Webinar: Big Privacy

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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I'm presenting a Constellation Research webinar next week on my latest research into "Big Privacy" (June 18th in the US / June 19th in Australia). I hope you can join us.

We live in an age where billionaires are self-made on the back of the most intangible of assets - the information they have amassed about us. That information used to be volunteered in forms and questionnaires and contracts but increasingly personal information is being observed and inferred.

The modern world is awash with data. It's a new and infinitely re-usable raw material. Most of the raw data about us is an invisible by-product of our mundane digital lives, left behind by the gigabyte by ordinary people who do not perceive it let alone understand it.

Many Big Data and digital businesses proceed on the basis that all this raw data is up for grabs. There is a particular widespread assumption that data in the "public domain" is free-for-all, and if you're clever enough to grab it, then you're entitled to extract whatever you can from it.

In the webinar, I'll try to show how some of these assumptions are naive. The public is increasingly alarmed about Big Data and averse to unbridled data mining. Excessive data mining isn't just subjectively 'creepy'; it can be objectively unlawful in many parts of the world. Conventional data protection laws turn out to be surprisingly powerful in in the face of Big Data. Data miners ignore international privacy laws at their peril!

Today there are all sorts of initiatives trying to forge a new technology-privacy synthesis. They go by names like "Privacy Engineering" and "Privacy by Design". These are well meaning efforts but they can be a bit stilted. They typically overlook the strengths of conventional privacy law, and they can miss an opportunity to engage the engineering mind.

It's not politically correct but I believe we must admit that privacy is full of contradictions and competing interests. We need to be more mature about privacy. Just as there is no such thing as perfect security, there can never be perfect privacy either. And is where the professional engineering mindset should be brought in, to help deal with conflicting requirements.

If we're serious about so-called Privacy by Design and Privacy Engineering then we need to acknowledge the tensions. That's some of the thinking behind Constellation's new Big Privacy compact. To balance privacy and Big Data, we need to hold a conversation with users that respects the stresses and strains, and involves them in working through the new privacy deal.

The webinar will cover these highlights of the Big Privacy pact:

• Respect and Restraint
•  
• Super transparency
•  
• And a fair deal for Personal Information.

June 18, 2014 1:00p.m. PT/ 4pm ET

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News Analysis - Progress Software acquires Modulus - gets hip and bridges the old with the new

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Holger Mueller is VP and Principal Analyst for Constellation Research for the fundamental enablers of the cloud, IaaS, PaaS and next generation Applications, with forays up the tech stack into BigData and Analytics, HR Tech, and sometimes SaaS. Holger provides strategy and counsel to key clients, including Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Product Officers, Chief HR Officers, investment analysts, venture capitalists, sell-side firms, and technology buyers.  Coverage Areas: Future of Work Tech Optimization & Innovation  Background: Before joining Constellation Research, Mueller was VP of Products for NorthgateArinso, a KKR company. There, he led the transformation of products to the cloud and laid the foundation for new Business Process as a…...

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Somewhat surprisingly Progress Software this morning announced the acquisition of Cincinnati based Modulus. Not so surprising if you follow Progress more closely and see the significant steps the vendor is taking to create value for its large install base.

So let’s take a look at the press release:

Progress (NASDAQ: PRGS), today announced it has acquired Cincinnati, Ohio-based Modulus, a privately held company that provides a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for easily hosting, deploying, scaling and monitoring data-intensive, real-time applications using powerful, rapidly growing Node.js and MongoDB technologies. Financial terms were not disclosed.

MyPOV – A key move by Progress that discloses all the value propositions that Modulus brings to Progress and its customers. A fast way to deploy to deploy next generation applications leveraging PaaS techniques, node.js and MongoDB.


The Modulus Node.js and MongoDB cloud platform is designed to simplify and speed development of the new generation of scalable, always connected business and consumer apps that are constantly monitored and optimized for the best experience. The Modulus platform is ideally suited for real-time mobile, SaaS, social and Big Data apps that run across distributed devices and can seamlessly handle floods of data requests with built-in performance monitoring and analytics.

MyPOV – A good description on what Modulus does – deliver next generation applications that are highly scalable, distributed across devices and delivered through the cloud. All application attributes that Progress has been traditionally lacking for its applications, and recently (the last 2-3 years) been adding capabilities both through internal development and acquisitions.


The Modulus platform is offered both as a hosted service and can also be deployed by enterprises in public, private and hybrid clouds as well as in an on-premise infrastructure. Modulus Enterprise is the first and only enterprise Node.js PaaS available as a licensed product, allowing businesses and ISVs to deploy next-generation apps faster and at a lower total cost. With Modulus, more time can be spent on creating and modernizing apps and less time worrying about deployment infrastructure.

MyPOV – Modulus’ flexible deployment options, all the way to private cloud have certainly made the vendor more attractive to Progress, as Progress customers for a number of reasons still have a significant portion of on premise deployed applications. Progress has realized that for a number or reasons, these customers will not move their applications to the public cloud, so thanks to Modulus’ private cloud deployment, modern platforms like node.js and MongoDB as well as techniques like continuous deployment and application monitoring will be available for Progress customers.


Founded in 2012, Modulus has more than 450 customers of all sizes and is a leader in the Node.js community. Progress is committed to continuing and expanding Modulus' contributions and role in this community. The core technologies that Modulus supports are among the fastest growing in the industry. Node.js is designed for easily building high performing, scalable network applications using the ubiquitous JavaScript programming language. MongoDB is the leading NoSQL database system and is designed for scalability, performance and high availability.

MyPOV – Nothing documents providing value to customers better than rapid growth in the customer base – and with Modulus having 450 customers in only a little more than two years of existence is certainly a key proof point. Progress customers can now build their next generation applications with modern, state of the art technologies that last but not least are also popular with the developer community.

Surely in less than a few hours after the release there will be pundits deploring an end of innovation here, but Progress would be foolish of not continuing to support the Modulus product commitments and roadmap. In contrary – I would expect Progress to double down on the Modulus side as the offering is something Progress has been chasing to create since a number of years – a modern PaaS platform.

With the addition of the Modulus capabilities into its PaaS portfolio, Progress now offers the industry's most comprehensive set of cloud, mobile, hybrid and on-premise development, data and business rules technologies.

MyPOV – Let’s leave the marketing beside – the key thing is that Progress has become a lot more attractive to its customer base. Progress also has a whole new set of reasons its existing customers to keep looking at the vendor and keep building applications with Progress tools.

Overall MyPOV

A very good move by Progress. Now it needs to create and publish the roadmap of bringing proven and appreciated Progress capabilities to the new Modulus platform. And as well harmonize and communicate how Modulus fits in the overall Progress PaaS strategy, something I am sure the team around CTO Padir is been working on. Lastly I am sure a whole lot of millennial developers will have the answer on the question ‘Progress who?’ figured out on June 9th 2014. Not a bad side effect for the proven and venerable Progress Software.

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Other technology posts

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Watson the Doctor is no laughing matter

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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For the past year, oncologists at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre in New York have been training IBM's Watson - the artificial intelligence tour-de-force that beat allcomers on Jeopardy - to help personalise cancer care. The Centre explains that "combining [their] expertise with the analytical speed of IBM Watson, the tool has the potential to transform how doctors provide individualized cancer treatment plans and to help improve patient outcomes". Others are speculating already that Watson could "soon be the best doctor in the world".

I have no doubt that when Watson and things like it are available online to doctors worldwide, we will see wonderful overall improvements in healthcare outcomes, especially in parts of the world now under-serviced by medical specialists. As with Google's self-driving car, we will probably get terrific gains averaged across the population from replacing humans with machines. Yet some of the foibles of computing are not well known and I think they will lead to surprises.

For all the wondrous gains made in Artificial Intelligence, where Watson now is the state-of-the art, A.I. remains algorithmic, and for that, it has inherent limitations that don't get enough attention. Computer Scientists and mathematicians have know for years that some surprisingly straightforward problems have no algorithmic solution. That is, some tasks cannot be accomplished by any universal step-by-step codified procedure. Examples include the Halting Problem and the Travelling Salesperson Problem. If these simple challenges have no algorithm, we need be more sober in our expectations of computerised intelligence.

A key limitation of any programmed algorithm is that it must make its decisions using a fixed set of inputs that are known and fully characterised (by the programmer) at design time. If you spring an unexpected input on any computer, it can fail, and yet that's what life is all about -- surprises. No mathematician seriously claims that what humans do is somehow magic; most believe we are computers made of meat. Nevertheless, when paradoxes like the Halting Problem abound, we can be sure that computing and cognition are not what they seem. We should hope these conundrums are better understood before putting too much faith in computers doing deep human work.

And yet, predictably, futurists are jumping ahead to imagine "Watson apps" in which patients access the supercomputer for themselves. Even if there were reliable algorithms for doctoring, I reckon the "Watson app" is a giant step, because of the complex way the patient's conditions are assessed and data is gathered for the diagnosis. That is, the taking of the medical history.
In these days of billion dollar investments in electronic health records (EHRs), we tend to think that medical decisions are all about the data. When politicians announce EHR programs they often boast that patients won't have to go through the rigmarole of giving their history over and over again to multiple doctors as they move through an episode of care. This is actually a serious misunderstanding of the importance in clinical decision making of the interaction between medico and patient when the history is taken. It's subtle. The things a patient chooses to tell, the things they seem to be hiding, and the questions that make them anxious, all guide an experienced medico when taking a history, and provide extra cues (metadata if you will) about the patient's condition.

Now, Watson may well have the ability to navigate this complexity and conduct a very sophisticated Q&A. It will certainly have a vastly bigger and more reliable memory of cases than any doctor, and with that it can steer a dynamic patient questionnaire. But will Watson be good enough to make it available direct to patients through an app, with no expert human mediation? Or will a host of new input errors result from patients typing their answers into a smart phone or speaking into a microphone, without any face-to-face subtlety (let alone human warmth)? It was true of mainframes and it's just as true of the best A.I.: Bulldust in, bulldust out.

Finally, Watson's existing linguistic limitations are not to be underestimated. It is surely not trivial that Watson struggles with puns and humour. Futurist Mark Pesce when discussing Watson remarked in passing that scientists don't understand the "quirks of language and intelligence" that create humour. The question of what makes us laugh does in fact occupy some of the finest minds in cognitive and social science. So we are a long way from being able to mechanise humour. And this matters because for the foreseeable future, it puts a great deal of social intercourse beyond AI's reach.

In between the extremes of laugh-out-loud comedy and a doctor's dry written notes lies a spectrum of expressive subtleties, like a blush, an uncomfortable laugh, shame, and the humiliation that attends some peoples' experience of ill health. Watson may understand the English language, but does it understand people?

Watson can answer questions, but good doctors ask a lot of questions too. When will this amazing computer be able to hold the sort of two-way conversation that we would call a decent "bedside manner"?

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Additional Resources

Three Billion was a Snap - Why even selfies deserve data protection
Data to Decisions

Tales of the One in Ten

Gavin Heaton

Founder
Disruptors Co

Gavin is the Founder of Disruptors Co, one of Australia’s leading independent strategy and innovation companies. Gavin advises firms on strategy, marketing, product development and innovation. He is also a member of the Orbits program, the influencer network of award winning analyst and advisory firm, Constellation Research. Gavin advises boards and leadership on innovation strategy, marketing, data-driven product development and corporate venturing. Gavin is on the board of Vibewire, a youth-led social enterprise based in Sydney, Australia and on the Technology Advisory Group for Good2Give – the workplace giving platform. ...

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But then something happens that he could never have imagined.

Watch and share and help change someone else’s story.

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The Enterprise Mobility Problem

Brian Katz

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Brian Katz is a director at pharmaceutical company Sanofi, where he manages mobile initiatives, including mobilizing the salesforce, building best practices for developing apps, handling BYOD initiatives, enabling new devices and form factors for success, and looking at ways to innovate in the mobile space for Sanofi. He started his career working with a multi-national New York financial company as an email architect, designing and maintaining their email and communications systems, which also involved supporting their mobile computing platforms. ...

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The question needs to be asked whether these enterprises should care. The BYOD (Bring your own device) faithful will insist that the enterprises must care, as employees will use any device they fancy and they must be ready. Security will insist on it, as the new features are always new things to be blocked until the din reaches the crescendo of caring, forcing them to truly examine if an issue exists, most often it doesn’t. Yet, we let it go unsaid, in almost every corner enterprises are looking at mobility wrong, except for the few in that rarified air.

You see, mobility is this bell that all are ringing, loud and clear. They have seen the drummer and are marching to his beat, handing out smartphones and tablets left and right. Apple is cleaning up in the enterprise and Samsung is starting to make some headway for Android. It’s like an episode of Oprah, you walk into work one day and look beneath your seat and there’s a tablet or smartphone waiting. If you are really lucky there might even be a few apps preloaded or the companies that really get it have an app store already setup and ready to go, filled with apps that fit your needs.

The funny thing is, 6 months later, they all start asking where all the new productivity is that they read about in every Wall Street Journal or even the New York Times. They thought that all they had to do was hand the devices out. They setup basic PIM functionality. Everyone can get their email, contacts and calendaring on their devices. According to IBM they should be getting an extra hour a day of productivity from each person. Some think that if they give their users smartphones and tablets they should get two extra hours each day.

Along the way, these companies forgot what they were doing in the first place. They built their business and created a strategy for growth and profit. They hired good people and gave them the tools they needed to get their jobs done. Then these shiny little objects that came with stories of unheard of productivity and efficiency distracted them. It caused them to stray from the basics that made them good companies in the first place. There was no strategy when these mobile devices were rolled out, other than they would work. They forgot that mobility is just another tool in the arsenal of their workers. These tools required jobs that could be done with them. The jobs couldn’t be done exactly the same way they had been in the past because those tools already existed. They had to be suited for a new way of working. They had to be fit to their workers wants and needs. They necessitated a loosening of the old ways of doing things and needed to give heed to new apps and devices that allowed more flexibility and agility.

Mobile devices, in and of themselves, are pointless. They aren’t tools. It’s only when you combine the mobile devices with the right apps, that they become tools fit to the right need. It’s when they take an old business process and turn it on its head because they enable a new, better way for it to be performed that they are successful. It’s when it allows someone to enter information in a system instantaneously after it is acquired versus the old way of writing it down, walking back to their desk and inputting it that it becomes efficient. When a pilot no longer has to carry 20 pounds of manuals for a flight and then leaf through to find the right page, but instead just types in the search box of their tablet to find the right procedure that it becomes successful. When approvals that required an email, a web browser, a SharePoint session, and a complete approval flow taking 30 minutes in total and a PC become a mobile app where the manager reviews the case and clicks approve in 2 minutes, then you’ve become successful.

An enterprise can ignore the goings on in mobile or throw themselves whole hog into giving their workers devices, but until they integrate mobile into their business strategy, processes and procedures, all they’ve done is spend a lot of money on some really shiny toys.

Reflections on the Future of the Cloud at SAPPHIRENOW

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

R “Ray” Wang is the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He co-hosts DisrupTV, a weekly enterprise tech and leadership webcast that averages 50,000 views per episode and blogs at www.raywang.org. His ground-breaking best-selling book on digital transformation, Disrupting Digital Business, was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2015. Ray's new book about Digital Giants and the future of business, titled, Everybody Wants to Rule The World was released in July 2021. Wang is well-quoted and frequently interviewed by media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Cheddar, and Bloomberg. Short Bio R “Ray” Wang (pronounced WAHNG) is the Founder, Chairman, and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He…...

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In this post panel debrief, R "Ray" Wang shares his insights regarding the future of the cloud and shares how the cloud enables the transformation to digital. 

View more great video content in our media library. 

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Three Billion was a Snap - why even selfies deserve data protection

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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The latest Snowden revelations include the NSA's special programs for extracting photos and identifying from the Internet. Amongst other things the NSA uses their vast information resources to correlate location cues in photos -- buildings, streets and so on -- with satellite data, to work out where people are. They even search especially for passport photos, because these are better fodder for facial recognition algorithms. The audacity of these government surveillance activities continues to surprise us, and their secrecy is abhorrent.

Yet an ever greater scale of private sector surveillance has been going on for years in social media. With great pride,Facebook recently revealed its R&D in facial recognition. They showcased the brazenly named "DeepFace" biometric algorithm, which is claimed to be 97% accurate in recognising faces from regular images. Facebook has made a swaggering big investment in biometrics.

   "Big Privacy: The New Big Data Privacy Pact" webinar June 18
   

    Data mining needs raw material, there's lots of it out there, and Facebook has been supremely clever at attracting it.It's been suggested that 20% of all photos now taken end up in Facebook.     Even three years ago, Facebook held 10,000 times as many photographs as the Library of Congress:

[Picture courtesy of the now retired 1000memories.com blog]

And Facebook will spend big bucks buying other photo lodes. Last year they tried to buy Snapchat for the spectacular sum of three billion dollars. The figure had pundits reeling. How could a start-up company with 30 people be worth so much? All the usual dot com comparisons were made; the offer seemed a flight of fancy.

But no, the offer was a rational consideration for the precious raw material that lies buried in photo data.

Snapchat generates at least 100 million new images every day. Three billion dollars was, pardon me, a snap. I figure that at a ballpark internal rate of return of 10%, a $3B investment is equivalent to $300M p.a. so even if the Snapchat volume stopped growing, Facebook would have been paying one cent for every new snap, in perpetuity.

These days, we have learned from Snowden and the NSA that communications metadata is just as valuable as the content of our emails and phone calls. So remember that it's the same with photos. Each digital photo comes from a device that embeds within the image metadata usually including the time and place of when the picture was taken. And of course each Instagram or Snapchat is a social post, sent by an account holder with a history and rich context in which the image yields intimate real time information about what they're doing, when and where.

The hallmark of the Snapchat service is transience: all those snaps are supposed to flit from one screen to another before vaporising. Now of course that idea is contestable; enthusiasts worked out pretty quickly how to retrieve snaps from old memory. And in any case, transience is a red herring, perhaps a deliberate distraction, because the metadata matters more, and Snapchat admits in its Privacy Policy that it pretty well keeps the lot:

• When you access or use our Services, we automatically collect information about you, including:
• Usage Information: When you send or receive messages via our Services, we collect information about these messages, including the time, date, sender and recipient of the Snap. We also collect information about the number of messages sent and received between you and your friends and which friends you exchange messages with most frequently.
• Log Information: We log information about your use of our websites, including your browser type and language, access times, pages viewed, your IP address and the website you visited before navigating to our websites.
• Device Information: We may collect information about the computer or device you use to access our Services, including the hardware model, operating system and version, MAC address, unique device identifier, phone number, International Mobile Equipment Identity ("IMEI") and mobile network information. In addition, the Services may access your device's native phone book and image storage applications, with your consent, to facilitate your use of certain features of the Services.
• Location Information: With your consent, we may collect information about the location of your device to facilitate your use of certain features of our Services, determine the speed at which your device is traveling, add location-based filters to your Snaps (such as local weather), and for any other purpose described in this privacy policy.

Snapchat goes on to declare it may use any of this information to "personalize and improve the Services and provide advertisements, content or features that match user profiles or interests" and it reserves the right to share any information with "vendors, consultants and other service providers who need access to such information to carry out work on our behalf".

So back to the data mining: nothing stops Snapchat -- or a new parent company -- running biometric facial recognition over the snaps as they pass through the servers, to extract additional "profile" information. And there's an extra kicker that makes Snapchats extra valuable for biometric data miners. The vast majority of Snapchats are selfies. So if you extract a biometric template from a snap, you already know who it belongs to, without anyone having to tag it. Snapchat would provide a hundred million auto-calibrations every day for facial recognition algorithms! On Facebook, the privacy aware turn off photo tagging, but with Snapchats, self identification is inherent to the experience and is unlikely to be ever be disabled.

As I've discussed before, the morbid thrill of Snowden's spying revelations has tended to overshadow his sober observations that when surveillance by the state is probably inevitable, we need to be discussing accountability.

While we're all ventilating about the NSA, it's time we also attended to private sector spying and properly debated the restraints that may be appropriate on corporate exploitation of social data.

Personally I'm much more worried that an infomopoly has all my selfies.

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First Take - Sapphire 2014 Day 1 Keynote - Top 3 Takeaways

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Holger Mueller is VP and Principal Analyst for Constellation Research for the fundamental enablers of the cloud, IaaS, PaaS and next generation Applications, with forays up the tech stack into BigData and Analytics, HR Tech, and sometimes SaaS. Holger provides strategy and counsel to key clients, including Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Product Officers, Chief HR Officers, investment analysts, venture capitalists, sell-side firms, and technology buyers.  Coverage Areas: Future of Work Tech Optimization & Innovation  Background: Before joining Constellation Research, Mueller was VP of Products for NorthgateArinso, a KKR company. There, he led the transformation of products to the cloud and laid the foundation for new Business Process as a…...

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We are attending Sapphire 2014 in Orlando and it’s time to see how the SAP under soon to be sole CEO Bill McDermott will start messaging and communicating

And different it was with a 30 minute start with young leaders presenting how they change things with Innovation, being polyglot, starting radio stations in Africa and learning to code. Nice – but begged the question what it had to do with SAP and why it got so much room in the keynote. 

Social Discovery’s Time Is Now

X1

Barry Murphy is the Senior Vice President of Product Marketing and Strategy at X1.  In this role, Barry leads X1's product marketing function, aligning X1's offerings to market needs for search and information access, eDiscovery, cloud and virtual search, and social discovery. Barry joins X1 from eDJ Group, where he was an analyst and thought leader in information governance, eDiscovery, records management, and content archiving. Previously, Barry was Director of Product Marketing at Mimosa Systems, a leading content archiving and eDiscovery software provider. He joined Mimosa after a highly successful stint as Principal Analyst for eDiscovery, records management, and content archiving at Forrester Research. Barry received a B.S. from the State University of New York at…...

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The 80/20 rule tends to apply in all aspects of life, and it is certainly applying to social discovery, at least in terms of who “gets it” and who doesn’t.  I say that because, when I talk to folks about social discovery, about 80% of them feel that it is a fringe issue that will be something to deal with in the distant future.  Only 20% realize that social discovery is happening now and that getting ahead of the curve presents a huge opportunity.

On the surface, it would seem problematic that so few embrace the realities that social media is here to stay in the business world.  According to Forrester Research’s The State Of Consumers And Technology: Benchmark 2013, US, “consumers of all age groups use social networking. From the 85% of Gen Zers to the 57% of the Golden Generation who visit Facebook at least monthly, social networking is ingrained in the Internet experience for all generations. Consumers use social media to interact with companies, too. The average US online Facebook user “likes” 14 brands on Facebook, while almost seven out of 10 social networkers engage with brands on social media.”  That social media content is discoverable is not up for debate; the argument tends to be around whether actual social discovery is mainstream yet.

The proactive management (e.g. archiving) of social media is not yet a mainstream practice in US enterprises.  In talking to a colleague at an archiving vendor, the primary reason for this is cost.  Yes, there is a lack of maturity in policies (both usage and retention) and a fear that simply journaling social media into an archive will just bloat digital landfills, but the primary issue is cost.  This is because most of the solutions for capturing social media into an archive are hosted and have recurring subscription and storage fees.  As a result, the starting cost – just to add social media to an archive – is over $25,000.  For most enterprises, that additional cost is a non-starter.

Just because proactive management of social media is not mainstream does not mean that social discovery as a practice is not.  I can look at the sales numbers for X1’s Social Discovery (X1SD) product and tell you that the growth rate is such that it is clear the practice is widespread.  I have also heard from service providers that are doing over 30 Facebook collections per week.  To me, that indicates that social discovery is a mainstream practice.  With X1SD, the cost issue is averted because the starting cost is less than $1,500.  Plus, the filtering capabilities allow investigators to only pass potentially relevant content downstream in the eDiscovery lifecycle.  And, being a desktop install means that no custody or control issues will pop up (especially important in the law enforcement use-case).

Most of the coverage of social media tools focus on the marketing use-cases – for example enterprise listening platforms and social relationship platforms.  Those use-cases serve important business functions, but discovery platforms need to meet a higher standard.  They need to show defensibility and have great control over custody of the data.  With such capabilities in place and in use today, it is only a matter of time before enterprises connect the dots and begin addressing social discovery with as much discipline as they do collection of email and other enterprise content.

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