Personal Knowledge Banks

Putting the power of personal data

into the hands of individuals

Some key points from the Discussion Paper:

Current organisational approaches to the acquisition and use of personal data are inefficient, organisation-centric and fail to realise the data's true potential.

Today’s data environment is dominated by the concept of ‘customer relationship management’, where many different organisations collect many different slices of information about the same individual. This data is invariably high partial, often misleading (and also, probably, inaccurate).

Personal Knowledge Banks turn this environment on its head by enabling individuals to collect, store and use the information they need to manage their lives better, including the information they generate interacting and transacting with organisations.

Personal Knowledge Banks are the only way of building a complete picture of an individual and his or her needs and preferences. But they take us in a completely new and different direction.

Up till now, organisations have focused their efforts on extending and deepening

their ownership and control of personal data: on collecting more data about individuals. In future, the centre of gravity will be different. It will be driven by services that help individuals collect and manage their own data.

Personal Knowledge Banks open up huge opportunities both to make existing processes and services richer and more efficient, and to create a wide range of innovative new services.

Because they place control over the uses of personal data in the hands of the individual, they address – almost in a single stroke – the many issues and controversies now blowing up around privacy and data protection.

Over the coming years, Personal Knowledge Banks will become a huge new market in the own right, transforming how individuals and organisations interact and transact.