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…...

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If you weren’t able to be at CCE2019, you missed it. Here “it” is…at minute 26 and 37 seconds in the exceptional fireside chat with Vint Cerf. “It” is the moment you hear Ritchie Etwaru, Founder and CEO of Hu-manity.co, utter words that would later go viral: ”I’m asking for Vala…”

For those in the room, it became the ultimate inside joke. Vala Afshar, Chief Digital Evangelist at Salesforce and co-host of DisrupTV, is not exactly a shy wallflower terrified of asking his own questions. For me, what this moment revealed was the camaraderie and connection that the Constellation Community has spawned.

In that spirit, we introduce the #Asking4__________ blog, where we ask big questions of this broad network of thinkers, innovators and friends to capture and share their insights. To kick us off, we went to one of our brightest stars in the community Andrew Nebus. I’m pretty sure that if you looked up transformation leader, you’d see a picture of Andrew. This time around, I’m asking some questions for myself…mainly because I am greedy and because I can. That and Vala was super busy…so…you know…

Liz Miller (LM) Q: What is the next big thing – that “thing” in 2020 that could disrupt it all?

Andrew Nebus (NB) A: I see infinite ambient orchestration of experiences taking off in 2020. This has been in the works for some time, but a nexus of technology improvements is hitting now. One of the keys is the growth of AI services general availability. Another is serverless, opening up experience-based designs orchestrating underlying tech. Serverless is at a critical tipping point.

LM Q: What was the big lesson learned in 2019 that will change how you approach things in 2020?

AN A: I learn something almost every day. Staying teachable is one of the most important things each of us can do. It is also important that we re-learn lessons.

Something I learned again: I love vacationing with my father. He used to join me at tech conferences in the early 2000s and have a blast hanging out exploring cities. This year, we took a great trip to Iceland. I re-learned how fun it is to explore with him. In 2020, I am booking more father-son trips. (Note to Andrew: I hear Half Moon Bay is AMAZING in October…)

LM Q: Three technologies you are keeping an eye on moving into the next decade – for either personal, professional or profoundly peculiar reasons and why?

AN A: Green Tech: In this decade we are going to have much bigger disruptions in battery development, energy supply chains, and plant-based meat. I am looking for profound improvements to tackle decarbonization challenges at scale. We cannot expect individuals to take all the actions to solve the problems of giant industries and nations.

Next, with exponential growth of AI, automations, and algorithmic managers, I am watching the bias and harm of automated tech. As Chris Salles said at CCE2019, even innocuous sounding automations & human augmentation has impacts on the other side. We need leaders to step up. "Discrimination blind" tech and policies will continue to harm disadvantaged communities.

And I am going to take a mulligan. Like everyone, I am keeping an eye on autonomous vehicles. They are chock full of enough tech for any geek to enjoy, and I love platforms. Personally, I want safer driving technology and increased mobility for folks. There will be huge impacts on employment and even how roads work, a lot to watch.

LM Q: Technologies from the last decade you are saying goodbye to as we move into this new decade?

AN A: This is a hard one, as I hang on to things for quite some time… I just recycled a Laserdisc player.

First, I have bought my last internal combustion vehicle. The major range anxiety, charging time, and so forth have been mostly solved and electric works for me. It will take a while for the industry to change, but it will get there, and we will see a lot in the next decade. I am excited to see what my second* electric vehicle will be by 2030! (*Third if we count an electric Ford Ranger I used sometimes back in my Edison days.)

Next, goodbye Python 2.7! It is hard to believe this version came out in 2010, but it has been a rock star for a decade. It and its libraries changed so much about so much, including data science. In January it goes end-of-life. Of course, I won't say goodbye to Python, only version 2!

Finally, all the failed video/augmented reality headsets of the 2010s. I’ve had versions of this tech for so long, and the hit is not released yet. Goodbye Google Glass, Microsoft HoloLens, even Oculus Rift/Quest/Go. I’m looking forward to new mixed reality in the next decade.

About Andrew Nebus:

Andrew's extensive background includes building high performing teams, rethinking organizations, and executive strategy. Expertise includes architecture, data science, information security and compliance, and organizational transformation. He advises on the impact of digital transformation, evidence-based decision making, AI, data privacy, Blockchain, chatbots, and how digital disruption overcomes legacy organizational culture. He has a reputation for perceptual acuity and building trusted versions of organizations.

Andrew is currently at ASRC Federal. ASRC Federal companies deliver a wide range of services to help United States Federal government customers execute their critical missions. He has served as Command Staff and CIO at the Baltimore City Police Department, TAC Officer at the NJ Transit Police, and CIO of Edison, New Jersey.

Follow him on Twitter at @AndrewNebus

I came across a Gartner prediction last week that gave me pause: by 2025, 80% of marketers will abandon personalization efforts. By way of justification, the analyst quoted points to challenges of data collection, integration, and protection.

As headlines go, it’s a clickbait-worthy winner. But insightful commentary on how marketing is evolving?

While the challenges involved are undeniable, it would be difficult for me to disagree any more strongly than I do. To my mind, such a prediction is at worst cynical and at best the result of a misconception about what personalization really means.

To unpack this prediction, let’s start by clarifying what personalization is and how it works. Then we can evaluate where we are and where we might be in five years.

Personalization is an approach, not a technology tool. There’s little argument that we live in an experience economy. In both our personal and our professional lives, we’re more motivated to spend our money based on experiences than the innate characteristics of a product or service. Creating those experiences, and getting them consistently right, goes far, far beyond the scope of any one technology or platform. The starting point is to define what “good” customer experiences look like, then make delivering them part of everything from company culture to performance metrics.

Personalization is not limited to marketing. When done well, it’s an integral part of all customer interactions. Personalization influences more than delivering targeted ads or addressing an email to someone by name. It also means getting their name right when they call customer service, remembering their purchases, and understanding their intentions. Personalization is at least as important for sales and service as it is for marketing. Regardless of the context, personalization has four key components:

• Addressing the individual
• Inferring and anticipating their needs—aka customer understanding
• Testing that understanding
• Remembering—across the whole organization

Oh, and doing it all over again, every time. This is a continuous exercise, not a one-off.

We’re still trying to translate face-to-face personalization into digital channels. A whole lot of what’s perceived as personalization in face-to-face interactions (and phone conversations) is a combination of treating individuals with respect and empathy, making inferences based on their tone or behavior, listening to what they’re saying (and what they’re not), and testing understanding by asking a question or two. All of that informs what action we take in the moment. As social animals, this comes naturally to us. It is in many ways a form of unconscious competence. Yet we are still very much in the process of building the same ability to observe, identify, infer, and—most importantly—test understanding through digital channels. Although these capabilities are improving rapidly, we still have a long way to go. There will undoubtedly be some pretty egregious examples of getting it wrong along the way, but we’ll get better by thinking carefully about the outcomes and experiences we’re trying to create and—you guessed it—continuing to experiment until we get it right. If I come across a shortcut, I’ll let you know. Tough to find with a moving target.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The principles of personalization are as old as commerce. They’re the fundamentals that don’t change but must be reinterpreted each time we find new ways of buying and selling. Although knowing those fundamentals may be easy, applying them well can be extremely challenging. And that points to another big issue with personalization—or at least the term itself: we are very willing to be distracted by the ‘next big thing’ when the fundamentals themselves prove difficult or frustrating. I’d argue that personalization is and will continue to be a core tenant of good customer experience regardless of what else changes. Plenty of technology tools will wax and wane over the next few years. Some will fall by the wayside. There will undoubtedly be new categories that emerge with promises to improve our ability to deliver good customer experiences. Let’s be clear though—moving on to new tools and labels isn’t the same as abandoning personalization, even if it makes us feel like we’re making greater progress.

So where will personalization be five years from now? It’s a pretty safe bet that progress will continue to be uneven. The companies that seem to be doing the best so far—and the ones that will likely continue to be in the lead—are the ones that concentrate on the big questions. They understand the fundamentals and continuously ask themselves what they’re trying to achieve and why. Those north stars help to focus all the other priorities and trade-off decisions along the way. They also make it much easier to determine where technology can help and which tools are most appropriate. The impact of AI in particular will lead to significant improvements in capability, especially in addressing issues of scale and speed, over the next five years. At the same time, much progress will be the result of critical thinking, fine tuning, and incremental improvements in closing the gap between what customers expect and the actions companies take.

No one said personalization—effective personalization—was easy. (If anyone does, ignore them. They don’t know what they’re talking about.) Abandon it, however, and you might as well give up and go home.

Image: Snowflake cookies, a shameless homage to the festive season and tasty allusion to ways we think of customers. Source: TasteofHome.com

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…...

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We've all seen the ad. And we've seen what a great guerrilla take down looks like (thank you Deadpool). But, do we understand what the real mistake was? 

In the spirit of full transparency, I'm a SoulCycle devotee...and I'm a Peloton rider. I get the whole vibe of being a Peloton customer. I get why people get hooked on riding a bike to loud music and a strong beat. I get what makes the company great and what I'd love to see them do differently. 

I share this to say that I am NOT out to bash Peloton for fun. I'm actually deeply disappointed with the advertising track that the company took from moment one. Peloton has been on this whole "our customers think of their bikes as art" messaging for a while now. Don't believe me...AND you want to laugh out loud today...read this Twitter thread from January 2019. 

They aren't alone in showcasing their dystopian customers in advertising. Have you SEEN the impossibly beautiful apartment neighbors who "challenge" each other on their matching Nordic Track bikes? Hey there, stalker.

Peloton is at their best is when they are being authentic...when Robin is shouting kudos over sweat and 90's Rap...and they (should) know it. In a statement made soon after the internet erupted with criticism of the now infamous ad, Peloton said, "We constantly hear from our members how their lives have been meaningfully and positively impacted after purchasing or being gifted a Peloton Bike or Tread, often in ways that surprise them."

"Our holiday spot was created to celebrate that fitness and wellness journey. While we’re disappointed in how some have misinterpreted this commercial, we are encouraged by — and grateful for — the outpouring of support we’ve received from those who understand what we were trying to communicate."

I get it. I get what they wanted to communicate. They wanted to share what their riders, their runners, their community was already sharing. So here is my question...why not let the community share what they were already sharing?

WHY DID PELOTON RECAST AUTHENTICITY?

If the community was willing to share their journey, why not celebrate that? Why recast this "real" scenario with fake, impossible and laughable surroundings and actors who have never been on a Peloton bike? The disappointment shouldn't be that people (the ones you had hoped would buy a bike) misinterpreted the ad...it should be that someone at Peloton (and their creative agency) didn't think their actual customers could sell a bike. When I first posted this thinking on LinkedIn, I received stories from marketing colleagues about their own Peloton journey as an advocate, community sales champion and bewildered CMO. This move left us all scratching out heads. With legions of devotees sharing their stories, why pick the sad eyes actress?

In an age of authenticity and lightening fast reaction, why not listen to the reactions from the first round of ads that asked why the bike was literally placed in the center of a room on an actual pedistal? Did someone make the assumption that the popularity and uptick in sales of the bike or new treadmill was from the TV advertising or the tactic of presenting the aspirational? Did someone misread a desire for inspiration as confirmation of lofty aspiration? The truth is that most Peloton riders want to be the rider with the 1 point better power readout or, quite frankly, be Robin. (Here's the truth...we all imagine ourselves BEING Robin or Ally not looking like the model hired to be in the commercial shot at the Twilight set house in the woods.

What Peloton failed to realize is that tv advertising does what it is intended to do...deliver a mass message into a vacuum where it can be consumed, spit out and trampled on by the crowd, regardless of what YOUR BRAND'S crowd believes, feels or interprets. What they missed was an opportunity to DO what they said they were DOING...celebrating and sharing the feeling their real live human customers feel about their fitness journey. 

Instead, they crafted a narrative that felt a little creepy. It misfired. Having a mother explain that she had no idea how much her husband's wise purchase of a bike could change her life...not her kids, not their lives together, not her being able to prioritize herself in a life of chaos...no, it was all thanks to him. Yeah, it felt creepy. They betrayed their customer's stories and in turn betrayed their brand.

What would NOT have been creepy is a video of a real Peloton customer, in her messy, chaotic and real home talking about how this gift helped her see herself as a priority, even if for 60 minutes a day, red in the face, gasping for air and covered in sweat. They could have shared the story of a man who had lost his swagger as life races on, but found his confidence and earned his swagger back thanks to a Peloton Trak. The storylines are endless. The celebrations are posted everywhere. But it is clear that in Peloton's defense of their mis-step, they continue to ignore that the stories ARE the inspirations and aspirations, not support for an error in judgement.

If there is something we can all walk away with is a reminder that in today's customer experience driven economy, the angry noise from the crowd has real impact. For Peloton, it was a stock price hit that will recover. But the brand is now associated with a punchline -- a creepy moment they never intended and could have avoided had they just done what they set out to do: celebrate their riders and showcase the community.

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…...

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Einstein Everywhere In Every Cloud And Every Industry

Dreamforce 2019 kicked off to 171,000 on-site attendees and over 13 million online viewers.  Sessions packed in at Moscone Center and the surrounding hotels were bursting at the seems, even with Howard Street shut down as the HQ for the Dreamforce National Park.  The event often known as the “Greatest Enterprise Show On Earth” brought together more thought leadership than Davos and The Business Council combined.  The major announcements at the show include:

Photo: @rwang0

• AI everywhere. What we are seeing from this Dreamforce is this pervasiveness of AI and how it will be used throughout the Salesforce products and how industries will be impacted by these advancements.
• Industry focus. The expansion of the Industry Clouds has spurred business transformation conversations across value chains for financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, consumer goods, and government.
• New product launches. Customer 360 Truth, Einstein Voice Skills, Service Cloud Voice, Einstein Call Coaching show case the power of conversational experiences.  Salesforce also beefed up MuleSoft Accelerators, delivered an new learning journeys, and improved the Tableau Catalog.
• Key partnerships. Microsoft Azure – Salesforce solved a key customer need for Azure support. Salesforce - Apple Trailhead Go gave mobile users free access to Trailblazer courses.  Trailhead GO is a mobile app for Trailhead exclusive to Apple's iPhone and iPad.  Salesforce – Amazon Connect reinforced the Amazon relationship around contact center agent enablement and training.

Figure 2. Twitter Moments for #CNX19

Event Report: The Dreamforce 2019 Feed #DF19

Your POV.

Will you be ready for AI?  Do you have the basic building blocks in place?   Will Einstein AI change your transformation objectives?  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationR (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) org.

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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Digital Identity: easier said than done

Digital progress is famous for its incredible speed.  No other technology compares to information technology, where disruption is the norm.  If Moore’s law could have applied from the early 1970s to automobiles as well as computers, then it is reckoned that a VW Beetle today could go 300,000 miles per hour, get two million miles per gallon, and would cost four cents to buy outright.

Yet the same cannot be said of Digital Identity.  Eminent financial services commentator Dave Birch says “we are getting nowhere on digital identity, while identity fraud continues to spiral out of control and we are drowning in fake news”.  The program for the TechVision Research “Chrysalis” conference this month stated that “[if digital identity] problems were easy to solve, we wouldn’t be debating some of the same issues we were discussing 30 years ago”.

Something’s amiss with Digital Identity. It can’t be that hard to solve.

There is broad agreement that, as a rule, we should avoid identifying users when it’s not strictly necessary.  Surely therefore “identity” is not the right word for what we’re trying to solve online.  Consider that Self Sovereign Identity (SSI) is one of the dominant themes in the field today, yet the Sovrin Foundation chair Phil Windley has said that “in SSI, there’s no artefact called an identity”. 

Authentication doesn’t necessarily mean identification. If we can at least agree on that, then allow me to set out a more elegant and yet more powerful way of framing how we decide to deal with people and things online. No radical change is suggested; in fact I will draw on concepts that are as old as e-commerce itself.

What is Digital Identity about?

Attitudes to Digital Identity vary, from Kim Cameron’s pragmatic idea of “claims made about digital subjects” through to Windley’s vision of a “life-like identity [for our] digital lives”.

No matter how we define them, digital identities are representations of people or other entities (including inanimate objects) which are relied upon by others online.  There are many ways to convey identity information, including account names and numbers, shared secret or static passwords, one-time dynamic passwords, authorization tokens, biometrics, digital certificates and “verifiable credentials”. 

So when Alice wants to make sure it’s truly “Bob” she’s dealing with in the digital domain, there’s a great many signals at her disposal.

Where’s the real Bob in all this? He’s sitting somewhere “IRL” at one end of a chain of electronic processes leading to the signals received by Alice.  The signals comprise text and numbers, possibly images, cryptograms, hashes, certificates or other data structures which are processed and interpreted by Alice (actually by her hardware and software) so she can satisfy herself she’s really dealing with Bob.

So, when it comes to authenticating Bob in any electronic channel, all Alice has to go on is data.  Bob is not directly visible; he is revealed only by data.

It’s the data, stupid

If the reality is data is all we got, then digital identity can be made more elegant.

At the dawn of e-commerce in the late 1990s, the APEC Business Facilitation Steering Group developed comprehensive guidance on electronic authentication with the aim of expediting digital transactions across 20-odd member economies.  Technology neutrality was essential, for e-business rules and laws were yet to emerge, and it wasn’t clear which technical protocols would be dominant. Furthermore, APEC members spanned a great range of cultural and political approaches to real world identity, from libertarian to authoritarian.

To pave the way to international harmonisation, it was vital to frame authentication without dependence on national or “legal” identity.  So APEC came up with a dry functional definition of authentication which didn’t make reference to identity at all:

The means by which a receiver of an electronic transaction or message makes a decision to accept or reject that transaction or message.

In plain language, authentication boils down to three questions, the first of which is:

1. What does Alice need to know about Bob to allow her to deal with him in a particular context?

The things that matter vary of course from one type of transaction to another. For instance, if Alice is a merchant and Bob is her customer, then she might need to know his credit card number.

The validity of information about people generally comes from the source. So the next question is:

2. Where will Alice get the information she needs about Bob? 

Continuing the credit card example, the preferred source of the account number is the card-issuing bank. For Card Present transactions, the PAN is obtained directly from an official plastic card. 

Generally speaking the acceptable (sometimes compulsory) sources are known in advance and can be codified in the transaction software.  So at design time, decisions are made about what information the Relying Party (Alice) will need to know about her Subject (Bob) in order to accept him at transaction time. Which brings us to a third plain language question: 

3. How will Alice know if the information about Bob is fit for purpose?

The veracity of data retrieved from a credit card in Card Present transactions is substantiated by physical security features or cryptographic measures in chip cards. (On the other hand, the security of Card Not Present CNP internet payments lags the Card Present mode by at least a decade, with no proper integrity protection for online customer data yet to be deployed at scale; CNP fraud is now running at many tens of billions of dollars annually and is growing at around 20 percent year-on-year).

The evolution of data carriers

I’ve used credit cards to illustrate important facets of authentication; let’s look more closely now at the patterns and lessons that the cards industry provides for data quality.

A credit card is fundamentally a data carrier used to present an account holder’s bona fides to a merchant.  At the time a purchase is transacted, the merchant only needs to know that the customer’s account details are genuine and correct, and then the account details are pushed into the card scheme network for settlement.  Modern card technology and infrastructure, universally familiar and trusted by customers, provide a model for personal data protection at scale.  The key lies in how data carriers have become more active over the decades.

The payment card industry has progressively adopted more robust forms of data carrier:

• the original paper charge cards in the 1950s were transcribed by shopkeepers by hand
• embossed plastic cards were copied onto carbon paper by “Click-Clack Machines”
• magnetic stripe cards allowed automatic reading by electronic terminals
• chip cards are also read automatically but with crucial differences under the covers to improve the reliability of the data 
• today’s smart phones with embedded cryptographic secure elements can mimic chip cards (and bring added functionality such as in-app payments, mobile wallets for multiple accounts, and extra security).

The plastic card spread beyond banking to become a near-universal form factor for holding and presenting account information.  The transition from mag stripe to chip has occurred within the UX envelope of the plastic card.  Some non-payments cards -- such as driver licences and student cards -- are also transitioning to chip, where the need to protect increasingly valuable and vulnerable account data warrants the marginal cost increase.

Mag stripe fraud is enabled because a card terminal cannot tell the difference between an original stripe and a copy; data encoded on a magnetic medium has no provenance.

The point of a chip or “smart” payment card is to protect the presentation of cardholder data.  While the cardholder data in a chip card is basically the same as that coded on a magnetic stripe, the way it is transferred from card to terminal is special, and mitigates tampering, counterfeiting or interception and replay of data in illicit transactions.

A mag stripe reader transfers a plaintext copy of the account number and other details from the card to the merchant terminal, which then passes them into the scheme network along with the transaction price that is owing. The read process is passive; cardholder data is simply extracted from the data carrier.  A fake or cloned card presented to the reader cannot be distinguished from the genuine article. 

With a chip card, the terminal first sends the purchase details into the card’s embedded microcontroller, which joins the purchase with the account holder data and digitally signs the combination before reverting to the terminal.  The digital signature renders each transaction payload unique to the card, unique also to the purchase, and prevents substitution of stolen customer data or tampering with the transaction.  As mag stripe technology is phased out, raw customer data will become less and less useful to criminals.  

The more things change, the more they stay the same

A critical point about the introduction of smarter data carriers into the credit card schemes was the minimal impact on customer experience, scheme rules, cardholder contracts, billing, and merchant service agreements.  The backend infrastructure for settling transactions among banks and merchants remained completely unchanged.  The transition to chip centred on the card reading equipment where it addressed just one problem: the provenance of the cardholder data presented to the terminal. 

A thoroughly standardised CX is a special achievement of the payment card industry.  Bank customers enjoy an array of competitive card brands, payment products and offers, yet all cards work exactly the same, and all provide the same high levels of security and privacy.

Smart data carriers and data quality

To summarise, chip cards and functionally equivalent smart payment phones fundamentally protect the quality of critical data, as follows:

• Consent: each fresh transaction is digitally signed automatically and seamlessly for the customer, using a private key, unique to them, held in the chip.
• Provenance: customer details are certified by the issuing bank through a digital certificate bound the customer-specific private key.
• Possession: the fact that a card or phone was unlocked by a PIN or biometric proves to a reasonable degree of confidence that the device was in the possession of the rightful customer when the transaction was generated.
• Privacy: the accuracy and provenance of customer data presented by chip makes the transactions reliable without further identification and exposure of personal data.
• Originality: provenance and proof of possession allow a relying party to tell the difference between original customer data and data that has been counterfeited or stolen and replayed.

So what?

Why does it matter if we reframe Digital Identity in these more objective terms?  Elegance for starters: taking subjective loaded terms like “identity” and “trust” out of everyday cybersecurity considerations would help streamline analysis and design.

We should also save time expended in philosophical arguments.  While the sociology and other isms of identity are important and inexhaustible, a more cut-and-dried demarcation between the digital and the organic could improve authentication practice.

Authentication data is a special case of personal data.  We could now take the lessons of the IDAM industry and leverage personal cryptographic data carriers as universal infostructure to protect personal data across the Digital Economy.

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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It was a meeting of the minds as always with the Salesforce Dreamforce conference.  There are lots of great announcements, and the event takes over all of San Francisco.  From a healthcare perspective, the trend towards consumerization leaves patient-centric needs unmet. The abundance of healthcare information, availability of non-traditional solutions, and new models of care shift control from providers to patients. Patients demand healthcare access on their terms, not the providers’ or payors’ terms.  

Here is a survey performed by Salesforce about patient challenges. 

Latest Salesforce healthcloud announcements

Health Cloud’s Patient Program Management features include:

Guided Program Enrollment allows life sciences companies to create therapeutic support programs at scale to acquire, support and engage patients, improving both the patient experience and shortening the time to therapy. 

Patient Services Consent Management provides pharmaceutical and medical device companies with the ability to easily view and capture patient consent with an eSignature. Now consent can take place with the enrollee in-person or remotely, as patients can log-in using a tablet or mobile device to view and provide consent on forms associated with the program. 

Medical Device Commercial Operations features include: 

Sales Agreements help medical device companies manage device sales, volume, price and revenue commitments. Sales and operations teams can collaborate to track whether customers are meeting their commitments by comparing planned sales quantities to actual booked orders, as well as planned revenue amounts to actual booked revenue. 

Account-Based Forecasting helps medical device companies forecast device sales. Now, medical device customers can create a baseline forecast using market and account growth factors relative to the previous year’s actuals. 

#chousangle

• We do expect the healthcare CRM market to pickup. Expect the fall of patient portals as customer relationship management (CRM) systems evolve to address experience management. 
• Patients must have all their vital information, from health records to appointment schedules, at their fingertips. Integration and orchestration must address real-time patient matching and information sharing.
• Patient access is an area of concern, so evaluate how your contact center is operating, and how easy is it for a patient to schedule an appointment? Also, the contact center staff at your organization must have the tool to help with scheduling, so that process must also be efficient and effective. 
• Pharmaceutical companies should start branching out with non-traditional affiliations with the health system. Think patient first and help the hospitals identify the appropriate patients for clinical trials. 
• It will be interesting to see how the healthcare CRM plays out as the competition is heating up from various players along with the population health vendors tackling the whole person approach in healthcare. 

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…...

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There are almost too many things to share and recount from #CCE2019. For example, I could share my expanding vocabulary thanks to Chris Lochhead or the fact that I am considering hiding under a park bench in fear of the year 2030 thanks to Alan Bealieu.

The more I walked the hallways and heard from speakers, panelists and moderators, the thing I kept hearing was a sense that amongst these disruptors, change agents and enterprise provocateurs, there is a clear path to the results and reward of digital transformation. Welcome to the age of action.

For most of us, the path to digital transformation has been filled with more question marks than exclamation points. Teams reshaped. Tools realigned. Data reimagined. Strategies scrapped, remapped and scrapped again. For the leaders in that ballroom, sitting around the tables, on the couch or on the stage, the path has been winding, bumpy and marked with more than a couple “failing forward” moments. But thankfully, the insights they shared are lessons we can all leverage to draft our own paths to success.

Doing is Different Than BEING. Alan Bealieu joked that if you wanted to retain a Millennial in the workplace, you should use the word sustainable at least 3 times in the interview…regardless of context. Funny…especially for this GenXer. Yet the kernel of truth there is that Millennials don’t want to DO…they want to BE. They want to BE sustainable. They don’t want to DO sustainability campaigns. They are also VERY aware of the difference.

We can argue sustainability success rates later, but it does mirror what we need to emulate when it comes to digital transformation. We can’t just plan or hope for digital transformation. We need to BE digital. We can’t afford to DO digital through a series of loosely connected projects. We need to BE digital on purpose because our customers already expect digital. Anything less than being digital will be akin to saying transformation three times in a conversation, regardless of context.

Don’t Give Up…Take Naps. To paraphrase SAP’s Eric Stine, our greatest competitor in this digital transformation race is change fatigue. But according to Steve Reese of the Phoenix Suns, we aren’t going to get very far without a good night’s sleep.

It can’t be stressed enough that this hamster wheel known as transformation has been a marathon with no end, run at the all-out pace of a 100-meter sprint. It feels impossible and unfair, running uphill…both ways. From the vantage point of the Chief Marketing Officer, the idea of fatigue is very real. We’ve been running, sometimes backwards using data as a rear-view mirror that only justifies past investments, carrying a stack of point solutions held together with brand band-aids and customer experience hope. It is starting to crack and fall apart.

Maybe it is time to take a nap…or at least get a better night’s sleep. As the Suns have learned through a comprehensive workplace sleep study, improved sleep yields improved decisions. Instead of ripping and replacing, perhaps a nap is in order to make better decisions to advance the agenda.

Transformation is an action, not magic. John Hagel reminded us that automation is not synonymous with transformation…it just makes the caterpillar move faster. But the change in form between caterpillar to butterfly is not really transformation either. Metamorphosis, by definition, is a transformation that appears to be by magic or sorcery. It just “happens.” But transformation is an act…intentional action that leads to a change in appearance or character. It does not just happen. Tadpoles morph into frogs. Companies just don’t happen to foundationally change their business model.

Transformation demands focused action by strong leaders. However, the ideas we have about leadership must also change. Dr. Annie McKee shared that leadership, like happiness, is a choice. To be an effective leader, we must focus more on the happiness part of that statement. “People are emotional beings,” McKee emphasized. “When we FEEL bad, we don’t think as well, we make poor decisions and take stupid actions.” Stupid actions will not empower transformation. It will just make a faster (super expensive) caterpillar.

While every panel, every keynote and every hallway chat were peppered with discussions of technology (can I get a shout-out for blockchain anyone?) and how to be a disruptor and not the disrupted, in the end, all roads led back to people.

I’ll end this recap with an exceptional challenge from Ritchie Etwaru, “Turn up your customer empathy to 100. Turn down your product arrogance to 0.” If nothing else, my hope is that we can manage to start moving the dials, shifting our focus away from transformation to sell products faster and towards new models that exceed customer expectations. Once we do, we will have found the magic that leads to metamorphosis and, perhaps, the actions that lead to true transformation.