As a SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) Analyst, I spend my days researching, writing and presenting ideas to companies and audiences. One of the most important subjects these days is how to develop and implement the best possible
information logistics systems. That means utilizing and processing collected data in the most advantageous and efficient manner possible to further the ambitions of the business. That goal is perfectly understandable for a business - collecting business data and transactional data is expected, but when it is your personal data (Code Halos) that is being collected we often feel differently. For example, I love having my
TripIt, Marriott and
Delta mobile apps know about me, my preferences and my past, present and future travels, but I don't want that information shared with other vendors (or home burglars) without my permission.
In this article, my colleague Ben Pring,
Co-Director of the Center for the Future of Work at Cognizant is kind enough to address the good and bad of having your data (Code Halos) aggregated and tracked online. I have included two embedded videos - first, a video interview that I filmed with Paul Roehrig and Ben Pring on the concepts of Code Halos, and a second far more professional clip on the role of Code Halos in our everyday life.
***
The
response to our articles around
Code Halo-thinking is overwhelmingly
positive.
I and my co-authors, Malcolm
Frank and Paul Roehrig, have spoken at dozens of client and industry events and
engaged in numerous post-presentation discussions with a wide array of
senior IT and business leaders who when
presented with
the Code Halo idea and
follow us through our Crossroads Model tell us of
the opportunities Code Halo-thinking offers
(including the risks of “extinction events”) are very real in their industry or
market.
For
example, the narrative resonated with a major
soft drink manufacturer that saw a new way to think about the social network
around its soft drink; with an international airline which is beginning to
socialize and internalize the new metaphor of a Code Halo to rethink how it
moves customers from point A to point B; and with a leading financial services
institution that admitted it was
only
too aware of the “ionization” happening all around it as new ideas from
start-ups begin to change the competitive dynamics the company faces.
Video Link:
http://youtu.be/ctycYs18dyk
The second major reaction though – which may or may not
surprise you, if you’ve read any of the previous pieces here, is that many
people immediately internalize the Code Halo story and find “the dark side of
the Halo.” Rather than focusing on the positive transformational commercial
opportunities Code Halos present, they
land on the dystopian, Orwellian world of constant surveillance by Big (and
little) Brother that Messer’s Assange, Manning and Snowden have brought to the fore in recent weeks, months and years.
Typically we hear a torrent of worst-case scenarios. “I
don’t want to share my information with retailer x”, “I don’t want the
government to have even more information on me that they do already”, “this is
just going to make hackers’ lives easier”, “I get bombarded by enough
advertising already; this is just going to make it even worse”, “I don’t want
to live in 1984”, “I am not a number”, “how can I control who knows things
about me”, “this is the final nail in the coffin of privacy”, “these ideas will
never take off.”
The prism that people have is perfectly
understandable. Their concerns and
fears are, of course, entirely valid and understandable. We share many of them.
As digital immigrants ourselves we are at times as dazed and confused as any
set of middle aged men by the emergent and volatile social mores of the new
world and have to fight back the temptation to wallow in nostalgic revelries of
how “this wasn’t the way we used to do it back in the day/old country.”
The grand experiment that we are all engaged in – creating a
world of unprecedented hyper-connectivity of time, space, and culture - which
the Code Halo phenomena is supercharging, is, by its very nature, unknowable
and logically contains good things and bad.
Lots of good things are going to happen in a world of Code Halos, as are
lots of bad things.
In short, we have no intention to deny that bad things will
happen as a result of code meeting code. We fully expect they will. There is a
very real dark side of the halo. All of the worst-case scenarios with which we
are presented will happen, and are
happening now. People will get hacked. Government intrusion will grow.
Advertisers will create new ways to embed advertising into every nook and
cranny of our lives through every IP addressable form factor we use. Privacy
will recede. The nefarious will have new opportunities to hurt us. Many
innovations enabled by Code Halos will have unexpected consequences which will
compound over time to produce unanticipated negative outcomes. And yet we firmly believe these fears, concerns and
objections are overblown, irrelevant or moot. Every objection is entirely the
same objection that people raised as Al Gore’s Information Superhighway was
entering the public consciousness in the middle of the 1990s; “I’ll never put
my credit details onto the web,” Average Joe said in 1996; now Joe is routinely
spending thousands of dollars online.
The Internet has been a crime scene in the last 20 years --
repeatedly. And it still is. And it always will be. But, today the Internet has
634 million websites and 2.4 billion users, according to uptime monitoring
company, Royal Pingdom, and is here to stay. Nobody is going to un-invent it.
In 2013 so much of our lives are already online – shared,
visible, transparent, open, all proffered voluntarily through Facebook,
Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, et al, or less voluntarily via our credit score,
phone records, movements, and key strokes that the government can impound
without warrant -- that privacy is already an illusion, hackers already hack,
advertisers can already advertise within our email, pharmacies already send our
16-year-old daughters coupons for diapers when neither they nor we knew they
were pregnant; we are numbers, we are code.
The world that we are describing is already here. The Code
Halo era is not imminent. It is now.
Just as the upside of the Internet has won over the downside
we believe the upside of a Code Halo world will win over its downsides. The
“give to get” ratio of the Code Halo world will be so positive that, in the
same way that the cost and convenience of Internet era 1.0 triumphed over its
doubters, the new Internet era of Code Halos will similarly see it detractor’s
voices diminish and disappear.
And one last thought; the ultimate value of Code Halos will
originate out of the openness of data that is shared and this, of course, will
mandate good behavior and accountability. Just as lousy service that once went
unpunished is now broadcast on social media with sometimes devastating impact, individuals or corporations that misuse or exploit information exchanged via
Code Halos will struggle to enrich and inflate their Code Halo and to generate
commercially material sparks. Bad Code Halo behavior will exist in a world of
instant high visibility and will push some towards their extinction event.
Thoughts?
*************************************************************
Kevin Benedict,
Head Analyst for Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC)
Cognizant
View Linkedin Profile
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
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