Right Side Up

Last night, eloquently supported by my colleague William Heath, I gave a master class on Volunteered Personal Information for the IDM (Institute of Direct Marketing).

My concluding summary was:

•    We are in the midst of a once-in-a-century tipping point in the information flows in our society: from ‘top down’ (organisation to individual) to ‘bottom up’ (individuals to organisations and each other).
•    Marketing as we know it was constructed around the assumptions and operational requirements of ‘top down’.
•    Most of its current problems and constraints are a by-product of this heritage.
•    In the course of organising and managing their daily lives – making and implementing decisions – individuals generate huge amounts of new, rich, accurate, timely information about who they are and what they want..
•    An emerging industry of Personal Information Management Services (PIMS) is making it possible for individuals to capture and share this information.
•    For this information to be shared on a mass scale however, three new ‘rules’ of personal data must be accepted: personal information is the person’s; the individual must have control over what information is shared with who, for what purposes; the individual has to derive a genuine benefit from the information sharing process.
•    Once these rules have been accepted, multiple different types of VPI will begin to flow.
•    Separately and together this VPI can help organisations cut guesswork, waste and costs, identify customer needs better and focus available resources on truly adding value: a ‘VPI value explosion’.
•    Every organisation needs to develop its own VPI strategy.

If you want to find out more, get in touch with me at Alan.Mitchell@ctrl-shift.co.uk and I will send you a shortened version of my presentation.

Alan Mitchell

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AlanMitchell 'The Information Age', Buyer centric services, Uncategorized, vpi

I’ve just been revisiting a debate which flared up a couple of years ago and which seems to be returning: are we moving towards an attention economy or, perhaps an intention economy?

Thinking about it, I don’t think we are moving towards either because they are both sub-sets of something much bigger. When push comes to shove, economies are organised around human beings’ physiological, psychological and social needs and wants. How we address these needs and wants changes over time and this is driven by decisions: we achieve our goals by making better decisions, and implementing these decisions better.

Call it MAIDB for short: Making and Implementing Decisions Better.

Ultimately, that’s what people want to do. But doing it is very difficult. And understanding how to do it better seems to be even more difficult.

The more I look at this, the bigger it gets.

Alan Mitchell

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AlanMitchell Uncategorized

‘Customer Relationship Management’ (CRM) can never deliver its hoped-for benefits because it’s constrained by a series of intrinsic flaws. The emerging alternative for organisations is to rely less on data collected about customers behind their backs and outside of their control, and to rely more of data volunteered by customers under their control.

Of course, this requires all sorts of changes in attitudes, processes, mechanisms, even business models. But my prediction is very simple. Over the coming five to ten years, organisations that get up to speed on this have a good chance of prospering. And those that fail to ‘get it’ will be left behind, hamstrung by two pretty damaging weaknesses: reduced ability to deliver customer value, and reduced customer trust.

I’ve written more about this for MyCustomer.com here.

The research on which this article is based is here.

Alan Mitchell

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AlanMitchell 'The Information Age', vpi

At the core of the buyer-centric concept is the simple notion that for most people, value boils down to the ability to make and implement better decisions – at every level from life defining to choice of toothpaste.

Trouble is, once we start investigating what a ‘better decision’ might look like, it turns out to be pretty complicated.  New discoveries in psychology are underlining just how complicated human decision-making is, and the whole debate has been shrouded in a fog of confusion – most of it generated by marketers and their self-serving theories of ‘persuasion’.

Anyway, I’ve been gnawing away at these issues over the past few months and will at the grindstone for a while yet.

If you are interested in some half-way house conclusions, you can see my summary of what new findings of psychology mean for our understanding of consumer decision here, and why most marketing theories about consumer decision-making are so much claptrap here.

Really keen to hear any thoughts or comments.

Alan Mitchell

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AlanMitchell Buyer centric services, Marketing, The Persuasion Paradigm

Doc Searls has circulated a brilliant picture of some clever people’s view of the music industry. You can see it at http://www.sloaneandco.com/images/universe_of_music.jpg.

In case you didn’t notice, just one music industry player is missing. Can you guess which?

Alan Mitchell

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I’ve written an article on Volunteered Personal Information. You can read it at http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/news/926139/Reinventing-marketing-Alan-Mitchell-asks-marketers-prepared-era-volunteered-personal-information/

Alan Mitchell

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AlanMitchell 'The Information Age', Project VRM, vpi

One of the things that falls out our analysis of personal data ecosystems is the power of ‘volunteered personal information’ (VPI).  This is information that only the individual knows or can see because of his or her unique vantage point, and which (therefore) only that individual can share.

This creates many knock-on questions.

One of them is ‘how valuable/important is this information?’. Answer: unthinkably valuable, because potentially this volunteered information tells us (i.e. suppliers, governments, public services, other individuals) who somebody is, what they want and need, and when they need it. The ‘holy grail’ of information about the nature, shape, location and timing of demand, in other words. The new report from Ctrl-Shift on this subject estimates that within ten years, the market value of VPI ‘feeds’ from individuals to organisations will be worth £20bn in the UK alone.

Other questions follow, such as:

• ‘what are the mechanisms by which individuals are going to capture, gather, store and share this information?’
• ‘under what conditions will they do so? e.g. what are the incentives encouraging people to participate and what are the obstacles discouraging them?’
• ‘what are the rules surrounding such information sharing? This includes technical standards, enabling information to flow easily, but also terms and conditions as to who has access to this VPI, for what purposes, under what terms?’

These are all huge questions, which many people are working on right now (see, Project VRM, Mydex and the Kantara Initiative for example).  I’ve blogged about some of the issues surrounding VPI here.

Alan Mitchell

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AlanMitchell Buyer centric services, Data, Project VRM, vpi

Two  welcome bits of news this week from the UK.

First, BT has distanced itself from Phorm, the behavioural targeting advertising company that stalks individuals’ usage of internet sites to deliver more ‘relevant’ advertising to them.

In one sense, there is nothing wrong with the idea of building a profile of an individual’s web-surfing habits and using that information to serve up relevant information. Where Phorm went wrong was that it tried to do it behind individuals’ backs, without their knowledge or permission.

Now. Turn the Phorm proposition on its head, so that individuals use exactly the same technology to build up a profile of their own activities, and are then able to bundle bits of the profile into packages (‘this is the research I have done for my new holiday’, ‘this is the research I have for my new car’) and to selectively disclose this information to organisations they want to do business with and trust.

Hey presto! All of Phorm’s privacy invasion issues disappear as the technology becomes a tool of consumer empowerment. And advertisers actually get much better value from it!

When, oh when, will marketers and advertisers see that their current adversarial, targeting mindset is precisely why their initiatives are so inefficient, ineffective and (as with Phorm) counterproductive?

The second bit of news is the Tories’ announcement that they might turn to companies like Google or Microsoft to help build personal health records, as opposed to the current approach of centralised NHS (i.e. organisation-centric) medical records that has been a dismal failure and cost the citizens of this country £18bn so far.

As the Tories are likely to be the next government, this is significant, which is why The Times carried a lead front page story on it. Unfortunately, The Times got the wrong end of the stick (they are still working to an old and out of date political agenda). The issue is not who holds the data – state organisations or private sector organisations – but who controls the data: individual or organisation.

The Tories have woken up to what Phorm hasn’t – The Times reports a Tory spokesman talking about the need for people to ‘own’ their own data. Is Google or Microsoft the right organisation to facilitate this?  Not in my view, but then I’m biased because of my involvement with Mydex whose mission in life is to help individuals do exactly that.

But the key point is this. It’s now becoming clear that the issue of helping individuals ‘own’ and manage their own information is moving rapidly from the ‘far out’ fringe to the mainstream.

About time too!

Alan Mitchell

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AlanMitchell 'The Information Age', Data, Marketing, Privacy, vpi

Cross-post from my CRM..meet VRM blog.

This post is a short(ish) summary of a working session led by Drummond Reed and me at the recent West Coast VRM Workshop, and also an introduction to the Kantara workgroup in which we are going to move this debate forward. It is also part of the thinking that will short emerge in a Mydex white paper.

At the VRM workshop, we discussed the need for the concept of the Personal Data Store, what it would do in practice, and what that will ultimately enable.

Why we need such things – because individuals have a complex need to manage personal information over a lifetime, and the tools they have at their disposal today to do so are inadequate. Existing tools include the brain (which is good but does not have enough RAM, onboard storage, or an ethernet socket……thankfully), stand alone data stores (paper, spreadsheets, phones, which are good but not connected in secure ways that enable user-driven data aggregation and sharing), and supplier based data stores (which can be tactically good but are run under the supplier provided terms and conditions). NB Our current perception of ‘personal data stores’ is shaped by the good ones that are out their (e.g. my online bank, my online health vault); what we need is all of that functionality, and more – but working FOR ME.

What they will do/ enable – the term Personal Data Store is not an ideal term to describe a complex set of functions, but it is what it is until we get a better one (the analogy I’d use in more ways than one is the term ‘data warehouse’ – again a simplistic term that masks a lot of complex activity). A Personal Data Store can take two basic forms:

Operational Data Stores – that get things done, and only need store sufficient breadth and depth of data to fulfill the operation they are built for (e.g. pay a credit card bill, book a doctor’s appointment, order my groceries).

Analytical Data Stores – that underpin and enable decision making, and which typically need a more tightly defined, but much deeper data-set that includes data from a range of aspects of life rather than just that from one specific operation (e.g. plan a home move, buy a car, organise an overseas trip).

A sub-set of the individual’s overall data requirement will lie in both of the above, this being the data that then integrates decision-making and doing.

In both cases, the functionality required is to source, gather, manage, enhance and selectively disclose data (to presentation layers, interfaces or applications).

We also discussed ‘who has what data on you’ and introduced the following diagrams to explain current state and target state (post deployment of Volunteered Personal Information (VPI) tech and standards).

The key terms that require explanation are:

My Data – is the data that is undeniably within, and only within, the  domain of an individual. It’s defining characteristic is that it has demonstrably not been made available to any other party under a signed, binding agreement. This space has been increasingly encroached upon by technology and organisations in recent history (e.g. behavioural tracking tools like Phorm) and this encroachment will continue. Indeed a general comment can be made that ‘my data’ equates to privacy in the context of personal data; so the rise of the surveillance society and state is a direct assault on ‘My Data’. Management of ‘My Data’ can be run by the individual themselves, or outsourced to a ‘fourth party service’.

Your Data – is the data that is undeniably within the domain of an organisation; either private, public or third sector. Proxy views of this data may exist elsewhere but are only that. This data would include, for example, the organisations own master records of their product/ service range, their pricing, their costs, their sales outlets and channels. Customer-facing views of much of Your Data is made available for reproduction in the ‘Our Data’ intersect.

Our Data – is the data that is jointly accessible to both buyer and seller/ service provider, and also potentially to any other parties to an interaction, transaction or relationship. It is the data that is generated through engaging in interactions and transactions in and around a customer/ supplier relationship. Despite being ‘our’ data, it is probably technically owned, or at least provided under terms of service designed by the seller/ service provider; in practical terms this also means that the seller/ service provider dictates the formats in which this data exists/ is made available.

Their Data – is the data built/ owned/ sold by third party data aggregators, e.g. credit bureaux, marketing data providers in all their forms. It’s defining characteristic is that it is only available/ accessible by buying/ licensing it from the owner.

Everybody’s Data – is the public domain data, typically developed/ run by large, public sector(ish) entities including local government (electoral roll), Post Offices (postal address files), mapping bureau (GIS). Typically this data is accessible under contract, but the barriers to accessing these contracts are set low – although often not low enough that an individual can engage with them easily.

The Basic Identifier Set/ Bit in the Middle – this is the core personal identity data which, like it or not, exists largely in the public domain – most typically (but not exclusively) as a result of electoral rolls being made available publicly, and specifically to service providers who wish to build things from them. This characteristic is that which enables the whole personal eco-system and its impact on data privacy to exist, with the individual as the un-knowing ‘point of integration’ for data about them.

The ovals in the venn diagram represent the static state, i.e. where does data live at a point in time. The flow arrows show where data flows to and from in this eco-system; I use red to signify data flowing under terms and conditions NOT controlled by the individual data subject.

Flow 1 (My Data to Your Data, and My Data to Our Data) – Individuals provide data to organisations under terms and conditions set by the organisation, the individual being offered a ‘take it or leave it’ set of options. Some granularity is often offered around choices for onward data sharing and use, i.e. the ‘tick boxes’ we all know and which are one of the main bitsof legacy CRM that VRM will fix.

Flow 2 (Your Data to Your Data, including Our Data) – Organisations share data with other organisations, usually through a back-channel, i.e. the details of the sharing relationship are typically not known to the data subject.

Flow 3 (Your Data, including Our Data to Their Data) – Organisations share data with a specific type of other organisation, data aggregators, under terms and conditions that enable onward sale. Typically the sharer is paid for this data/ has a stake in the re-sale value.

Flow 4 (Everybody’s Data to Their Data) – Data Aggregators use public domain data sources to initiate and extend their commercial data assets.

The target state is shown below, a different scenario altogether – and one which I believe will unfold incrementally over the next ten years or so…..data attribute by data attribute, customer/ supplier management process by customer/ supplier management process, industry sector by industry sector. In this scenario, the individual and ‘My Data’ becomes the dominant source of many valuable data types (e.g. buying intentions, verified changes of circumstance), and in doing so eliminates vast amounts of guesswork and waste from existing customer/ citizen managment processes.

The key new capabilities required to enable this to happen are those being worked on in the User Driven and Volunteered Personal Information work groups at Kantara (one tech group, one policy/ commerce one), and elsewhere within and around Project VRM. The new capabilities will consist of:

- personal data store(s), both operational and analytical

- data and technical standards around the sharing of volunteered personal information

- volunteered personal information sharing agreements (i.e. contracts driven by the individual perspective, creative commons-like icons for VPI sharing scenarios)

- audit and compliance mechanics

Around those capabilities, we will need to build a compelling story that clearly articulates, in a shared lexicon (thanks to Craig Burton for reminding us of the importance of this – watch this space), the benefits of the approach – for both individuals and organisations.

The target state that will emerge once these capabilities begin to impact will include the 4 additional individual-driven information flows over and above the current ones. The defining characteristic of these new flows is that the can only be initiated by the data subject themselves, and most will only occur when the receiving entity has ’signed’ the terms and conditions asserted by the individual/ data subject. The new flows are:

Flow 5 (My Data to Your Data (inc Our Data) – Individuals will share more high value, volunteered information with their existing and potential suppliers, eliminating guesswork and waste from many customer management processes. In turn, organisations will share their own expertise/ data with individuals, adding value to the relationship.

Flow 6 (Everybody’s Data to My Data) – With their new, more sophisticated personal information management tools, individuals will be able to take direct feeds from public domain sources for use on their own mashups and applications (e.g. crime maps covering where I live/ travel)

Flow 7 (My Data to (someone else’s) My Data) – An enhanced version of ‘peer to peer’ information sharing.

Flow 8 (My Data to Their Data) – The (currently) unlikely concept of the individual making their volunteered information available to/ through the data aggregators. Indeed we are already starting to see the plumbing for this new flow being put in place with the launch of the Acxiom Identity Card.

The implications of the above are enormous, my projection being that over time some 80% of customer management processes will be driven from ‘My Data’. I’m pretty confident about that, a) because we are already see-ing the beginning of the change in the current rush for ‘user generated content’ (VPI without the contract), and b) because the economics will stack up. Organisation need data to run their operations – they don’t really mind where it comes from. So, if a new source emerges that is richer, deeper, more accurate, less toxic – and all at lower cost than existing sources; then organisations will use this source.

It won’t happen overnight obviously; as mentioned above specific tools, processes and commercial approaches need to emerge before this information begins to flow – and even then the shift will be slow but steady, probably beginning with Buying Intention data as it is the most obvious entry point with enough impact to trigger the change. That said, the Mydex social enterprise already has a working proof of concept up and running showing much of the above working. A technical write up of the proof of concept build can be found here. And the market implications of this are explored in more detail in new research on the market value of VPI shortly to be published by Alan Mitchell at Ctrl-Shift.

The two hour session at the VRM workshop was barely enough to scratch the surface of the above issues, so the plan is to continue the dialogue and begin specifying the capabilities required in detail in the User Driven and Volunteered Personal Information (technology) workgroup at The Kantara Initiative. The workgroup charter can be found here. A parallel workgroup focused on business and policy aspects will also be launched in the next few weeks. Anyone wishing to get involved in the workgroup can sign up to the mailing list here and we’ll get started with the work in the next couple of weeks.

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Iain Henderson Data, Privacy, Project VRM, vpi

The British Standards Institute have produced a new set of standards for what they call PIMS (Personal Information Management Systems).

Of course, this PIMS is the complete opposite of the PIMS we have been talking about for the last couple of years. Their standard is for organisations managing individuals’ personal data. Our PIMS are for individuals using information to manage their affairs.

‘My PIMS’ versus ‘Their PIMS’. Oh dear, more terminological confusion here we come!

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