Global Executives Recognized for Championing Disruptive, Unconventional and Authentic Customer Experiences on 2020 AX50

Aubrey Coggins

Constellation Research

Aubrey (Levinstone) Coggins manages Constellation's marketing and communications programs and is the producer of DisrupTV, a weekly Web series on innovation and the enterprise.  She previously served as a senior manager of corporate communications at Egnyte and held account roles at Access Communications and The Hoffman Agency. Born and raised in Texas, she received a bachelor's degree in Public Relations from The University of Texas at Austin – Hook ‘em!   ...

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• Thinking outside of the box and breaking the status quo through bold measures
• Activating and advancing experiences that understand and anticipate customers’ needs
• Recognizing and respecting that customers call the shots
• Making real impact by guiding their organizations to reinvent themselves and disrupt their industries

• Brian Aronowitz, Chief Marketing Officer at Institute of Culinary Education
• Mark Browning, VP IT and CIO at Exelon Utilities
• Christopher G. Burger, Vice President Global Technology & Global CIO Chief of Staff at InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG®)
• Christina Callas, Chief Digital Officer at Total Wine & More
• Cheryl Cargill, Vice President of Total Customer Satisfaction at Faurecia
• Charlie Cole, Global Chief eCommerce Officer at Samsonite and Chief Digital Officer at Tumi
• Glenn Coles, IT Business Executive, Advisor & Speaker at Yamaha Motor Corporation
• Rhonda Crawford, Vice President of Global Distribution & Digital Strategy at Delta Air Lines
• Ross Creasy, EVP, Chief Innovation Officer at Ameris Bank
• Sandra De Zoysa, Group Chief Customer Officer at Dialog Axiata, PLC
• Lynn Diegel, Consumer Care and Contact Center Operations, Associate Director at Clorox
• Renee Ducre, Senior Director of Data Strategy at Turner Sports at Warner Media
• Jay Duff, Director of Analytics Engineering at Chick-fil-A Corporate
• Tori Forbes-Roberts, Vice President, Reservation Sales, Customer Care and Digital Engagement at Delta Air Lines
• Kieran Hannon, Chief Marketing Officer at Openpath, Inc
• Heather Hanson, Head of Global IT User Experience at AB Electrolux
• Jo Ann Herold, Chief Marketing Officer at The Honey Baked Ham Company
• Jennifer Hewit, User Experience Strategu and Analytics Executive at Bank of America
• Danielle Joiner McPherson, General Manager, Global Reservations Tech and Innovation at Delta Air Lines
• Linda Jojo, Executive Vice President, Technology and Chief Digital Officer at United Airlines
• Robert Kleinschmidt, Strategic Digital Business Innovator & Senior Vice President at Airborn, Inc
• Ronda Krier, Vice President, Digital Guest Experience and Business Intelligence at Red Robin
• Kenny Lauer, Former Chief Experience Officer & Now: Unlimiting our human potential through AI Personas at Lifekind AI
• Victor Lee, Former Chief Marketing Officer of RXBAR
• Marty Marcinczyk, Founder/GM Helm at Comcast
• Ed Massey, Head of GHOS Americas Region at InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG®)
• Mike Menendez, IT Vice President at Exelon
• Heather Miksch, Vice President of Business Operations at Carbon
• Chris X. Moloney, Chief Marketing Officer & Senior Vice President of E-Commerce at Brinks Home Security
• Alexandra Morehouse, Chief Marketing Officer & Chief Digital Officer at Banner Health
• Pedro Mota, Vice President of Marketing at Porsche Cars North America, Inc
• Lynda P. Pires, Global Head of Customer Experience Insights, Grupo Santander Digital at Banco Santander
• Kellie Romack, Vice President, Digital HR and Strategic Planning at Hilton
• Rob Roy, Chief Digital Officer at Sprint
• Sunny Sanyal, Vice President of Marketing at Hyster-Yale Group
• Kendra Shimmell, Senior Director, UXR Central Science, at Twitch
• Charlie Sung Shin, Marketing, Data and Technology Strategist and Vice President Strategy & Analytics at Major League Soccer
• Janet Song, Startup Exec, Advisor, & Travel Lover and Former Chief Customer Officer at Dollar Shave Club
• Steve Stessman, Vice President of National Sales at Tuff Shed
• Nikki Todd, Vice President of Digital User Experience at The Coca Cola Company
• David Trice, General Manager at Honeywell Connected Buildings
• Mirjam Van Den Berg, Chief Customer Care Officer at Travix
• Dan Vinh, Global Marketing Executive/CMO Marketing & Communications at Culinary Institute of America
• Ricky Volante, Chief Executive Officer at The Professional Collegiate League
• Rahul Vora, Vice President of Customer Experience at FLEETCOR
• John Walsh, Vice President of Marketing at Mack Trucks, Inc
• David West, Principal COO at The Professional Collegiate League
• Paul Zaher, Vice President of eCommerce at WestRock Company
• Krystal Zell, Chief Customer Officer, VP Customer at Home Depot
• Eileen Zicchino, Managing Director, Head of Client Strategy, Business Banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch

#JPM20 is over. Now it is time for #HIMSS20

David Chou

CIO
Harris Health Systems

Title: About David Chou David Chou is vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, covering the intersection of the healthcare systems’ stringent processes and regulations and the transformational power of technology. With nearly 20 years of experience as a senior IT executive across various health systems, David brings a CIO’s practicality to his advisory practice on emerging technologies and disruptive innovation. He offers guidance to healthcare institutions and practitioners navigating digital mega trends and how to strategically apply them to hospital operations to maximize their technology investments. David’s expertise is helping a health system transition toward becoming a digital enterprise in the healthcare setting. He has worked on building a digital…...

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We wrapped up the J.P. Morgan's 38th annual Healthcare Conference a couple of weeks ago in San Francisco. The event is tailored more towards pharmaceutical and life science industries, medical devices firms, technology vendors, emerging start-ups, and members of the investment community. I believe that the contents at the upcoming HIMSS Global Health Conference will resemble the related discussions from San Francisco with a technology focus.

Themes from #JPM20

• The shift to value-based care starts with price transparency.
• Consumers want to be in charge but, are they really in control?  
• Massive investments to lower drug prices.  
• There is still a focus on digital, but are we building the culture or talent.

Focus for CIO at #HIMSS20

Technology platform to incorporate virtual care offerings and define the desired digital experience.   Healthcare providers must define their consumerism strategy and what does that look like for the patient experience. We expect the expansion of telemedicine services by every organization, and CIOs are on the hunt to help define the digital patient experience while looking for the ideal technology platform. 

CIOs need the right information security solutions to safeguard assets.  CIOs and CISOs are working to build a comprehensive information security program while investing in a variety of tools to combat sophisticated external and internal threats. Specific products such as Identity Access Management (IAM), internet of medical things (IoMT) protection and management, and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) are top of mind for the executives during the conference. Pervasive security will mature as the new normal.

They are exploring the right partner for their back-office transformation using Cloud ERP. Healthcare systems are in the process of an aggressive change by utilizing technology solutions such as ERP and revenue cycle. Unfortunately, many health systems have antiquated ERP solutions, and the CIOs will be looking for the next generation cloud ERP solution as a trend for the upcoming years. 

Clinical communication.   Effective clinical communication is a core competency for patient engagement. Physicians, nurses, and every clinician must be on the same page when they provide care for the patient. The clinical communication technology provides the platform; it is the transparent tool that can be used by every clinician for delivering patient care. The communication technology is more than a secure messaging platform; it should also be the platform for a clinician to document patient interactions, and it provides notes on a patient as the clinician administers care.

We want a "digital front door." - The digital front door requires a mass personalization for the patient. The solution starts with the contact center as the first interaction for a patient/consumer for scheduling appointments or any questions related to care. CIOs will explore next-generation contact center technology as a standard to establish the digital experience. 

API orchestration using low code platforms.  Interoperability is still a hot theme on the radar for CIOs, and they are looking for the low code, easy to use platform that can decouple data from the various applications while stitching them together using microservice architectures.

CIOs discuss 5G, but they are not convinced yet.  The fifth-generation global mobile telecommunications standard, which is expected to become broadly promises much faster speeds through a higher-frequency millimeter-wave band. 5G requires building out more infrastructure and CIOs for the impact while exploring their wifi infrastructure strategy. With a mature 5G network, can this replace the hospital wifi infrastructure? 

Healthcare Provider Goals:

Here is what is happening for the healthcare provider space.

"Our main challenge is that we are working to lower the cost of care while managing the population health so that we can get paid for value, however, we must also protect the "money maker" aka inpatient care.  

We will see many Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) agreements with competitors. Outpatient pharmacy chains like CVS are not looking to build hospitals. They will partner with a health system to drive inpatient referrals. Another example is a non-profit and a faith-based system in California that come together to create a joint venture that will own and operate a medical center. 

2020 is about blocking and tackling. CIOs must focus on reinforcing the IT foundational building blocks. Infrastructure must be up to date; enterprise applications in the portfolio should be reevaluated to ensure that the departments are utilizing them effectively while removing redundant systems to drive efficiency. CIOs must focus on cleaning up the core technology stack as a starting point before they jump into leading the digital initiative. 

2020 Predictions for the Future of Work

Dion Hinchcliffe

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Title: About Dion Hinchcliffe Dion Hinchcliffe is an internationally recognized business strategist, bestselling author, enterprise architect, industry analyst, and noted keynote speaker. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in digital strategy, the future of work, and enterprise IT. He works with the leadership teams of large enterprises as well as software vendors to raise the bar for the art-of-the-possible in their digital capabilities. He is currently Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. Dion is also currently an executive fellow at the Tuck School of Business Center for Digital Strategies. He is a globally recognized industry expert on the topics of digital transformation, digital workplace, enterprise collaboration, API…...

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It will be quite a year in 2020 for digital workplace and employee experience, as a number of important emerging trends shift the landscape. Some long-standing issues will also reach a tipping point for many organizations. In my discussions with CIOs, CHROs, heads of digital workplace, and IT solution owners over the last year, it's clear that it's currently a difficult time right now for those in charge of digitally enabling work in our organizations.

I recently laid out the reasons for this in considerable detail. These issues are now consistently a significant challenge for many organizations to deliver well on either digital workplace or employee experience, two closely related concepts. While these issues can't entirely be overcome this year for most organizations, it's safe to say that understanding them and tackling them proactively will produce the better result.

Underscoring the importance and urgency of progress is the significant gap today between delivery and expectation in employee experience. A recent in-depth study by Deloitte reported that while 80% of executives say employee experience is important, only 22% of employee report it's done well. What's more, 59% or organizations say they're not really ready to address it. This means there's a lot to do for those responsible for this area, not just in driving improvements on the ground, but managing stakeholder expectations overall.

That's not to say it isn't a very exciting time to be in the practice. It very much is. The technology options, transformation techniques, and design/delivery methods have never been richer or more mature. Techniques like design thinking, technologies such as talent analytics, new transformation techniques that scale well, and employment trends like gig economy for the enterprise are all offering new possibilities for breaking through the challenges that many are facing in closing the gap between what organizations are able to deliver and not only what their workers want, but would actually benefit from.

Related Research: Experience-Driven Organizations

Fourteen Trends in the Future of Work

Here are twelve leading trends that we see meaningful movement in when it comes to developing and improving the employee experience:

• Employee experience will see more concerted leadership attention and increased levels of investment in 2020. Although employee experience is best when it's delivered completely and effectively through joint partnership between IT and HR, efforts will nevertheless attempt improvement with or without the partnership. Those that do it together, however, will see the most significant committment of budget, as each purview can contribute investment. It will also be seen as more significant and credible by other executives and the board. As employee experience gains awareness, credibility, and urgency as a construct -- and more success stories emerge -- investments will grow in general in 2020 and beyond.
• An increase in committed attemps by IT and HR to come together in partnership to create a genuine and more effective employee experience vision, strategy, and operations. More CIOs will join with CHROs in 2020, largely because of the growing understanding of the infeasibility of changing just the technology or just the way that people are trained, managed, and work in isolation. It has to be done together. As a better understanding emerges of what it takes to embark on the digital transformation of work to reinvent the three aspects of employee experience together (physical, digital, and cultural), we'll see a steady increase in more teaming and collaboration within the C-Suite this year. I also expect to see more Centers of Excellence around employee experience, as a way of accelerating the efforts in high value areas to boost acquisition and retention of workers in particular.
• Automation of tactical work will substantially increase, as remaining roles will become steadily more strategic, while AI gains spotty traction that's far removed from creating large scale unemployment. AI isn't replacing humans yet, and good thing, because such capabilities will need to be overseen by workers with a high vantage point within the organization for the foreseeable future. What we'll see is easy-to-use automation tools like Robotic Process Automation (RPA) being used to augment or replace more and more rote jobs. Best-in-class employers will use new educational capabilities that have emerged to reskill and cross skill those workers, many of which, as I've predicted for a while, will have a harder time becoming the developers or managers of AI-based automation deployments. 
• Fragmented and disjointed digital workplaces will be recast by best-in-class employers into more integrated, organized, and streamlined experiences aimed at highest value use cases. The workplace as it is made up today requires ever more time spend in applications and digital channels. As apps continue to proliferate and there is a strong shift away from one-size fits all to more local choice in the systems used to get work done, we're seeing broad interest and demand for ways to develop a "center of gravity" for employee experience or what I sometimes call a digital workplace hub. One example of this is Citrix Workspace, with the addition of Sapho's capabilities. We see some of this showing up in the emerging the digital canvas category, as well as products that either aim at integrated employee experience to next-gen intranet products that integrate apps, data, and people into more seamless, end-to-end functionality. We'll see more trials and experimentation in a big way in 2020 to drive productivity improvements, improve onboarding speed, and reduce cognitive overload, among other benefits.
• Capabilities to constructively manage and shape Shadow IT, now a major and unpredictable factor in the workplace today, will see improved early adoption. It's clear that unsanctioned workforce applications are here to stay as part of the digital workplace. I've argued that they actually provide a practical form of free R&D and innovation to improve the digital workplace, but that we'd need capabilities to provide operational guardrails to make it sustainable. These types of capabilities are now available. Solutions from Expanse, Perforce, ClusterSeven, and Ntiva are not only designed to find and control Shadow IT but allow workers, whenever it makes sense, to continue using the best tools for their jobs in a more maneable and protected way. Shadow IT is a major force in organizations today, often making up more than half of IT being used (though usually not mission critical systems.) Employee experience leaders can now offer choice, flexibility, and the best tools for tasks at hand in their digital workplaces/employee experiences.
• Work will become even more flexible, dynamic, and unconnected to location, as workers become less attached to the companies they work for and more connected to their peers, careers, and communities. Expectations and desires around work itself have been steadily changing. Jobs are steadily becoming more transient, remote, and virtual. People want meaningful connection in their work, and they are getting it more from their colleagues, long term career narrative, and the groups of people they attach themselves to, such as professional assocations and online communities related to their work. Employee experiences will adapt to this by helping workers to better make these connections using everything from enterprise social networks and alumni communities to online employment platforms and corporate social responsibility networks (as examples.)
• New sourcing models for talent, such as gig economy for the enterprise, will continue to take marketshare, enabling better personalization of work/life while giving organizations powerful new options for hiring. Employment is shifting in a significant way to platforms that can provide long term opportunity for an entire career, as opposed to an individual job. The gig economy has matured and is making significant inroads into the enterprise, offering far more flexible employement on both sides of the equation. See my recent exploration of how on-demand digital hiring has become a leading source of innovation in employment in important new ways in my discussion with the CEO of Gigster.
• For the first time, strategic design and updates of the employee experience will tend to cater most to the needs of Generation Z, while most other changes won't be aimed at any particular generation. Now that Gen Z has become the largest percentage of the workforce, at about 40% this year, it will drive many of the largest policy and strategy decisions when it comes to key elements of employee experience. Gen Z's top driver, for the first time in employment history, is not salary but control over work/life balance. There are other factors too that are only now being understood. Employee experience in particular will be dramatically impacted in 2020 by companies that want to be preferred employers for this leading talent cohort. Offering customization, choice, flexibility, and adaptability to need is therefore key to the future of work. I'm having more hiring and IT managers come to me than ever saying they are getting unusual requests from new hire prospects, including requesting the ability to split time between two companies or only working three days a week, for example.
• Pressure to rethink and digitally transform HR will get the most serious consideration yet, but actual movement will be slow except in certain high value and/or easy-to-implement areas. HR has been one of the departments most resistent to digitially transforming itself and I don't expect that will change much this year, mostly due to the simple fact that the digital world is not typically a core competency of the HR function in general. However, where there is ready opportunity to improve employment screening, automate rote HR tasks, analyze in-house talent using digial tools (thereby rethinking performance reviews, for instance), or otherwise rethink portions of HR in a targeted fashion, I believe we'll see it happen more in 2020 than ever before. But important advances evident from the digital world that are obvious to everyone (i.e. online learning) will put the onus on HR to have a bigger rethink sooner rather than later, especially as automation and AI continues to make major inroads. Thus, the groundwork for this may be laid in many organizations this year, with insiders expecting more "flip the script" than ever within the function.
• Education and skillbuilding will continue to evolve, with informal learning, social learning, microlearning and other forms of on-demand, personalized, and co-created education to help workers stay abreast of and effective in a fast-changing world. The ways that technology has reimagined corporate education in the last five years has been dramatic. Everything from freely available and high quality online courses to internal employee crowdsourcing of learning has made it possible for workers to learn much more quickly and just-in-time. Enterprises now have the tools to upskill and crosskill workers being affected by automation, as well as offering a vital means of retention for those organizations will to assemble best-of-breed onboarding and retraining programs using today's digital art of the possible.
• The ongoing fierce competition between top digital workplace vendors in certain major categories will result in most offerings more clearly defining their corner and staying in it, as sharp differentiation continues to be required to stand out. This competition is perhaps best represented by the ongoing face-off with the great Slack and Microsoft Teams competition, with others like Dropbox and Box, and Office 365 and Google Suite rounding out the platforms I'm most asked about in pairs currently.
• The rise of design thinking and data-driven optimization of the workplace will simultaneously raise the quality and businss impact of the employee experience. We now have the capabilities to create personalized, end-to-end employee experiences for our workers using the latest digital workplace tools. We can also use powerful new analytics solutions -- well exemplified by Microsoft's impressive Workplace Analytics --  to help workers function better, with fewer errors, and less wasted time on all sides. Design thinking in particular offers a way to get the heart of what workers need today to be effective and engaged. Talent and workplace analytics is giving us a way to find out what's actually happening and then proactively improve or optimize it, uncovered new opportunities along the way. I expect a broad uptake of both practices, though the management processes to deliver on it well are still being figured out within most organizations.
• An exciting new set of categories for digital workplace applications and solutions will gain more interested new adherents. While there's no question that technology is advancing more quickly than most organizations can absorb it, that doesn't mean enterprises shouldn't increase their metabolism and explore what's truly possible today. Again, best-in-class employers will tend to do this more than others. Some of these new categories are exciting areas that have been in early adoption phase for several years, including work coordination platforms, augmented meeting services, and digital adoption platforms like WalkMe. All of these, and others, should be given serious consideration now to improve the employee experience and broader business impact and worker effectiveness.
• Recent industry regulations and an increased focus on corporate responsibility will complicate the employee experience and digital workplace, while providing some notable and worthwhile protections. Well beyond GDPR, which has had a dramatic global impact to how business systems operate, new digital regulations will continue to arrive including the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) as well as the new gig economy law, Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5). All of these will have a host of unintended consequences (see this example with AB 5 here) and will thus make creating employee experiences more complicated, although they will have clear and targeted benefits in some cases. Practitioners should be prepared to adapt to these and be steeped in the details of digital regulation in 2020.

A New Future of Work Is Upon Us

There are other trends too, but these are the key ones that will be either most interesting or most impactful for those responsible for digital workplace and employee experience in 2020. It's clear that creating an effective workplace takes both big picture thinking as well as the ability to harness and actually tap into digital complexity, which is one of the hallmarks of effective digital transformation today.

I do expect that the confluence of factors facing organizations today will take the next several years to sort through and find the most workable methods to capitalize on the above trends. This issue is that considerable control continues to be lost as both technology and the nature of employment itself shifts dramatically towards new models that offer greater value and therefore opportunity, both for workers and enterprises. The future of work continues to be a brave and exciting new world for sure, for those that choose to adopt and live in it, and are willing to acquire a new mindset.

Update: This post started with twelve predictions, but I subsequently added two more.

Additional Reading 

How to Achieve Minimum Viable Digital Experience for Employees

Creating the Modern Digital Workplace and Employee Experience

It's never too late

Steve Wilson

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Steve Wilson is former VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, leading the business theme Digital Safety and Privacy. His coverage includes digital identity, data protection, data privacy, cryptography, and trust. His advisory services to CIOs, CISOs, CPOs and IT architects include identity product strategy, security practice benchmarking, Privacy by Design (PbD), privacy engineering and Privacy [or Data Protection] Impact Assessments (PIA, DPIA). Coverage Areas: -  Identity management, frameworks & governance-  Digital identity technologies-  Privacy by Design -  Big Data; “Big Privacy”-  Identity & privacy innovation Previous experience: Wilson has worked in ICT innovation, research, development and analysis for over 25 years. With double…...

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Privacy dies yet again

In another masterful piece of privacy reporting, Kashmir Hill in the New York Times has exposed the nefarious use of facial recognition technology by crime-fighting start-up Clearview. The business offers face searching and identification services, ostensibly to police forces, on the back of a strikingly large database of reference images extracted from the Internet. Clearview claims to have amassed three billion images -- far more than the typical mugshot library -- by scraping social media and other public sources. 

It’s creepy, it offends our intuitive sense of ownership of our images, and the potential for abuse and unintended consequences is enormous.  But how should we respond objectively and effectively to this development? Does facial recognition, as the NYT headline says, “end privacy as we know it”? 
First let’s get one distraction out of the way. I would agree that anonymity is dead. But this is not the end of privacy (instead I feel it might be a new beginning). 

If there’s nowhere to hide, then don’t

Why would I say anonymity is a distraction? Because it’s not the same thing as privacy.  Anonymity is important at times, and essential in some lines of work, but it’s no universal answer for the general public.  The simple reason is few of us could spend much of our time in hiding.  We actually want to be known; we want others to have information about us, so long as that information is respected, kept in check, and not abused.  

Privacy rules apply to the category Personal Data (aka Personal Information or sometimes Personally Identifiable Information) which is essentially any record that can reasonably be associated with a natural person.  Privacy rules in general restrain the collection, use, disclosure, storage and ultimate disposal of Personal Data. The plain fact is that privacy is to protect information when it is not anonymous. 

Broad-based privacy or “data protection” laws have been spreading steadily worldwide ever since 1980 when the OECD developed its foundational privacy principles (incidentally with the mission of facilitating cross border trade, not throttling it).  Australia in 1988 was one of the world’s first countries to enact privacy law, and today is one among more than 130.  The E.U.’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) currently gets a lot of press but it’s basically an update to privacs codes which Europe has had for decades.  Now the U.S. too is coming to embrace broad-based data privacy, with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) going live this month. 

Daylight robbery

Long before the Clearview revelations, there have been calls for a moratorium on face recognition, and local government moves to ban the technology, for example in San Francisco.  Prohibition is always controversial because it casts aspersions on a whole class of things and tends to blur the difference between a technology and the effects of how it’s used.  

Instead of making a categorical judgement-call on face recognition, there is a way to focus on its effects through a tried and tested legal lens, namely existing international privacy law.  Not only can we moderate the excesses of commercial facial recognition without negotiating new regulations, we can re-invigorate privacy principles during this crucial period of American law reform. 

I wonder why privacy breaches for some people signal the end of privacy?  Officially, privacy is a universal human right, as is the right to own property. Does the existence of robbery mean the end of property rights? Hardly; in fact it’s quite the opposite! We all know there’s no such thing as perfect security, and that our legal rights transcend crime.  We should appreciate that privacy too is never going to be perfect, and not become dispirited or cynical by digital crime waves. 

What is the real problem here?

Under most international data protection law, the way that Clearview AI has scraped its reference material from social media sites breaches the privacy of the people in those three billion images.  We post pictures online for fun, not for the benefit of unknown technology companies and surveillance apparatus. To re-purpose personal images as raw material for a biometric search business is the first and foremost privacy problem in the Clearview case.  

There has inevitably been commentary that images posted on the Internet have entered the “public domain”, or that the social media terms & conditions allow for this type of use.  These are red herrings.  It might be counter-intuitive, but conventional privacy laws by and large do not care if the source of Personal Data is public, so the Collection Limitation Principle remains.  The words “public” and “private” don’t even feature in most information privacy law (which is why legislated privacy is often called “data protection”). 

Data untouched by human hands

The second problem with Clearview’s activity is more subtle, but is a model for how conventional data protection can impact many more contemporary technologies. The crucial point is that technology-neutral privacy laws don’t care how Personal Data is collected.  

If an item of Personal Data ends up in a database somewhere, then the law doesn’t care how it got there; it is considered to be collected.  Data collection can be direct and human-mediated, as with questionnaires or web forms, it can be passive as with computer audit logging, or it can be indirect yet deliberate through the action of algorithms. If data results from an algorithm and populates a database, untouched by human hands, then according to privacy law it is still subject to the same Collection Limitation, Use & Disclosure Limitation and Openness principles as if it had been collected by another person. 

The Australian Privacy Commissioner has developed specific advice about what they call Collection by Creation: 

The concept of ‘collects’ applies broadly, and includes gathering, acquiring or obtaining personal information from any source and by any means. This includes collection by ‘creation’ which may occur when information is created with reference to, or generated from, other information the entity holds.
Data analytics can lead to the creation of personal information. For example, this can occur when an entity analyses a large variety of non-identifying information, and in the process of analysing the information it becomes identified or reasonably identifiable. Similarly, insights about an identified individual from data analytics may lead to the collection of new categories of personal information. 

The outputs of a face search service are new records (or labels attached to existing records) which assert the identity of a person in an image. The assertions are new pieces of Personal Data, and their creation constitutes a collection. Therefore existing data protection laws apply to it. 

The use and disclosure of face matching is required by regular privacy law to be relevant, reasonable, proportionate and transparent. And thus the effect of facial recognition technology can be moderated by the sorts of laws most places already have, and which are now coming to the U.S. too. 

It’s never too late for privacy

Technology incidentally does not outpace the law; rather it seems to me technologists have not yet caught up with what long-standing privacy laws actually say. Biometrics certainly create new ways to break the law but by no means do they supersede it. 

This analysis can be generalised to other often troubling features of the today’s digital landscape, to better protect consumers, and give privacy advocates some cause for regulatory optimism. For instance, when datamining algorithms guess our retail preferences or, worse, estimate the state of our health without asking us any questions then we rightly feel violated.  Consumers should expect the law to protect them here, by putting limits on this type of powerful high tech wizardry, especially when it occurs behind their backs.  The good news is that privacy law does just that.  

CRM Is Not Enough! Amen. Now Where’s the Beef?

An interesting announcement—published as an ad in the Wall Street Journal—came to my attention the other day. A group of independent vendors led by Segment has publicly drawn a line in the proverbial sand. They’re saying it loud and they’re saying it proud: traditional CRM systems are not enough to meet the needs of businesses today.

This group calls for “flexible customer data infrastructure [that] can match the reality of today’s digital world.” Their declaration emphasizes that data should be available and used by every part of a business, not just marketing and sales. It decries rigid, siloed systems that can’t adapt to changing requirements to fulfill customer expectations. They call for choice, flexibility, and the opportunity for every organization to be customer-first.

To Segment, Airship, Amplitude, Drift, Iterable, Mixpanel, Outreach, Pendo, Radar, Tray.io, and the other signatories—some of whom I know well, some of which I’ve used—I salute you. I’ve written a thing or two about how crucial data and an enterprise-wide approach are to building durable customer relationships. You’re on the money. And you’re saying what many believe but few are willing to give voice, for a whole host of reasons that are better discussed on a podcast or over a pint.

But where’s the beef?

We agree on the objectives and the urgency of the need. In fact, just about everybody involved in trying to improve customer interactions, shape compelling customer experiences, and build great customer relationships does, too. But how will you help with the hard work of making it happen?

In particular, how do you propose tackling the most intractable challenge of all: creating a standard data model? (If anyone doubts the scale of this challenge, just start with trying to define a “customer” in a way that marketing, sales, service, finance, and legal can all agree on and work with. Then map it to two or more systems.)

We share an embarrassment of riches today in enterprise software and technology. Cloud-native offerings, API-based integration, and low-code/no-code workflow apps, along with a remarkable shift toward UI/UX design that actually anticipates the needs of workers doing their jobs, make it possible to create business systems that work the way people do. Matching those systems to the ways we want to operate may not exactly be easy, but it’s far easier than it was in the past. It’s also much faster and adaptable as things change. Implementing best-of-breed systems in the current environment makes a whole lot more sense as a result.

Without a core data model that provides a solid starting point, however, alternatives to enterprise suites remain a tough sell for any established company. This isn’t necessarily a “better” approach, it’s just a more practical one. Even the big players know they have to do something because this won’t be true for ever. Witness Oracle CX Unity, Salesforce’s Customer 360 Single Source of Truth, and the Open Data Initiative among SAP, Microsoft, and Adobe.

Which brings me to my request: for those of us who believe that there’s an alternative, even one that coexists with enterprise suites, what are you going to do next? How will you help make the vision a reality? Will this “platform of independents” work together to define a song book that everyone sings from? Are there any plans to create a formal working group or consortium?

You’ve got my attention. Now what?

“Rare Breed” authors Sunny Bonnell and Ashleigh Hansberger to Challenge Leaders to Be Defiant, Dangerous and Different During AXS Mind-Share Experience

Aubrey Coggins

Constellation Research

Aubrey (Levinstone) Coggins manages Constellation's marketing and communications programs and is the producer of DisrupTV, a weekly Web series on innovation and the enterprise.  She previously served as a senior manager of corporate communications at Egnyte and held account roles at Access Communications and The Hoffman Agency. Born and raised in Texas, she received a bachelor's degree in Public Relations from The University of Texas at Austin – Hook ‘em!   ...

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Rebellious. Audacious. Daring. Divergent.

Most advice guides encourage leaders to change their inherent characteristics to get the job, get the promotion and get the client. We are taught to “fit the mold” and hide those traits that make us different.

The authors of “Rare Breed” Sunny Bonnell and Ashleigh Hansberger will completely tear down this misconception and break away from the façade we have always constructed. I’m excited to see them take the main stage at our inaugural Ambient Experience Summit (AXS) in February with their keynote that will challenge attending leaders to set a course for strategic rebellion.

Bonnell and Hansberger will share their wisdom and insights from their radical "outside the box" book written for the mavericks, oddballs and visionaries they call “Rare Breeds.” Instead of trying to conform, leaders who follow their own paths will find success and make real impact.

The keynote highlights the tone and what to expect for the entire conference, which will be hosted in Atlanta on February 26–27, 2020. This exclusive, invitation-only event will bring together leaders who understand and anticipate customers’ needs and recognize that customers call the shots.

Through think-tank-style workshops, panels, fireside chats and networking sessions, we will focus on knowledge sharing and best practices for CX around organizational change, redefining processes and changes in thinking. Leaders in this customer experience movement will share valuable insights and lessons learned in their own transformations. Together (during and after the event), we’ll keep raising the bar to improve CX and design the experiences that serve them well.

AXS will kick off with an awesome Porsche driving experience and will conclude with a celebration of the experience leaders listed on this year’s AX50 who have already started charting their unconventional and rebellious course. These are daring, global executives who are unafraid of delivering amazing, transformative experiences across the enterprise.

Hope to see you at AXS 2020! Get ready for a bold, wild ride!

Sex, Spatial and Rock ‘n Roll: Dr Janice Presser Takes on Tech When I Started #Asking4 Aubrey

Liz Miller

Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

About Liz Miller: Liz Miller is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation, focused on the org-wide team sport known as customer experience. While covering CX as an enterprise strategy, Miller spends time zeroing in on the functional demands of Marketing and Service and the evolving role of the Chief Marketing Officer, the rise of the Chief Experience Officer, the evolution of customer engagement, and the rising requirement for a new security posture that accounts for the threat to brand trust in this age of AI. With over 30 years of marketing experience, Miller offers strategic guidance on the leadership, business transformation, and technology requirements to deliver on today’s CX strategies. She has worked with global marketing organizations to transform everything from…...

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Ever thought about building a team? Ever tried to do it? Ever wonder why it didn’t turn out like you thought? Dr. Janice Presser is someone you should know.

A world-renowned systems scientist and team architect, Dr. J (as she is lovingly known amongst the Constellation team) is the originator of Teaming Science and the primary architect of Teamability, a technology that measures how people will perform in teams.

For over 25 years, she has been the leading expert in teams, from how to build them to how to recognize the strengths and boundaries of human infrastructure. She is, at her core, an explorer of the human condition and a cheerleader for what makes everyone a visionary, a leader, a contributor and a wonderfully complex part of a team.

Who better to ask what’s next, especially when our own head of Marketing, Aubrey Coggins, is the one asking? Specifically, Aubrey wanted to know what technology Dr. J is curious about as we kick off a new year and decade. Here is her answer when we started #Asking4 Aubrey.

Q from Aubrey Coggins: What tech are you keeping your eye on – it can be personal, professional or profoundly peculiar – as we move into the next decade?

A by Dr. Janice Presser: For me, I think of this in the context of what is personal, what is professional, and then what is profoundly peculiar – or indomitably individualistic as I might prefer!

First up the personal. Since serving on the spatial computing panel at Constellation Connected Enterprise 2019 (#CCE2019), I’ve given a lot of thought to how the collective technologies the term encompasses will change our lives. I expect that there will be more drones, more robotic household appliances, and more charging stations for electric cars, but that these relatively simple - and benign - technologies will be confined to more privileged communities. What concerns me more is the edge of spatial that threatens to replace human interaction with fantasy-driven entertainment, especially for young people. My hope is, of course, that someone will want to integrate teaming science content into the gaming wonders of this next decade.

Next, let’s take on the professional. I expect my focus will turn more to the technologies that will keep we Boomers in shape. I don’t expect to ever retire, which is much easier when all you do is consult and write, but I do want to watch the technologies that will keep me mobile, comfortable, and sassy as ever. Electric cars are fine, but if all I need is something to get me to local pubs, entertainment, and the gym, I’d much prefer a self-driving golf cart - lighter, less expensive, and absolutely non-polluting please! I’m watching some new health-related technologies, including an at-home physical therapy machine that minimizes treatment-related injury. Finally, I’m keeping an eye on any technology related to sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll because, well, that’s what’s kept Boomers going this far. With new advances in streaming and recent news that the biggest explosion in podcasting is porn, there’s going to be plenty to observe and comment on.

Finally, the indomitably individualist tech. I’m watching more in the arena of politics. How will we ensure that each vote counts - first, by being counted? How will we deal with the fact that some people don’t have just one district? Will identity technologies eliminate the need to attach ourselves to one address - or any permanent one? If something is technologically possible and available, how will we evolve the law to align with how people really live?

Regardless of where you are looking, may 2020 be the beginning of your best technology decade ever!

More About Dr. Janice Presser: Dr. Janice spent her formative years researching how people team together and found answers in systems theory and physics. Having written her first line of code in high school, she was positioned to architect a system to measure how people work together, in business and personal life, and develop the underlying theory and practice of Teaming Science. The technology is available for business uses – hiring and other management decision making – at Teamability.com. The author of seven books on teaming, she is currently working on the question of how spatial technology will impact human relationships in the future and invites inquiries at TeamingScience.com.

More About Aubrey Coggins: Aubrey Coggins manages Constellation's marketing and communications programs and is the producer of DisrupTV, a weekly Web series on innovation and the enterprise. She is a talented marketing and editing professional with expertise in technology marketing and public relations. If you are interested in being a guest on DisrupTV, Aubrey is the person to connect with and wow with your point of view!

Host Analytics Rebrands as ‘Planful’ to Emphasize Continuous Planning

Doug Henschen

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Doug Henschen is former Vice President and Principal Analyst where he focused on data-driven decision making. Henschen’s Data-to-Decisions research examines how organizations employ data analysis to reimagine their business models and gain a deeper understanding of their customers. Henschen's research acknowledges the fact that innovative applications of data analysis requires a multi-disciplinary approach starting with information and orchestration technologies, continuing through business intelligence, data-visualization, and analytics, and moving into NoSQL and big-data analysis, third-party data enrichment, and decision-management technologies. Insight-driven business models are of interest to the entire C-suite, but most particularly chief executive officers, chief digital officers,…...

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Host Analytics gets its identity in sync with its platform and what’s most important to customers.

I have yet to meet anyone who says they do “corporate performance management.” But I have met plenty of people who say they’re financial planning and analysis (FP&A) professionals. Indeed, if you search the Internet, you’ll quickly find FP&A certification programs and plenty of online resources for corporate financial planners.

Seeking to update its identity with a brand that finance professionals can better relate to, Host Analytics announced on January 15 that it’s changing its name to “Planful.”

What’s in a name? Grant Halloran, the instigator of the change and Host’s CEO since July 2019, points out that the new name is a real word. I looked it up, and Merriam-Webster has two definitions for planful: 1: full of plans: resourceful, scheming and 2: according to a plan: persistent and arousing of the mind. I’m not sure about the scheming part, but what finance executive would not want to be described as “full of plans, resourceful, persistent” and “arousing of the mind?” Better still, it’s every FP&A professional’s objective to have things go “according to plan,” unless, of course, they could “exceed all plans.”

The company wanted to get away from “Host” for the obvious reason that the word is a relic from 2001, the infancy of cloud tech and the year the company was founded. As for the focus on planning, I myself having been advocating a move away from corporate performance management – an aging name for the technology that users never really adopted.

Last summer I changed the name of our “Constellation ShortList for Corporate Performance Management” to the “Constellation ShortList for Cloud-based Planning Platforms.” As I explained back then, the name change reflected “broad strategic and operational use [of the tech] outside the boundaries of finance” as well as “end-user adoption of ‘financial planning and analysis’ as the name of the discipline that they practice.”

What, exactly, will change with this rebranding? I was glad to hear it’s mostly about messaging and the conversation with customers rather than the vendor’s product, which has been on my ShortList for years (despite the dated moniker). In another brand tweak, the platform’s modeling capabilities will be renamed “Dynamic Planning.”

Importantly for customers, the company will continue to invest in all aspects of the platform. Financial consolidation and reporting, for example, will “continue to be an anchor and differentiator,” Brian Martell, director of product marketing, told me. “Solid figures from consolidation and reporting are the bedrock of accurate plans and are critical to driving more agile planning cycles.”

Planful execs also talk about helping to “elevate the financial IQ of the entire organization.” That happens when organizations spread planning outside of finance and when finance leaders collaborate more effectively with budget owners. Planning platforms also help companies to drive toward continuous planning, accelerating from annual and quarterly planning to monthly, weekly and event-triggered planning cycles that enable companies to quickly adapt, pivot and innovate. Planful reports that customers moving from manual, spreadsheet-based methods to its platform shorten planning and forecasting cycle times by up to 50%, reduce reporting time by 90%, and reduce average time to close by up to 75%.

Amen to acceleration. As I wrote in “Why the Digital Era Demands Agile Planning,” my latest report on this category, “All too many business and financial leaders rely on months-old budget projections and lagging financial measures to gauge the state and direction of their businesses.” Cloud-based planning platforms give companies better visibility into the latest business conditions while agile planning and forecasting capabilities help them to innovate and be the disruptor instead of the disrupted.

The cloud and digitization have leveled the playing field for midsize companies and upstart innovators in many respects, but these advantages can be forfeited when relying on siloed, spreadsheet-based financial planning and analysis methods that are anything but agile. Modern FP&A professionals know there’s a better way.