It’s been a lucrative five years for consultants in information management with new work being as easy to win as saying the word “compliance”. Executives are more than willing to sign-up new consulting engagements based the need to meet their compliance and regulatory requirements. The trouble is, this type of information management engagement breeds a defensive rather than a confident enterprise.
A defensive organization believes that data needs to be locked-down, that risks need to be taken out and the analysis resulting from any dataset should be predictable. Of course, any regular reader of this blog would know that we view data contained in large enterprises as complex and displaying all of the attributes of chaos mathematics which means any attempt to remove surprises from data is a fruitless endeavor.
A confident organization, on the other hand, recognizes that data is complex and chaotic but seeks to gain benefit from that complexity. Rather than be afraid of randomness, they use the techniques of MIKE2.0 to identify the risks and then focus on monitoring and measuring. In general, I observe a strong correlation between the confident enterprise and the adoption of Web 2.0 techniques and principles. The confident organization believes that there is more value in collaboration and is willing to sponsor individual innovation.
A good example of why this is so important can be seen in social networking sites such as Facebook. With the rapid growth in their use by a new generation of consumers, service providers ranging from telecommunication and financial services right through to government, need to come to grips with both the technology and the cultural drivers behind them. Consumers are becoming more confident in sharing quite detailed information about themselves in a way that they expect others to pick-up. Increasingly it will make no sense for providers to ask individuals to provide data about their relationships, locale or other details when those are already available in the public web.
In fact, one of the reasons why Facebook is so powerful is its ability to interface into custom applications. Imagine the impact if you wanted to sell these consumers a new financial or telecommunications product and you made it possible to apply online from within Facebook! More importantly, you can give the individual a sense of control by allowing them to privately share critical information with you and then maintain it in a form with which they are comfortable – perhaps for a multitude of providers.
Obviously there are challenges in this type of initiative, but good use of data measurement, reconciliation and parsing approaches allow it to be done. The question is whether your enterprise has even considered whether it’s worth doing? You can bet it won’t be long before your competitors do!
November 17th, 2007 at 10:01 pm
Rob – very interesting idea! Especially when you think about it in the context of this article …
http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t34949.html
November 18th, 2007 at 10:59 am
Actually the comments on trust make me think of “permission marketing” – concept coined by Seth Godin. Essentially whereby we agree to be targetted by marketing. This then makes me think of the amount of data focused effort that marketeers make to segment customers , attempt cross sells etc. Obviously a very rich source of data for them to use would be our Facebook accounts.
Furthermore one of the best type of marketing is word of mouth from trusted friends. Thus if you either manage a sale to one customer or even identify that customer as already owning your product then you can (using propensity scores) target the most relevant of their friends for your product.
Customers are already buying into sharing information about their service providers – consider how Wesabe blew the lid on the dearest actual overdraft fees by simply analysing thousands of statements supplied by its users.
Overall I think the biggest thing coming is for service providers and customers to collaborate more explicitly and trustingly- this will be a great value driver.
November 19th, 2007 at 7:14 pm
I agree with both of your comments, particularly with regards to concerns about what permissions are implied are explicit. I believe that anyone who interacts with consumers needs to go to great lengths to ensure that not only are they being entirely appropriate in their use of data, but also that the customer feels the same way. In terms of providing data about themselves, it is not that business should harvest this data for CDI purposes, rather that they should invite customers to use collaborative and social networking tools rather than proprietary closed environments to provide data and complete applications.
November 19th, 2007 at 10:12 pm
Actually thinking about this as an “identity management” issue in general and then on user centric control makes me wonder about the “Higgins Project”. It is led by SocialPhysics(www.socialphysics.org) and supported by IBM and Novell amongst others:
Higgins is a collaborative project focused on the creation of interoperable, protocol- and platform-independent identity components. Upper-level components can be assembled to create three kinds of identity selectors –user-centric applications for presenting, selecting, and managing a person’s multiple, partial identities using the i-card metaphor.
…
The initial motivation for Higgins was a desire to have systems that operated on behalf of the user – enabling the user to have more convenience, privacy and control over their identity and profile information. Because people want to share information differently in different contexts
http://www.eclipse.org/higgins/
November 20th, 2007 at 10:46 am
Hi Rob – Good to see this site. A great idea for a dedicated IM push.
Compliance has been the obvious driver for Information Mgmt initiatives at most organisations. As you’ve pointed out, one-off initiatives that are not sustained or expanded in scope will not contribute to a smarter organisation in the long term.
WIth the present structure of organisations, often there is no “owner” for an IM initiative…CIO = tech infrastructure support, CFO = financials support, CEO = mostly unaware of the full value proposition of IM, Board = Same as CEO.
The way to influence these organisations may be to highlight the downstream difficulties that are caused by not having a dedicated IM approach…some that come to mind immediately are inconsistent reporting around core entities, inadequate analysis of information, inconsistent treatment of customers, and a reliance on individuals for information; with no verification of accuracy of that information.
With the marketing that the IM vendors are doing, and the push from like-minded individuals who “sell” IM to Boards/ C-Level executives, hopefully we will soon start seeing smarter organisations that can start viewing their data stores as information mines!
November 20th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
Flux (www.flux.com), when fully released in December, would allow companies to deliver content or applications to many social networking sites like FaceBook, MySpace or Friendster all from one platform. Flux, in future, can be a very powerful CDI across multiple social networks.
November 21st, 2007 at 12:44 pm
Robert, Thanks again for an inspiring appearance at the MDM event in New York last week…your presentation was uplifting and thoughtful, and not surprisingly, drew my colleagues and I to drop by MIKE 2.0 enthusiastic about contributing to the worthy open sources efforts. So thanks for your leadership in this arena.
While your appearance at the CDI-MDM conference was a highlight, notable by their absence were any case studies from pure-play online business models, perhaps for the reasons you stated about the relative infancy of the data management field, as well as the infancy of online business models. That being said, online models generate and leverage unusually rich streams of customer information, making their approach to data management essential, strategic, and intriguing.
With your connections across the industry, any chance you can bring a few Web 2.0 CIO’s to your next MDM keynote
It would be an interesting conversation.
Thanks again,
Jaime Fitzgerald
http://www.fitzgerald-analytics.com/
November 22nd, 2007 at 10:48 am
Good point Jaime!