How to have Employees be more Creative for Continuous Improvement

Overcoming Legacy Processes to Achieve Big Data Success

For large companies with legacy infrastructure, changing to a Big Data focus isn’t easy — but AMEX proves it’s possible.

For large companies saddled with complex legacy environments that were developed over many decades, finding the opportunity for disruption can
be a daunting challenge.

Unlike new economy firms, which have had the benefit of being able to
build their businesses and infrastructure from scratch in a “green-field” environment, most large corporations are saddled with disparate and
fragmented operational and analytical environments and processes,
characterized by business and data silos that limit the ability to operate
with agility, flexibility, and insight across customers and lines of business.

While institutional reputation, customer reach, and operational scale
provide many advantages to large corporations, these larger firms cansometimes be challenged when it comes to innovation and
responsiveness. Yet it’s still these large corporations that continue to be
the bulwark of the economy, accounting for the bulk of business and
consumer transactional activity. Now, Big Data approaches that were
developed by the new economy firms, which enabled the flexibility and
rapid growth of these firms, are being adopted by mainstream
corporations to overcome legacy challenges and introduce greater
corporate agility and speed.

A 2014 survey conducted by NewVantage Partners of 125 senior
corporate executives, representing 59 Fortune 1000 companies, showed
that more than two-thirds of executives reported that their organization
had a Big Data initiative in production. These same executives reported
that investments in Big Data are projected to grow dramatically in the
coming years — with 75% of executives reporting investments greater
than $10 million, and 28% reporting investments exceeding $50 million
by 2017.

For these corporate giants, operational process optimization can have
a huge business impact.

One such firm that’s benefiting from new Big Data approaches is
the financial services giant American Express (AMEX), which is
harnessing the power of its data to innovate and to streamline complex
operational processes. AMEX has opened its own new technology hub
in Palo Alto, led by former Google and PayPal executive Nik Sathe.
The new tech center “will focus on innovations in Big Data, cloud
computing, and mobile infrastructure,” according to AMEX CIO Marc
Gordon.

AMEX has taken steps to optimize and streamline its operational and
data processes end-to-end by migrating many traditional processes
from legacy mainframe environments to Big Data processing
environments, resulting in dramatic improvements in speed and
performance, significant reductions in cost, and notable increases in
responsiveness to customer needs.

Ash Gupta, chief risk officer and president for Risk and Information
Management for AMEX, comments, “Fact-based analytics have always
been in our company’s DNA, yet I have never seen such an analytical
leap as the one we have made with Big Data.” He cites several areas
where AMEX is focusing its Big Data efforts, notably in addressing
service excellence, generating billings and receivables growth, and risk management. A few examples:

- Using Big Data platforms, AMEX has been able to dramatically reduce
the time it takes to process the thousands of variables and billions of calculations needed to match customer card offers to card member
interests. It previously took years of processing time just to sift through
these massive volumes of data, but now it can be done in hours.

- AMEX has made similar strides in connecting merchants to card
members on personalized offers, taking a 3-day process and reducing
it to 20 minutes on their Big Data platform.

- American Express uses Big Data analytics to detect and prevent fraud
in milliseconds and with greater precision, using machine-learning
models that leverage billions of historical transactions across millions
of card members, resulting in instant fraud alerts for customer protection.

Leading companies can learn from the example of AMEX and other
mainstream corporations that are adopting Big Data solutions and
approaches with success. Here are a few suggestions:

- Assess opportunities to migrate operational business processes from
mainframe environments to faster and cheaper Big Data approaches.

- Create a Big Data Center of Excellence or Analytical Sandbox as a
testing ground to identify suitable applications for Big Data.

- Adopt a “data first” approach that focuses on rapid identification of
data insights, rather than investing in large data warehouse initiatives.

- Develop a “culture of data” staffed by a next-generation of analytics
professional, whom are conversant in new Big Data approaches and
analytics techniques.

Mainstream companies will drive the future of Big Data investment. But
they must demonstrate a willingness and flexibility to tackle their
complex legacy environments and data infrastructure. For those firms
that make the commitment, as evidenced by the example of American
Express, the payback is likely to be high. Their ability to compete for
customer success in the coming years may depend on it.

SOURCE: MIT Sloan Management Review

Building a Customer Centric Culture

To have the customer’s best interests as the focus of your attention – not to be pre-occupied in your own interests at the customer’s expense.

To do this, you need to:

(1) Really know the customer in order to anticipate their best interests.

(2) Differentiate between primary and secondary motives.

Customer-Centric Primary Motives:

Making it easier and nicer for the customer to get and use solutions.

Self-Centric Secondary Motives:

Building revenue and profit through new product development, word-of-mouth, etc.

There’s a myth that talking often to your customers (sales, service, surveys, etc.) means you’re customer-focused. However, customer-focus goes beyond lip-service to the primary motives that drive your behaviors.

Gap in Desired Versus Actual Customer-Centricity

Half of companies say they’re extremely customer-centric, but when customers of those companies were asked, only a tenth of them said those companies were extremely customer-centric. Why is there such a huge gap? When you think about who makes business processes and policies within a company, it’s usually the workforce that doesn’t interact directly with customers. Three-fourths of companies say that customer experience is not well defined and communicated within their company. Half of companies say they have fair or little knowledge of customer demographics, behaviors, psychographics, and transactional histories. Less than a tenth of companies say they have excellent knowledge of customers. Three-fourths of companies say their employees aren’t well versed in how to delight customers.

Ways to Really Know the Customer

This represents an opportunity for those who work directly with customers to share valuable stories and facts with the rest of the company, to help the entire workforce live up to their brand promises. We usually think of marketing, sales, and customer service as outward-facing, with only outbound deliverables.

Yet, if a company is customer-centric, then concentric circles around the customer mean that marketing, service and sales are the natural conduit for helping the rest of the company – engineering, finance, human resources, production, operations, technology, safety, accounting, etc. – understand their impact on customer experience and customer profitability. Three-fourths of marketing groups say they don’t influence the customer service function … so you can imagine how much influence marketing has on the rest of the company!

Customer-facing professionals can sensitize the whole company toward the customer’s plight and priorities:

(1) Make sure customer stories reflect the customer experience spectrum.

(2) Use creative ways to share customer stories:

– Intranet
– Internal newsletters
– Bulletin boards & posters
– Lobbies, break rooms, war rooms, conference rooms, cafeteria
– Staff meetings

(3) Involve organization in learning and adapting their mindsets – this is the organization-wide journey guiding everyone on managing their personal impact on customer experience, called internal branding

Return on Investment

Your company makes huge efforts and investments in communicating your value proposition, which is the brand promise that shapes customer expectations. A corresponding investment – at least in energy and scrutiny – makes sense for ensuring the brand promise is indeed delivered. Customer satisfaction occurs when the customer’s experience meets or exceeds their expectations. Trust – being true to the brand promise – is biggest the biggest factor in building a customer-centric culture that maximizes customer profitability.

SOURCE: areaofentrepreneurs

How to Build a Collaborative Culture

There are plenty of enterprise collaboration tools to get work done better and faster. But are we optimizing the use of those tools to make collaboration the best it can possibly be?

“A little bit of culture change can go a very long way — and you don't have to tackle the entire organizational culture or its myriad of potential sub-cultures,” Jed Cawthorne told us this month. “You should not shy away from small, incremental changes that can potentially make a big difference.”

So what should you do?

The Question

How do you build a collaborative workplace culture?

The Answers

Michael Fitzpatrick, CEO, ConnectSolutions

Fitzpatrick is CEO and founder of ConnectSolutions, a private-cloud solutions provider for Microsoft Skype for Business and Adobe Connect. With more than 13 years of experience in software and technology development, Fitzpatrick has built a track record in enterprise and government solutions. Tweet to Michael Fitzpatrick.

At CoSo, we believe high-quality experiences with collaboration, communication and learning solutions can dramatically improve the worker’s ability to support the goals of the organization.

But a truly collaborative culture can’t be achieved without carefully tuning your technology, people and processes so that they’re in perfect alignment with each other.

You can tell your people to work together, but you can’t create a truly collaborative workplace culture if you don’t provide them with the tools they need to work together — especially with the growing reliance on dispersed workforces and teleworking.

For a time, this was a tough task as the enterprise was flooded with personal tech that served the user’s needs but tended to fragment collaboration within the team at large. But unified communications has since evolved from the deployment of disparate tools to platforms designed to serve all in a seamless and standardized way.

Now, we can support more collaborative work environments by embedding UC into the organization’s business process workflows, creating frictionless communication that threads email, instant messaging, voice over internet protocol and video collaboration through the very apps and documents that people work with every day.

The work environment becomes more flexible.

Collaboration for workers becomes, once again, a human task that isn't disrupted by the very technology that's supposed to enable it.

Of course, the workforce must also be primed to support collaboration in the enterprise. This means ensuring everyone from on-site workers to mobile teams and freelancers is participating and that the desired collaborative behavior is being exemplified at the C-level.

It means working with HR to create best practices, prioritizing cooperation in the hiring process and creating clearly defined roles. Once your technology, people and process are in sync, a truly collaborative environment will take hold.

Sameer Patel, GM and SVP, SAP

Patel is GM and senior vice president of product management and go-to-market at SAP Cloud/SuccessFactors. Before SAP, he lead enterprise technology teams in the consulting and systems integrator business, where he focused on designing and executing customer, employee and partner networks and associated applications. Customers have included Intel, Nike, CA, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, XO Communications, Symex, McKesson, Wrigley and others.Tweet to Sameer Patel.

You start by throwing out all the nebulous metrics such as sharing and productivity that don’t matter to most executives or aren’t easily measurable by employees.

What does matter to executives and most employees is executing their individual and team mission and charter. And if you can channel the benefits of collaboration to executing those objectives better and faster, the basis for a collaborative culture emerges in a much more organic and natural way.

To start, identify two to three functional areas where the cost of not collaborating on a given business activity is terribly obvious.

Examples are selling or supporting customers, on-boarding new employees, developing product or coordinating hundreds of vendors across your supply chain. Such tasks have established key performance indicators that everyone is already swimming toward and innately require collective output.

It becomes readily apparent to everyone that a collaborative culture around tangible functional processes can be an indispensible enabler to meeting core performance goals.

Deidre Paknad, CEO, Workboard

Paknad shapes Workboard’s product strategy, customer engagement model and thought leadership efforts. She said she is passionate about providing tools and insights that help leaders engage their teams in great achievement. At IBM, she was vice president of a global business and worked to improve information economics for enterprise customers. She has been recognized by the Smithsonian for innovation twice and has more than a dozen patents. Tweet to Deidre Paknad.

How team leaders and executives listen and engage has a huge impact. People hear what we say and may miss what we mean, so leaders’ words invite or crush engagement.

Start with "yes" to get ideas and information to flow. Show people you’re open to their ideas, facts and input. You shut things down when your first answer is no — “no, we can’t do that” or “no, we don’t have the budget.”

While there are instances where there is no budget, the instant “no” can be more habit than fact. When people anticipate a “no”, they avoid bringing forward information or ideas altogether. As Tina Fey says, “start with yes and see where that takes you.”

Secondly, assume AND rather than OR to improve collaborative decisions. Sometimes in conversations people assume each new idea supersedes or displaces those expressed before it — my idea or yours, one option or the other when in fact it’s my idea and yours, one option and another.

Without realizing it, we pit ideas against each other and shut down consideration of additive ideas. This wastes time on false debates. Growth requires more than one idea, market segment, revenue source, and initiative so the false competition undermines collaboration, culture and profit.

Finally, Ask "why" to signal and ensure you heard. It signals authentic engagement and provides people with an opportunity to share logic so you genuinely understand. It also gives you pause to consider the idea’s merits before moving on, to frame your “yes and” response, add another “why” or provide a well-considered “no.”

In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t take more management time to be an authentic listener than it does to resolve false debates, dig for facts that people don’t want to share or recover from decisions that were ill informed.

Guy Nirpaz, CEO, Totango

Nirpaz is the CEO and co-founder at Totango, a customer success and user engagement management platform. Before starting Totango, he focused on real time big data as EVP of engineering at GigaSpaces and was chief architect at Mercury. Nirpaz said he's driven by the possibilities technology offers to improve the way people do business. Tweet to Guy Nirpaz.

Culture is about people, motivations, successes and frustrations. The first rule of collaborative culture is making sure the company acts as a team and that the mission and goals are all collaborative. We succeed and fail together as a team.

It starts with hiring people that are not only excellent at what they do, but people that are comfortable to work as a team. Sometimes very talented people are not hired due to massive ego.

A good smelling sign to recognize it is when they are being asked about their previous company, you get the sense that they were the stars while everyone else was completely useless.

The second part is to foster collaboration. This is first and foremost the role of the executive team. As a start the executive team needs to demonstrate characteristics of collaboration. You know that you're not there when fingers are started to be pointed out when stakes are high.

Beyond that the executive team should continuously figure out ways to communicate the joint goals, and actively take part at conflict resolution by always pointing out the joint goals and missions and how those should be interpreted in this case.

Anthony Smith, CEO, Insightly

Smith is CEO of Insightly, a San Francisco-based SaaS CRM application. Before Insightly, he was a consultant for IBM and a software engineer for global-mining consultancy Snowden. Tweet to Anthony Smith.

Building a collaborative culture starts with identifying your company’s core values, like clear and frequent communication, and then establishing those right off the bat. At Insightly, we want our employees to have a healthy balance between work and their personal lives so we offer flexible hours and work locations.

Everyone still works at least 40 hours a week, but many employees are remote or choose hours outside the typical working day. One big challenge that comes with implementing a remote-workforce program is making sure that employees are collaborating just as much as they would if they sat next to each other.

To maintain constant communication and collaboration between team members, provide remote employees with extra services that help to ensure that they are clued in on everything that’s going on in the company.

Beyond the day-to-day tasks, fly in remote employees every quarter to encourage team bonding. And when we first hire a new employee, we have them spend a week at company headquarters so they can become acquainted with co-workers, attend in-person training meetings and familiarize themselves with business processes. This helps to ease them in and move them toward the end goal of becoming completely ingrained in the team.

Title image by Asa Aarons Smith/all rights reserved.

SOURCE: CMSWiRE

What is a “collaborative organisation” anyway?

Over the last few years, I’ve spent a lot of time writing and talking about the benefits of collaboration and the technology to support collaboration in its many forms. What has become clear during that time, however, is just how nebulous and confusing the term “collaboration” is. But while it’s easy to get caught up in defining what “collaboration” itself actually means (and yes, MWD has its own definition too!), I’ve come to realise that it’s not necessarily the act of collaborating that needs defining, but what this means in the context of an organisation that is looking to be more collaborative. So perhaps the question should be – What does a collaborative organisation look like?

It is highly unlikely that there is no collaboration taking place in your organisation at present – people are no doubt talking to each other in the office or on the phone, sitting in meetings to discuss particular activities or events, or working together on particular projects or documents, for example. However, evidence of anecdotal collaboration such as this is not the same as being a collaborative organisation; this suggests an underlying culture of collaboration which drives all activity within the organisation. In real terms, I think there are three important characteristics that help to define a collaborative organisation:

1. A networked and non-hierarchical organisation structure
2. A culture of openness, honesty and trust
3. An engaged and valued workforce.

A networked and non-hierarchical organisation structure

A collaborative organisation is typically the antithesis of the “traditional” command-and-control organisation where there is a rigid hierarchy of roles and management authority. Instead, the organisation structure is much more fluid and flat , with individuals given greater responsibility to make decisions appropriate to their role and the task concerned, without the bottlenecks caused by layers of management approvals and red tape. Teams are defined not by their position within the organisation, but by what they are trying to achieve whether this is a specific project or an on-going business process and so tend to be more transient, with teams made up of a collection of different roles required to complete the task or tasks, rather than simply a group of peers of the same role, for example. Similarly, individuals are defined not by their role, their seniority, or even their team, but by the set of skills, knowledge and experience they can contribute to a particular task, discussion or activity.

Rather than layers of “management” which focus on controlling behaviour and driving activity, there is an emphasis on providing leadership– setting targets for individuals and teams, and then providing the appropriate motivation and support to help them achieve those targets. One of the benefits of less-structured, non-hierarchical collaborative working environments is that new ideas can be executed more quickly, enabling the organisation to respond rapidly to competitive challenges or market pressures. New projects and teams can get up and running quickly, without the need for major reorganisation, creating new dynamics within the business. Communication is also much faster, with central news able to reach individuals directly, rather than being filtered through management, and information able to flow more easily throughout the organisation via a peer-to-peer channel.

A culture of openness, honesty and trust

In a collaborative organisation, every individual has a voice, and is encouraged to express their opinion without fear of stepping on the toes of more senior people. This is less about people being given a forum to publicly criticise their peers, managers or leaders, but about creating an environment where openness, sharing and discussion is central to everything that takes place, be that the announcement or definition of a new strategy or direction for the company, a proposed change to a process in a particular part of the business, or simply an event, news item or suggestion at a local level. This does not mean to say that every activity, every decision within a collaborative organisation is necessarily always achieved collaboratively, but that there is a common bond of trust between peers, between leaders and employees, so that there is no sense of threat or inconvenience from inviting others to contribute an opinion, or provide feedback, and people are confident and willing to do so when asked.

An engaged and valued workforce

In a collaborative organisation, employees are given greater responsibility, and are given the opportunity to voice their opinion, to engage with peers and managers and in so doing– have a say in the way things are done and the direction the company is taking. The result is a workforce that is much more interested in the organisation’s fortunes, that cares whether or not the company achieves its goals, and that feels a collective sense of ownership and involvement in the process of achieving those goals. This empowered workforce has much greater loyalty to the organisation as a result, and so is less likely to churn frequently as individuals seek to gain greater levels of responsibility, or find an employer who better values their commitment.

Clearly, while most organisations can show evidence of some collaborative behaviour, the majority have some way to go before they can honestly say they check all three of these boxes. It’s a long, arduous journey in some cases, but those who have done it confirm it is worth the effort in the long run.

If you are embracing a more collaborative strategy in your organisation,check out this collection of reports and resources – including a free six-part webinar – on building a collaborative culture. Alternatively, you can get a free personalised action plan by completing the self-assessment in our Collaboration Maturity Acceleration Tool. If you’d like to find out more about how we can help, please get in touch!

SOURCE: MWD Advisors

Process Improvement: Six Sigma & Kaizen Methodologies

CAN CORPORATE CULTURE BOOST FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE

Executives spend a lot of time worrying about their companies’ products and prices, but they don’t spend nearly enough time worrying about corporate character.

A lot of them don’t believe companies even have a character, and others don’t see what difference it could possibly make.

Correlation between employee investment and performance

But is there a direct correlation between employee investment and performance? As Prof. James L. Heskett wrote in his latest book The Culture Cycle, effective culture can account for 20-30 percent of the differential in corporate performance when compared with “culturally unremarkable” competitors.

Organisational culture eats strategy for breakfast, lunch and dinner so don’t leave it unattended

Kotter and Heskett’s landmark study Corporate Culture and Performance documented results for 207 large U.S. companies in 22 different industries over an eleven-year period.

Kotter and Heskett reported that companies that managed their cultures well saw revenue increases of 682% versus 166% for the companies that did not manage their cultures well – stock price increases of 901% versus 74% – and net income increases of 756% versus 1%.

Corporate culture is an incredibly powerful factor

Corporate culture is an incredibly powerful factor in a company’s long-term success. No matter how good your strategy is, when it comes down to it, people always make the difference. As Peter Drucker so wisely stated, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

Top 4 corporate culture infographics

Culture is eating what it kills – such as strategy, change management, innovation, operational efficiency, lean process and even including vision and mission.

How to cultivate organisational culture?

Corporate culture is a hard thing to get right. It’s a moving target that means something different to everyone.

It grows and evolves over time and is the result of action and reaction. It is the lingering effect of every interaction. How to cultivate organisational culture?

Organisational culture eats strategy for breakfast, lunch and dinner from Torben Rick

SOURCE: Torben Rick

Business Process Management Implementation - the ultimate quick-fire Checklist

Business process management (BPM) aims to improve performance by optimising corporate practices and procedures.

Business processes are as diverse as the companies that implement them, so it’s difficult to find a one size fits all model. Added to this hodgepodge is the internal politics that threaten successful implementation of BPM. Opposition to cultural change can quickly turn BPM into an unwieldy beast. Gartner predicts that organisational politics will prevent at least one-third of BPM efforts in 2016.

Successful BPM can be achieved if you take the process bull by the horns. Be the master of the BPM arena by breaking down the method into these three digestible chunks:

1. Analysis and Design

You first need to know where you are before you can decide where you’re headed. Nailing this stage will go a long way in shaping what technical and business resources are needed to get things right. Do the following in this phase:

• Decide who needs to be involved – list all the skills you can think of and match them to the person.
• Hold a kick-off meeting – clarify roles and responsibilities.
• Identify gaps in knowledge and organise the relevant training.
• Establish the project scope – define the limits, considering the budget and time.
• Prepare the project plan – this includes the communication, change management, governance and training plan.
• Start process mapping – suppliers, inputs, processes, outputs and customers (SIPOC) diagram will be useful here.
• Identify challenges – what’s going wrong with the existing process?
• Define an improved process – what needs to be removed, added, merged or automated?
• Explain the structure for standardisation – how to name, categorise and model data.
• Create business process rules – these include schedules, escalations and notifications.
• Measure success criteria – what are your key performance indicators (KPIs)?
• Describe the user experience – logins, views, navigation and access levels belong here.
• Explain the reporting structure – choose the software and design the dashboard.
• Outline the system requirements – consider issues like the number of environments required and system integration.
• Map the data migration process – what data will be moved and how it will be transferred.

2. Program Management

This is divided into two areas – people and projects. Without the right hands on deck, the BPM implementation will be dead in the water.

Add the following to your BPM crew to help ensure plain sailing:

• Process owners are responsible for ensuring the business needs are met.
• Business analysts are the bridge between IT and business. They carry out process mapping, analysis and redesign.
• Process designers plan the technical parts of the process. They work out how the new process will fit within existing systems.
• Process developers have the job of designing new interfaces and database properties.
• Project managers run the daily aspect of the BPM implementation. Risk and issue tracking and resource planning are some of their tasks.
• Program managers are needed if the PBM project involves multiple organisations or a very large organisation. They choose priorities and make sure best practice is followed.
• Subject matter experts take part in the design and testing of the new processes and systems.

Now that you have the right people on board, add these elements to the BPM mix:

• A work breakdown structure which will form part of the project plan. 
• Resource management to account for absences and people leaving the organisation.
• Environment preparation so it should be ‘all systems go’ for deployment and integration.
• Change management processes help to maintain success after execution.
• Communication plans have details of what information is needed, where it’ll be kept and updated and who’s responsible for document control.
• Communication tools can include SharePoint, the intranet and newsletters.
• Lessons learnt logs to capture what went wrong and how it was fixed.
• Policy update documents show changes to policies and reflect the new processes.
• Testing schedules to include what will be tested, by whom and when.

3. Training

Implementing a BPM process is just the beginning. The business must be educated on the best ways to use, monitor and improve the processes.

These aspects will make your training more successful:

• Spell out the training objectives.
• Identify what training is specific to which group.
• Give every opportunity for training attendees to give feedback.
• Involve trainees early by asking them about their expectations at the start of the session.
• Make the training as relevant as possible by using real life examples.
• Make it clear what impact the new processes will have on jobs.

The perils surrounding BPM implementation can be lessened if you develop a good foundation. Ensure that you have the gone through these steps at a minimum.

The key is to remember that all successful projects involve getting the support from the right people. This is even more important with BPM. Save yourself a lot of stress by trying to get the right people on your side. You probably won’t win them all but the more you have for the BPM implementation, the higher the likely success rate.

SOURCE: DueDil

Big Data and Flexible Ethics

Few of us would doubt the value in the proper use of big data collection. Healthcare is perhaps most important, but better law enforcement and product safety improvement come in close seconds. Then there’s the intelligence value of collected data to find and neutralize growing threats to our nation.

So how can we take advantage of the value of big data without suffering the distrust and damage caused by its unauthorized collection and use?

Data, Data, Who’s Got Your Data?

In today’s connected world, you might say anyone and everyone. We’ve all heard that nothing is sure but death and taxes .... You can add the collection and use of big data to that list.

Everywhere we look, corporations and government agencies are relying on big data stores to pursue their relationships with you. If you shop online (and who doesn’t, these days?) your inbox and smartphone are full of marketing messages from retailers that seem to know what you have been buying, from whom and how long ago. Even your health records, driving records and a host of other things about you are being digitized and kept for analysis. In a culture that amasses big data that way, the deluge we are seeing is unlikely to abate anytime soon.

It’s become virtually impossible to know for sure who has your data or what are they doing with it. This is especially true as the “data sharing” phenomenon has grown – organizations collecting data and then sharing it with other organizations in return for their data. Now, even organizations you may trust with your information often don’t retain it and usually don’t control how it is used once they share it.

And with the rise of a highly sophisticated global data theft industry, even big data stores held by organizations with no intent to abuse or share them are vulnerable to unauthorized use – often ending up back in the marketplace as the criminals “fence” them back into legal channels.

With so many ways your data is being collected and with so many groups collecting it, or stealing it from someone who has, everything we do with any connection to the Internet is probably on someone’s digital shelf being used for … who knows what?

Big data can seem — and is often touted as — an unmixed blessing, taking us toward a brave new world of information transparency. But, like the “man behind the curtain” in the Wizard of Oz, there is a side to the big data phenomenon that we are meant to “pay no attention to.”

So, our question: How can the collectors of big data guarantee that our information won’t be used in ways we don’t approve of?

The answer: They can’t.

Fighting an Old War

All this isn’t to say we aren’t doing anything, but what we’re doing is way behind the times.

Several years ago, as technology began its rapid rise and data collection grew with it, privacy concerns (at a much lower level of jeopardy) drove the industry to adopt several protective techniques in an attempt to assure people that their data would be safe and used only for purposes they were OK with:

1. Purpose limitation, the careful restriction of collected data to only those elements critical to its intended use
2. Data minimization, the collection of only that data absolutely needed to perform the intended functions
3. Anonymization (a.k.a. “de-identification”), separating personal information from the statistical data needed for analysis
4. Software and hardware barriers to prevent data repository compromise

These worked (sort of) for a while, often creating more impression than substance of safety. But, like the aphorism about generals always fighting the previous war, while the growth of technology has rendered these techniques less and less effective, industry continues to depend on them to deal with today’s new world of big data.

The use of big data by legitimate firms for legal uses can be controlled to some extent by the use of “opt-out and opt-in” relationships between firms and their clients: Unless you give me permission to use or share your data, I agree not to do so. We see this on a growing number of websites.

SOURCE: CMSWiRE

CREATE A CULTURE CHANGE

Driving cultural change

The hardest part of a business transformation is changing the organizational culture – the mindset and instincts of the people in the company. Organizational culture is like an iceberg, with most of its weight and bulk below the surface.

An existing culture is based on shared philosophies, ideologies, values, assumptions, beliefs and attitudes. Transforming, sustaining and allowing for evolution of a culture is a complex process requiring a clearly articulated strategic aim, underpinning objectives and long term programme coordination and mobilization of resources.

So, what are the keys to CREATE a cultural change?

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CREATE

• Clarify values and organizational culture code
• Reinforce the vision and purpose – Ensure that everyone in the organization is clear on vision, values, culture code and how those elements lead to success
• Empower behaviors aligned with values, culture code and vision
• Align conversations up and down the organization
• Target effort on high impacts areas
• Emphasize success, plan for wins, celebrate change

Don’t shortcut the process of cultural change

Organizations may try to shortcut the process of cultural change by:

• Changing practices without changing values – Leaders often create new programs or policies without attempting to change the underlying beliefs that guide individual choices. Employees and supervisors who don’t believe in the change will at best not support it, and at worst undermine it.
• Confusing “espoused” values with underlying values – Leaders often develop and publish new values, but forget to work on changing employees’ beliefs about how the world works. Ignoring what’s below the surface is what will ultimately undermine organizational transformation.

Patience and persistence is required

Any cultural change involves changing the mindset and instincts of each person in the company. This does not happen overnight. So, patience and persistence is required to continue down the path for the one to three years it will often take to realize a full and complete cultural change in your organization.

SOURCE: Torben Rick