names or products on our website or other public platforms unless we have permission to do so.
- The challenge with doing a lot of confidential work is that new clients can’t always get a sense of the wide variety of work that we do.
- It’s hard to explain to new clients that we have great work experience related to what they need without the ability to show examples of that type of work.
However, being known as company that protects sensitive information has led to our ability to work on some elite projects with amazing companies. We’ve been able to gain the trust and confidence of clients by demonstrating how seriously we take project confidentiality.
When we have jobs that we have to adhere to strict, strict confidentiality, and our project teams cannot work together unless they are on the team together, that makes it a little bit tough. We have a strict requirement to go through in order to get someone to be approved to work on a project or understand the challenges there, and so that just again forces the confidentiality and the protection of the information of our clients, and keeps it from getting out into the public.