Have you hugged your fears today?

I was in a conversation the other day with many of my peers at an interesting roundtable headed by the Cowen Group. I was asked to help David Cowen lead a conversation about a myriad of topical ideas and challenges that many high-level leaders across a diverse list of industries faced today. As you might imagine, we heard about the challenges of perennial favorites like inability to find talented people, limited budgets, lack of C-level support for projects, and on and on. Naturally, more newsworthy topics like Big Data, social media, DropBox, the Cloud, and consumerization of IT, rightly caused particular concerns for most people due to the perception of loss of control over the network and the Corporate data. What I interpreted as the underlying tone of what most people said, and what hung in the air, though, was a thin, but pervasive mist of fear.

At the end, David asked a select few of us to summarize what we thought the take-aways were. As the speakers summarized their thoughts on what they heard that morning, I quickly rewrote my summation based on a small gem I heard David say earlier in the discussion: ‘encourage curiosity.’ My parting thoughts went something like this:

I have heard talk of a number of new, unknown and unproven technologies like the Cloud, Big Data, and ‘Bring your own device’, that have pervaded (invaded, really) our workplace.  And the common underlying tone that I hear amongst us is one of fear.

Now, maybe because I am a perpetual optimist, and a ‘glass half full’ guy, but I can’t help but suggest that a reasonable, and in fact only possible option is to embrace the fear that confronts us. Encourage the uncertainty. Welcome the Black Swan events that disrupt the melancholy of day-to-day existence.

Why? It is this ambiguity, this insecurity and dissonance to our comfort that otherwise makes life tolerable. Makes it bearable. Makes it worthwhile. The shock to the system of the unexpected and unknown is what drives humanity forward to betterment of us all. It is a cultural cold shower that everyone needs from time-to-time.

In the very beginning of the 20^th century, as new some entrepreneurs thought about what improvements could be made to transportation, the contrived thinking was more akin to ‘building a faster horse’ than to Henry Ford’s ideas of creating an assembly line, interchangeable parts and installment selling which really transformed the industry.

In the early ‘80s, Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America lobbied against the creation of the VCR. Valenti actually said, in front of Congress no less, that the “VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.” Yet, what did the VCR eventually do the movie industry? It saved it! Imagine how much better off the industry might be today of the fear of that new and unknown technology was embraced rather than discouraged.

So that is why my parting thought was to say, we should embrace the fear we all fear everyday at work of the unknown. We should also encourage those who work for us who talk of bleeding edge technologies and radical concepts like “I know we don’t do it this way here today, but...”, and promote their curiosity. Reward it, in fact.  If humanity is to be driven forward, it will take more than just a few us.

Changes in the world of Privacy: Big and Small

As I was preparing for an upcoming panel discussion on recent privacy issues affecting the Corporate world, I thought about two areas of relevancy for most organizations: micro and macro changes in the realms of privacy and security. See if you agree.

The major, though subtle, micro change in privacy and security world in recent times I’ve observed is the loss of power that the mighty IT organization used to have.  Remember back in the day when  IT’s world was gospel. If they said you couldn’t have this program, you didn’t get it; if they said there was no way you could access that web site, you didn’t get there. Use your own device in the office?!?! For work???!! Fugeddaboutit.

Nowadays though, it is more apparent than ever that IT has less power to say ‘no.’ Which of course causes many headaches for the IT department who must deal now temper the tension and traditional IT resistance of allowing unknown/untrusted devices into the inner sanctum. The risks are obvious and myriad. These risks have led many organizations to firmly resist the trend of consumerization by restricting the umpteen amount of variety of hardware that every C-level executive and their brother bring to their cubicles. 

In other ways, the fact that the fulcrum of power has now swung to the employee is a good thing, as I have argued in previous posts. It is the era of consumerization. This surge of employee power forces the IT department now to be collaborative, and no longer allows the department to be filled with ‘V.P.s of No’. I argue that regardless of the formal or informal position of the IT department, or even the company policy in general, this faction of users is growing and is in fact disintermediating the IT department by working around them to get their devices to work at work. And here’s why: people’s personal world and professional world are drifting closer and closer together with the traditional lines separating the two becoming blurrier than ever.

For most business people, the mobile phone is now the mobile office, for example. The ultimate objective of consumerization is simply work and personal life converged onto a single device. It’s all about productivity via familiarity of the toolset. Think about how life was 15 years ago: you had use of all the great technology and software at work. When you came home, all you had was some stripped down versions of that machinery and applications – toys, really.  Today, the scenario is reversed: employees who have state-of-the art technology at home can’t reconcile the fact that when they come to work they have a Windows XP machine, or worse, that takes 2 days to boot up.  Pent-up user demand should not be underestimated, and consumerized IT can be the Holy Grail of employee satisfaction if deployed properly.

A parallel phenomenon that is also of note is the reassignment of power away from companies and into the hands of the consumer, particularly the power to decide strategy and business approach. Very recent examples of companies making a 180 degree about face on a business decision are reminiscent of the introduction of New Coke April 1985, and then the very public reversal back to Classic Coke.

While the reintroduction of Classic Coke after the debacle of New Coke took 77 days before the company announced their mistake, many recent example of the power of the people (largely amplified with the vehicle of social media) are taking less time. Consider the Bank of America notice to start charging customers $5 for the privilege of using a debit card with the Bank for purchases – retracted in a month after the ensuring uproar; and Verizon reversed its plan to charge cell phone users $2 fee for one-time credit or debit card payments by phone or on the company’s Web site – retracted after one day!  Now that’s power. (And stupidity on the part of the Corporation’s marketing department.)

Of the most prevalent macro change I see in the privacy and security space must be the convergence to the center of the historically very different privacy and security models of the European Union and of the United States. It used to be that the U.S. cared only for security and very little of privacy (after all, we still have no national or federal privacy law), while the countries of the E.U. cared almost exclusively about the individual’s privacy, and no focus on security (there is, for example, no breach notification requirements in the E.U. data privacy laws.)

Now I see a slow, deliberate convergence toward the common middle as both parties realize the benefit and practicality of the other parties approach and model. Though the disparity of the two camps privacy and security laws are still world’s apart, within the next 3 years – due in large part to both the recently issued FTC privacy best practices report, and the publication of the E.U.’s Data Protection Directive proposed revisions - the world will soon finally agree on the proper blend of both privacy and security controls to benefits of all customers, consumers and employees on both continents.