Tag Archives: big data

Creepy data collection in the modern workplace

Another pioneering outfit is Sociometric Solutions, which puts sensors in name badges to discover social dynamics at work. The badges monitor how employees move around the workplace, who they talk to and in what tone of voice.
One client, Bank of America, discovered that its more productive workers were those allowed to take their breaks together, in which they let off steam and shared tips about dealing with frustrated customers.

The bank took heed and switched to collective breaks, after which performance improved 23 per cent and the amount of stress in workers’ voices fell 19 per cent.

Data pioneers watching us work – FT.com

It seems that last century’s Taylorism has, for some employers, morphed into more invasive forms of employee surveillance.

The corroding value of the internet cookie, and an opportunity to shape a new market

Several years ago, I first heard Doc Searls make an amusing comment about one of the basic elements of the internet universe, the browser cookie.  With full credit to Phil Windley, Doc’s historical summary of ecommerce (and much of the modern internet) went like this:

A brief history of ecommerce can be summarized as this- 1995: The invention of the cookie. The end.

The browser cookie has reigned supreme for nearly two decades.  It has given rise to marketing empires like Double-Click (Google), Omniture, and nearly every imaginable advertising network of the modern web.  Cookies also provide context beyond ecommerce, since they help sites fine-tune the user experience and reduce friction for end users.

Cookies have become so pervasive that a contextualized web with out them would not be possible.  They’ve also extended well beyond context, as most cookies now actively track internet users, often without explicit permission.  With that backdrop, it’s hard to imagine that this atomic element of today’s web may soon fade away.

Perhaps because of how pervasive it is, and how invasive it is to personal privacy, the browser cookie is now under assault on many fronts.  The Europeans have taken to legislation as the primary vehicle to act against personal tracking technologies like cookies, Microsoft has gone as far as to ‘default‘ a do-not-track feature with their latest version of Internet Explorer, and there are at least a dozen such plugins for Firefox and Chrome.  Some ad-tech experts are actually predicting the complete collapse of the browser cookie in five years:

Five years at the most.

At my former company, my peers were the people who created cookies. We didn’t create them for this. It’s a very weak computing mechanism. It’s flawed, invasive, it’s got privacy issues, it’s going to go.

I think it will take five years to kill it. At that point, it’ll be like birds chirping and flowers blooming because we’ll find some kind of value proposition that allows consumers to trust us and opt into personalization. I term it, tailor don’t target.

via – The cookie has five years left says Merkle’s Paul Cimino | Ad Exchanger

It’s no surprise that ad-tech professionals see a paradigm shift away from cookies, but that shift isn’t being driven by a direct attack on the technology.  I can’t imagine that the ‘average’ internet user is proactively installing browser plugins to block cookies, so there has to be another reason why cookie usage has dropped precipitously.  At a prior point in the same blog post, Cimino reveals:

The second main reason is that non-cookieable devices – phones and iPads, Kindles and the like – are generating traffic somewhere between 35% and 40% of our overall traffic. So 35-40% of traffic is not from computers.

Consumer behavior has shifted away, which is forcing a shift away from cookies.  Although this might seem as a ‘win’ for privacy,  the ad-tech world has figured out even more invasive ways to target consumers:

I can’t cookie your iPhone or your Android phone. If you are at home or you go to the same place every day, I can see the IP and part of the user agent – enough information to reasonably identify you over and over and keep that good sync between the data – the first- and third-party data and the targeting opportunity that’s out there.

The takeaway here is that, as we see the value of cookies corroding, the technological fabric that has woven the modern web has produced even more invasive methods to track individual behavior.  At the same time, legislation and technology to counteract tracking technology is focused on the old cookie paradigm.  While the new tracking systems are relatively new, perhaps there is a window of opportunity for consumers to help shape a more balanced framework.

It is this balanced framework, that we are focusing on developing at Customer Commons:

Customer Commons holds a vision of the customer as an independent actor who retains autonomous control over his or her personal data, desires and intentions.  In this vision, each of us will act as the optimal point of integration and origination for data about us. Customers must be able to share their data and intentions selectively and voluntarily. Individuals must also be able to know exactly what information is being held about them by those who gather it, by whatever means. To achieve this, customers must be able to assert their own terms of engagement, in ways that are both practical and easy to understand for all sides.

I encourage you to join the conversation at Customer Commons.  Additionally, I will be devoting more time writing about how customer engagement in a modern marketplace will be significantly different, and how we call all help to shape that future, and more free, market.

If you are in the bay area during the week of May 6th, 2013, please consider joining the Customer Commons Salon that Monday evening.

An excellent post on big data and the customer experience…

An excellent post on big data and the customer experience over at the Harvard Business Review blog. Of note:

Expand the Value You Create for Customers

Improving the customer experience is a fine idea. But companies often take it to extremes. It’s always a good idea to look for new ways to create value for customers. But focusing only on doing so through your product or service is entirely one-dimensional. The hard reality is that your product or service, however great it is — however much it helps your customers get a job done or provide an enjoyable experience — is likely just not that important to their lives in the grand scheme of things.

via The Big Goal Behind All that Customer Data – Bill Lee – Harvard Business Review.

On spreadsheets, big data, and GoodData’s Bashes

During a recent conversation I had with Mark Angel [founder of Knova Software and most recently the CTO at Kana], he was quick to point out that the ‘spreadsheet’ stage of cloud computing had yet to arrive. His point was that most of the computational horsepower of the cloud was still largely relegated to the technical elite inside organizations, and end-users had limited options on how cloud data were interpreted. Data, therefore, are frequently interpreted out of context, and far removed from the impacted business process. Nearly a generation ago, spreadsheets altered the corporate landscape by empowering end-users to manipulate data based on their expertise, unleashing an entirely new way of extracting meaningful insights from data. To Mark’s point, for many enterprises, that stage of cloud computing has yet to arrive.

The best opportunity for this ‘spreadsheet’ stage to take hold is in the white-hot field of big data. While capturing and storing data has never been cheaper, the opportunity to extend the ability to interpret this data to vast armies of knowledge workers has been limited. It was in that context that I found this morning’s announcement by GoodData of their Bashes to be an interesting development:

We call our apps “Bashes” — for business mash-ups — because they combine the best elements of consumer apps with modern, enterprise-class technologies. That means consumer apps’ clean and intuitive user interface, ease of use and device independence, with cloud-based business technologies that collect and manage structured and unstructured data from hundreds of sources. With Bashes, businesses can discern meaning from all the data flooding in from emails, social media, enterprise software and cloud apps.

– Filling in Big Data’s Missing Link: Making Big Data Pay for Itself @romanstanek

Clearly there’s an opportunity to give today’s knowledge worker a spreadsheet-like environment to mash-up disparate data sets on the fly. It looks like GoodData’s positioning their platform, and Bashes, to be one of the spreadsheets for this generation’s knowledge worker.