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Posts Tagged ‘Management’

Planning for the Future (Info Sharing)

May 17th, 2010
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identity online quadrant by Carol Shergold (Flickr)Yesterday I convened a workshop for the purpose of examining the ideas behind–and controls around–sharing of information. What’s information sharing? When we sign up for an online account, or when we purchase anything with a credit card, or when we introduce ourselves and offer our business card, we are sharing information with someone. What happens to that information next, and how people or companies benefit by or control it, was the subject of this workshop.

Scenario planning is a way of looking at a complex world and future decisions. Normally the practice of scenario planning takes considerable time (easily weeks to months), research, expertise and analysis to do properly. I was trained to do scenarios by Global Business Network (GBN), a company that first popularized this as a consulting practice. You may be interested in a scenarios paper I wrote back in 2002 for a more general audience, about the balance of power between restrictive/open network access providers and restrictive/open content providers: Our Stake in Cyberspace: The Future of the Internet and Communication As We Know It.

For our workshop purposes, we compressed the scenario planning process down to one day, brainstormed about our decisions and concerns, simplified the research, used the group’s expertise, and came away with simplified, shared insights. I’m still sorting through the notes and will post more about it shortly. One of the bottom lines from this event is this (thanks Joe): if I want to support user-driven access and control of information sharing, I need to be part of the VRM conversation, and help build and support the businesses involved in this work. (So far every VRM-oriented business appears to be in development.) Many of us are part of the conversation (mailing lists, social networking groups, face to face conversations, et al). I invite you to join the mailing list or read and comment on the blogs in the Blogroll (right column).

Coaching moment: What are the most important decisions that you or your business need to make in the next 3-7 years? Your questions might be yes/no or a choice among several. Now look to see what kind of forces affect your decisions. What kind of situations or characteristics or business/environmental forces will impact your decisions the most? Which ones can you do something about?

The process of writing down, then sorting through your mountains of details will often help you see your decision picture more clearly. Your considerations should include things you can do something about, things that affect you directly and need to be addressed. It’s generally not helpful in resolving your individual decisions to spend much time on global concerns that are not relevant to your decisions and out of your control right now, or are otherwise just plain unobtainable.

Basic brainstorming, sorting and planning is something you can do on your own or with friends. It’s not too hard, doesn’t require fancy tools (pencil and paper works well), and there are rewards (possibly great rewards!) for having tried. Don’t quickly push ideas away because they’re silly: sometimes those are the most valuable in the right context. You just need to write everything down, then sort and think about it; maybe re-sort and re-think. Ok, ready?

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On Sharing Information

February 15th, 2010
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Every day we visit sites, exchange email, post comments or status updates, and otherwise exchange data with lots of servers on the Internet. Much of the time we know and voluntarily offer our information, such as typing search terms to learn something, or offering our name, address and credit card to make a purchase. Our exchanges also transfer information about us that we may not be aware of, such as our IP address, our browser, and the type of operating system we’re using.

Despite our “agreeing” to various sites’ Terms of Service when we sign up for an account, we do not generally “volunteer” to be tracked, our habits quantified, categorized and sold. That raises the question: what if we could control more of what we exchanged? Would we? What would it take?

Obviously stores want to know if we are a serious customer: if we’re looking for the purpose of actually buying, if we can afford the items we’re looking at, and if they should use those items to suggest additional items we might be interested in (or if it was a gift to someone else and we have no personal interest in that item). For example, car dealers would save billions of dollars each year if they could identify serious and qualified buyers without having to create advertisements for television, magazines and newspapers, and billboards everywhere. In fact, it would probably be worth something to us as a serious shopper if we could identify ourselves as such ahead of time and especially during sales negotiations.

Like the car buying story above, scenarios are stories that we tell to help us understand complex environments. Chris Carfi did four nice overview examples in his Social Customer Manifesto’s VRM scenarios. The world of information sharing is complex in many ways: personally (what do I want to share?), politically/regulatorily, in commerce, technologically, and more.

Digital ID Coach is organizing a day-long workshop to look at this subject. We will be engaged in Rapid Scenario Development (a process that usually takes days or weeks). If you’re in the San Francisco bay area on May 16, you’re invited to join us. If not, stay tuned; we’ll be posting notes from that workshop.

Coaching moment: It’s worth thinking about how we use technology, and how it helps us do what we want to do. Technology such as computers, phones, and even programmable devices like thermostats and switches, have obvious benefits like aiding communications or saving energy. Technology also has a cost, like learning to use it or controlling things you don’t want it to do.

In the case of information technology, you’re empowered to connect to friends and resources but you also trade information about your location and other details. Since this will never be a case of only responding to your needs and never exchanging (which technically doesn’t work since the info needs to know where you are to respond to your request), we need to think about that exchange. What would help us the most? What would you be comfortable telling others about?

This is complex because it probably depends on each exchange. However, we can determine policies for general use in categories like “collect but don’t distribute without my express permission,” or “forward at will, this is something I want.” What categories or practices would you suggest?

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