Making cyber safe like cars

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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This is an updated version of arguments made in Lockstep's submission to the 2009 Cyber Crime Inquiry by the Australian federal government.

In stark contrast to other fields, cyber safety policy is almost exclusively preoccupied with user education. It's really an obsession. Governments and industry groups churn out volumes of well-meaning and technically reasonable security advice, but for the average user, this material is overwhelming. There is a subtle implication that security is for experts, and that the Internet isn't safe unless you go to extremes. Moreover, even if consumers do their very best online, their personal details can still be taken over in massive criminal raids on databases that hardly anyone even know exist.

Too much onus is put on regular users protecting themselves online, and this blinds us to potential answers to cybercrime. In other walks of life, we accept a balanced approach to safety, and governments are less reluctant to impose standards than they are on the Internet. Road safety for instance rests evenly on enforceable road rules, car technology innovation, certified automotive products, mandatory quality standards, traffic management systems, and driver training and licensing. Education alone would be nearly worthless.

Around cybercrime we have a bizarre allergy to technology. We often hear that 'Preventing data breaches not a technology issue' which may be politically correct but it's faintly ridiculous. Nobody would ever say that preventing car crashes is 'not a technology issue'.

Credit card fraud and ID theft in general are in dire need of concerted technological responses. Consider that our Card Not Present (CNP) payments processing arrangements were developed many years ago for mail orders and telephone orders. It was perfectly natural to co-opt the same processes when the Internet arose, since it seemed simply to be just another communications medium. But the Internet turned out to be more than an extra channel: it connects everyone to everything, around the clock.

The Internet has given criminals x-ray vision into peoples' banking details, and perfect digital disguises with which to defraud online merchants. There are opportunities for crime now that are both quantitatively and qualitatively radically different from what went before. In particular, because identity data is available by the terabyte and digital systems cannot tell copies from originals, identity takeover is child's play.

You don't even need to have ever shopped online to run foul of CNP fraud. Most stolen credit card numbers are obtained en masse by criminals breaking into obscure backend databases. These attacks go on behind the scenes, out of sight of even the most careful online customers.

So the standard cyber security advice misses the point. Consumers are told earnestly to look out for the "HTTPS" padlock that purportedly marks a site as secure, to have a firewall, to keep their PCs "patched" and their anti-virus up to date, to only shop online at reputable merchants, and to avoid suspicious looking sites (as if cyber criminals aren't sufficiently organised to replicate legitimate sites in their entirety). But none of this advice touches on the problem of coordinated massive heists of identity data.

Merchants are on the hook for unwieldy and increasingly futile security overheads. When a business wishes to accept credit card payments, it's straightforward in the real world to install a piece of bank-approved terminal equipment. But to process credit cards online, shopkeepers have to sign up to onerous PCI-DSS requirements that in effect require even small business owners to become IT security specialists. But to what end? No audit regime will ever stop organised crime. To stem identity theft, we need to make stolen IDs less valuable.

All this points to urgent public policy matters for governments and banks. It is not enough to put the onus on individuals to guard against ad hoc attacks on their credit cards. Systemic changes and technological innovation are needed to render stolen personal data useless to thieves. It's not that the whole payments processing system is broken; rather, it is vulnerable at just one point where stolen digital identities can be abused.

Digital identities are the keys to our personal kingdoms. As such they really need to be treated as seriously as car keys, which have become very high tech indeed. Modern car keys cannot be duplicated at a suburban locksmith. It's possible you've come across office and filing cabinet keys that carry government security certifications. And we never use the same keys for our homes and offices; we wouldn't even consider it (which points to the basic weirdness in Single Sign On and identity federation).

In stark contrast to car keys, almost no attention is paid to the pedigree of digital identities. Technology neutrality has bred a bewildering array of ad hoc authentication methods, including SMS messages, one time password generators, password calculators, grid cards and picture passwords; at the same time we've done nothing at all to inhibit the re-use of stolen IDs.

It's high time government and industry got working together on a uniform and universal set of smart identity tools to properly protect consumers online.

Stay tuned for more of my thoughts on identity safety, inspired by recent news that health identifiers may be back on the table in the gigantic U.S. e-health system. The security and privacy issues are large but the cyber safety technology is at hand!

The consumerization of security

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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Increasingly, commentators are calling into question the state of information security. It's about time. We infosec professionals need to take action before our customers force us to.

Standard security is just not intellectually secure. Information Security Management Systems and security audits are based on discredited quality management frameworks like ISO 9000 and waterfall methodologies. The derivative PCI-DSS regime mitigates accidental losses and amateur attacks but is farcically inadequate in the face of organised crime. The economics of perimeter security are simply daft: many databases are now worth billionsof dollars to identity thieves, but they're protected by meagre firewalls and administrators with superuser privileges on $40K salaries. Threat & Risk Assessments have their roots in Failure Modes & Criticality Analysis (FMECA) which is hopeless in the highly non-linear and unpredictable world of software, where a trivial mistake in one part of a program can have unlimited impact on the whole system; witness the #gotofail episode. Software is so easy to write and businesses are so obsessed with time to market that the world now rests on layer upon layer of bloated spaghetti code. The rapidity of software development has trumped quality and UI design. We have fragile home computers that are impossibly complex to operate safely, and increasingly, Internet-connected home appliances with the same characteristics.

We can't adequately protect credit card numbers, yet we're joy-riding like a 12-year old on a stolen motorcycle into an Internet of Things.

We're going to have to fix complexity and quality before security stands a chance.

Maybe the market will come to the rescue. Consumers seem to tolerate crappy computer quality to some degree, doubtless weighing up the benefits of being online versus the hassle of the occasional blue screen or hard drive crash. But when things like cars, thermostats and swimming pool filters, which don't need to be computers, become computers, consumers may make a harsher judgement of technology reliability.

Twenty years ago when I worked in medical device software -- pre-Internet, let alone the Internet of Things -- I recall an article about quality which predicted the public would paradoxically put up with more bugs in flight control software than they would in a light switch. In a way, that analysis predicted one of the driving forces for technology today: consumerization.

Happy New Year – some wishes for 2015

pending

Guy Courtin was formerly Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research covering Matrix Commerce and how the Internet of Things drives the evolution of commerce.  Guy has over 15 years experience in the technology space and specifically in the supply chain space. Most recently he was the Vice President of Research at SCM World. Where he focused on the service providers that empowered supply chains. Prior to SCM World, Guy held numerous senior positions. He was responsible for product marketing at RSi, a retail supply chain solution provider. There managed RSi’s go to market strategy around their leading cloud based supply chain solutions. He also spear headed Progress Software’s supply chain group. Where he was responsible for driving revenue and market share as well…...

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Once again the inevitable is happening, our journey around the sun has almost come full circle. 2014 was an interesting year – of course for us soccer fans it was extra exciting with a World Cup, but I digress. As we head towards 2015 here are some wishes I have for our supply chains far and wide:

• Better and more actionable data: Raise your hand if you are sick of hearing about big data…okay you can all put your hands down. This is not about the continued deluge of data, we all know that we are flush with data and with new technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) will only add to this wave of information. What we need to focus on, and achieve for our supply chains is more business data. Business data is the actionable information we can absorb, make a decision with and discard. Many of the CxOs I have spoken to this year, have pointed out that they know the information is out there, the
  

  Hey look…more “big data”

  issue they have is to identify and focus on the business data that their organizations can better leverage. This is no small task. It is easier to hoard mountains and mountains of data as opposed to be smart about which data to focus on and which pieces of information to lean on. Offerings from the likes of Cisco with their intercloud product provides a layer of intelligence to all that information flowing across our networks. Of course the need to do a better job of filtering and identifying that business information is vital…especially as “big data” only gets bigger. In 2015 let us hope that we become smarter about the types of data we lean on to be better with our supply chains – no easy task.

• Continued harmonization of execution systems: The need to integrate WMS and TMS seems like a no-brainer, yet remains surprising that in many instances the systems have themselves remained in silos. It is telling that a supply chain vendor such as JDA only acquired a robust WMS solution when they merged with Red Prairie. But as more companies that are in the execution space look to not only add functionality but ensure full integration – even mega vendors like Oracle are working to add functionality such as yard management to their execution suite – one can hope that 2015 sees more of these strategic moves. The value for the end users is to have a faster and deeper visibility into the end to end execution process. For this reason, let us also hope that focused manufacturing service providers such as QAD and Plex also push out from within the factory four walls to include greater services in transportation and warehousing. Being able to monitor my entire execution process is the only way to start to eliminate the blind spots that constantly haunt our supply chains.
• Smarter evolution of SMAC within all aspects of supply chain: What is SMAC? It isn’t what you talk on the basketball court. SMAC – Social Mobile Analytics Cloud. I look for a greater focus on the first two letters of SMAC for 2015. When it comes to analytics, supply chains have been working on ensuring we add greater layers of analytics and intelligence to our processes. This will only continue to be vital as we add…more data. As for the cloud, it continues to be an area of much debate for supply chains. By some studies, there remains a lot of skepticism when it comes to the cloud. And I understand why. It isn’t because the cloud is not a viable delivery mechanism for the tools and solutions we need to manage our supply chains, rather the business value has not been properly expressed. I am looking at you marketing and sales departments. Too often we lead with the lower total cost of ownership (TCO) or the ability to
  

  Decision making at the edge – at your finger tips.

  have access to the latest version of the software, rather than discuss why these features of the cloud open up new business models for supply chains. Smart vendors in 2015 will hone in on the business models the cloud empowers – not just lower TCO. But where 2015 holds more promise is with the social and mobile aspects of supply chain. Almost half of supply chain executives agree that social will play a vital role in their business, however less than 20% have any active strategy with social. I expect to see more partnerships such as the one between IBM and Twitter – to bring to the market solutions that these supply chain CxOs can lean on to take advantage of the nuggets that are in social. Finally 2015 will continue to see the importance of mobile in the supply chain. We already have witnessed how tablets and handhelds have impacted the factory floor, logistics, warehousing and within the store. But this is only the beginning. Smarter and more powerful devices will allow us to push decision making and control to the edges of the network. How solution providers tackle this new found power will be integral to how supply chains evolve in 2015.

I don’t think these are too much to ask of our supply chain users and vendors. Next year is an exciting one for new solutions and the continued evolution of existing technologies. But don’t we say that every year??

Happy New Year to you and your loved ones. See you on the other side!

2014 HCM Highlights - Month by Month

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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January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

As expected – a slow month – so I share my 2015 predictions and advice from the Constellation team post:

In the next ten years 10% to 20% of the North American and European workforce will retire. Leaders need to understand and prepare for this tremendous shift so performance remains steady as many of the workforce's highly skilled workers retire.

To ensure smooth a smooth transition, ensure your HCM software systems can accommodate a massive number of retirements, successions and career path developments, and new hires from external recruiting.

Constellation fully expects employment to be a sellers’ market going forward. People leaders should ensure their HCM systems facilitate employee motivation, engagement and retention, lest they lose their best employees to competitors. Read "Globalization, HR, and Business Model Success". Additional cloud HR case studies here and here.

MyPOV

The State of the State of 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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Constellation Research analysts are wrapping up a very busy 2014 with a series of "State of the State" reports. For my part I've looked at the state of privacy, which I feel is entering its adolescent stage.

Here's a summary.

1. Consumers have not given up privacy - they've been tricked out of it.
The impression is easily formed that people just don't care about privacy anymore, but in fact people are increasingly frustrated with privacy invasions. They're tired of social networks mining users' personal lives; they are dismayed that video game developers can raid a phone's contact lists with impunity; they are shocked by the deviousness of Target analyzing women's shopping histories to detect pregnant customers; and they are revolted by the way magnates help themselves to operational data like Uber's passenger movements for fun or allegedly for harassment - just because they can.

2. Private sector surveillance is overshadowed by government intrusion, but is arguably just as bad.
Edward Snowden's revelations of a massive military-industrial surveillance effort were of course shocking, but they should not steal all the privacy limelight. In parallel with and well ahead of government spy programs, the big OSNs and search engine companies have been gathering breathtaking amounts of data, all in the interests of targeted advertising. These data stores have come to the attention of the FBI and CIA who must be delighted that someone else has done so much of their spying for them. These businesses boast that they know us better than we know ourselves. That's chilling. We need to break through into a post-Snowden world.

3. The U.S. is the Canary Islands of privacy.
The United States remains the only major economy without broad-based information privacy laws. There are almost no restraints on what American businesses may do with personal information they collect from their customers, or synthesize from their operations. In the rest of the world, most organizations must restrict their collection of data, limit the repurposing of data, and disclose their data handling practices in full. Individuals may want to move closer to European-style privacy protection, while many corporations prefer the freedom they have in America to hang on to any data they like while they figure out how to make money out of it. Digital companies like to call this "innovation" and grandiose claims are made about its criticality for the American economy, but many consumers would prefer the sort of innovation that respects their privacy while delivering value-for-data.

4. Privacy is more about politics than technology.
Privacy can be seen as a power play between individual rights and the interests of governments and businesses. Most of us actually want businesses to know quite a lot about us, but we expect them to respect what they know and to be restrained in how they use it. Privacy is less about what organizations do with information than what they choose not to do with it. Hence, privacy cannot be a technology issue. It is not about keeping things secret but rather, keeping them close. Privacy is actually the protection we need when things are not secret.

5. Land grab for "public" data accelerates.

Data is an immensely valuable raw material. We should re-frame unstructured data as "information ore". More than data mining, Big Data is really about data refining but unlike the stuff of traditional extractive industries, data seems inexhaustible, and the cost of extraction is near zero. 

A huge amount of Big Data activity is propelled by the misconception that data in the public domain is free for all. The reality is that many data protection laws govern the collection and use of personal data regardless of where it comes from. That is, personal data in the "public domain" is in fact encumbered. This is counter-intuitive to many, yet many public resources are regulated - including minerals, electromagnetic spectrum and intellectual property.

6. Data literacy will be key to digital safety.
Computer literacy is one thing, but data literacy is different and less tangible. We have strong privacy intuitions that have evolved over centuries but in cyberspace we lose our bearings. We don't have the familiar social cues when we go online, so now we need to develop new ones. And we need to build up a common understanding of how data flows in the digital economy. Today we train kids in financial literacy to engender a first-hand sense of how commerce works; data literacy may become even more important as a life skill. It's more than being able to work an operating system, a device and umpteen apps. It means having meaningful mental models of what goes on in computers. Without understanding this, we can't construct effective privacy policies or privacy labeling.

7. Privacy will get worse before it gets better.
Privacy is messy, even where data protection rules are well entrenched. Consider the controversial Right To Be Forgotten in Europe, which requires search engine operators to provide a mechanism for individuals to request removal of old, inaccurate and harmful reports from results. The new rule has been derived from existing privacy principles, which treat the results of search algorithms as a form of synthesis rather than a purely objective account of history, and therefore hold the search companies partly responsible for the offense their processes might produce. Yet, there are plenty of unintended consequences, and collisions with other jurisprudence. The sometimes urgent development of new protections for old civil rights is never plain sailing.

My report "Privacy Enters Adolescence" can be downloaded here. It expands on the points above, and sets out recommendations for improving awareness of how Personal Data flows in the digital economy, negotiating better deals in the data-for-value bargain, the conduct of Privacy Impact Assessments, and developing a "Privacy Bill of Rights".

Market Move - Oracle buys Datalogix - Moves more into DaaS

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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Market move – Oracle buys Datalogix - the next gen Apps view

This morning we learnt that Oracle has acquired Datalogix, the provider of consumer data that fuels marketing campaigns.

Instead of dissecting the press release in the usual ‘myPOV’ fashion, let’s take a step back and see what this means for the Oracle acquisition strategy, the evolution of enterprise software and next generation applications.

Here are some key data points to consider going forward:

• We are seeing the end of transactional applications - At this point large serial acquirers of enterprise software vendors like Oracle have no further attractive targets. Either from a valuation perspective (e.g. Salesforce.com), from a built in house and now good enough perspective (e.g. Workday) or a regulatory perspective – there are no more traditional enterprise software targets to acquire. So data service companies are a worthy target.

• There is more than software to subscribe to – Oracle, probably better than its key competitors, understands that future revenue streams do not have to come from software subscription revenues alone, but can come also from data service royalties. 

• Oracle is the only enterprise vendor serious on DaaS (so far) – Frankly I was surprised when Thomas Kurian positioned DaaS (Data as a Service) on equal footing with the usual three musketeers of the on demand world – IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. Back in spring 2014, more here. Datalogix is probably the largest acquisition that Oracle has made in the DaaS space.

• When DaaS meets SaaS $s are made – From the press release it is also clear, that Oracle really understands that a winning combination of DaaS and SaaS is what secures long lasting revenue screens, creates software users like and need (aka becomes ‘sticky’) and excludes the competition very effectively. 

• Oracle needs a BigData platform – The acquisitions of Micros and now Datalogix will stretch Oracle’s database capability in the BigData realm, but the vendor has the expertise and capital to address this. Let’s keep in mind we are talking about e.g. moving Datalogix data across many data center and possible even on premise installations (let’s not forget Oracle give the on premise install option for Fusion Applications).

MyPOV

A good move by Oracle, it now has added probably enough growth from acquisitions to make 2015 YoY comparisons favorable, even if it experience little organic growth. With financial analysts seldom making the ceteris paribus argument of how large both companies would be without an acquisition event, this is good news for Oracle. 

Oracle Ups the Their Analytics Game: Signs an Agreement to Acquire Datalogix

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

Role: Vice President and Principal Analyst focusing on the IOT of Customer Experience and how the cloud is driving more flexible, agile, and robust customer service and customer experiences. In-app or in device customer service is the future. Coverage Areas: Next Generation Customer, Digital Marketing Transformation Bio: As a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, Inc, Petouhoff works with Fortune 100 and 500’s Senior Leadership teams to create strategic customer experience (marketing, sales and service) solutions which engage customers, build brands and grow businesses. Combining her experience as a former Forrester software analyst, PWC systems integrator and change management consultant, Petouhoff leads executive workshops to discuss to not only…...

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While difficult to do and very important, offline spending and digital marketing need to get connected. CMO’s need this data to make the right calls on their marketing mix and shape their priorities. Datalogix connects offline consumer spending to digital marketing to help marketers increase the effectiveness and measurability of their advertising.  It does this by aggregating and providing insights on over $2 trillion in consumer spending from 1,500 data partners across 110 million households to provide purchase-based targeting and drive more sales. They have over 650 customers, including 82 of the top 100 US advertisers such as Ford and Kraft, as well as 7 of the top 8 digital media publishers such as Facebook and Twitter use Datalogix to enhance their media. Oracle signed an agreement to acquire Datalogix.

How Does Datalogix  Fit Into The Oracle Cloud?

Oracle and Datalogix’s Data as a Service cloud solutions will provide marketers and publishers with the richest understanding of consumers across both digital and traditional channels based on what they do, what they say, and what they buy. This will enable leading brands to personalize and measure every customer interaction and maximize the value of their digital marketing. The ideas of contextually relevant content and offers is finally coming into it’s own. Will this results in the brand promises so many CMO’s are trying to deliver on?

• The combination fundamentally transforms marketing automation from executing campaigns to being able to correctly identify consumers, target them accurately with digital campaigns, allow marketers to measure which campaigns and channels are effective, and optimize how they reach consumers and spend their campaign resources.
• The addition of Datalogix represents a further extension of Oracle’s Public Cloud strategy to combine IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and Data as a Service on a common cloud and to transform SaaS business applications and processes by integrating data within these applications.

If you want more information, you can go here:

The press release: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/2395487

More information: http://www.oracle.com/datalogix

If CMO’s are going to be able to deliver right-time, real-time contextually relevant content, offers  and conversations, then this type of data is critically important. However, the question always remains how tech savvy are the CMO’s? Many have been focused on creative most of their careers. Today’s CMO must become tech savvy or at least have a staff that is. What would help? IT. But there’s long been a struggle between IT and functional department priorities.

With the advent of SaaS, many functional departments like marketing want to be able to stand up their own technology without being pushed to the end of the line of IT priorities. However, while SaaS allows marketers to do this, many of them might benefit by having a real partnership with IT, i.e., someone who is used to buying and implementing and optimizing technology. It will be interested to see how the relationships between IT vs. functional departments will pan out over the next year.  Will they collaborate or will they remain at a standstill? Will leaders at the CXO office step in to stop the corporate politics or do they even know they exist?

@drnatalie

VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research

Covering Marketing, Sales and Customer Service to Deliver of Great Customer Experiences

Christmas is around the corner – what Santa Claus can teach us about supply chain

pending

Guy Courtin was formerly Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research covering Matrix Commerce and how the Internet of Things drives the evolution of commerce.  Guy has over 15 years experience in the technology space and specifically in the supply chain space. Most recently he was the Vice President of Research at SCM World. Where he focused on the service providers that empowered supply chains. Prior to SCM World, Guy held numerous senior positions. He was responsible for product marketing at RSi, a retail supply chain solution provider. There managed RSi’s go to market strategy around their leading cloud based supply chain solutions. He also spear headed Progress Software’s supply chain group. Where he was responsible for driving revenue and market share as well…...

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You better watch out
You better not cry
You better not pout
I’m telling you why
Santa Claus is coming to town
Santa Claus is coming to town
Santa Claus is coming to town

Yup, the big guy dressed in red is getting ready to make his annual appearance. Bringing all the girls and boys, as well as some lucky moms and dads, presents and gifts for their Christmas trees. And all he expects in return is maybe some milk & cookies or even a carrot for his reindeer. But did we ever expect Santa Claus to provide us with some simple lessons that are applicable to our supply chains?

He has the global fulfillment thing down…

• He makes and list and checks it twice. Sage advice about how to handle all the data and information that extended supply chains produce and leverage on a weekly and daily basis. Many of the conversations I have had with supply chain practitioners and service providers comes back to getting a cleaner and more complete view of all the data that their supply chain produces on a weekly and daily basis. Look at what Santa is able to do – put all those wish lists in one aggregate list. He does check it twice to ensure consistency and correct for errors. Also good advice. Since we all know what garbage in gets us…companies like Avaya have worked with solution provider Kinaxis to create a more clear and single view of their distributor network and the data that is the connecting glue. One clean and unified view! Make sure to clear out that garbage before it gets into the system – or on Santa’s list.
• Gonna find out who’s naughty or nice. Yup Santa also looks at his data to segment his customers. Granted he has two simple categories. Our supply chains’ customers and suppliers are also segmented and they do not fall into simple “naughty” or “nice.” But maybe the simplicity of how Santa does his segmentation should drive our own. The key is identify what key variables matter to our businesses and supply chains. Determine which variables you need to identify and focus on to create the most effective segmentation. Santa might not explicitly state it, but his segmentation like our supply chains leverages a greater number of predictive analytics to drive better clarity. For example service providers such as Infosys work with a large office products manufacturer to better understand customer segments to establish service level engagements. Santa and our supply chains need to lean on tools and service providers that can help identify the variables to effectively and efficiently segment our target audience.
• He sees you when you’re sleeping …He knows when you’re awake. Maybe Santa has a secret deal with the NSA to eves drop on our calls…okay I joke…I think…but Santa makes sure he is aware of his consumers’ characteristics and where they are in the gift receiving pipeline. If we are awake he wouldn’t deliver our presents! Your supply chain needs to be sensitive to customers and where they are in the buying cycle. Think of how companies such as Steelwedge and Salesforce have worked together to help their customers better with the S&OP process by tying in the data coming from the Salesforce CRM to get a clearer view of where customers are with regards to the transactional pipeline. It is not simply about identifying our sleeping patterns, but understanding where we stand in terms of the buying cycle what our demand is and might be – are we in a position to have our gifts delivered by Santa?
• Santa’s a busy man he has no time to play…He’s got millions of stockings to fill on Christmas day. Wow, talk about solving the delivery to the home enigma. Santa and his reindeer are able to criss cross the global, in one night, and accurately deliver a vast number of packages, of different shapes and sizes, to millions of locations! Unbelievable. Santa is also ahead of the curve as he has been able to provide home delivery since day 1. Now I am not saying we can all find a Rudolfo with his nose so bright to guide our fulfillment and logistics departments, but there is something to say about how integrated Santa’s workshop is with his distribution center and his logistics. He cannot be expected to demonstrate this level of efficiency is he stocks the wrong goods, doesn’t properly load them to his sleigh and then takes poor routes to his delivery locations. Clearly the value for supply chains to integrate the warehousing and transportation is what Santa’s efficiencies demonstrate.  Vendors like Oracle with their integrated WMS/TMS and now yard management (that is like what Santa does with regards to managing the elves and ensuring their are efficient) or JDA with their TMS integrated with the WMS acquired in the RedPrairie merger, are prime examples of solutions that even Santa would appreciate to ensure seamless optimization between the workshop and the big red sleigh – ensure the inventory that he has to haul around the world on the night of December 24th is properly slotted and routed.

The one aspect Santa does not seem to have worry too much about, is with returns. He does not seem to have a good reverse logistics or after sales service department. But since he has gotten so much of the upfront part right he does have to worry about delivering the wrong items! Alas our supply chains do not have that luxury, and our supply chains do need to take into account reverse logistics, returns, maintenance and other after sales issues. But thanks to Santa Claus we have something to aspire to with regards to our supply chains.

Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays!

What Uber, Netflix & Amazon can Teach Big Pharma

Pharma is no longer allowed to be tone-deaf. Public scrutiny, regulatory changes, and increasing real time access to stakeholder sentiments create the expectation to be timely and relevant. One industry reaction to be timely, relevant, and commercially empathetic is a paradigm dubbed multi-channel marketing (MCM).

However MCM does not automatically engage doctors. At best MCM messages, while digitally precise, are tone deaf.

Hence, MCM cannot be a final destination for pharmaceuticals; it is a rest stop. The increasing amount of data we know about healthcare providers (HCP) will create an auditable expectation for pharmaceuticals to “get HCPs” right. Netflix suggests what we watch, Uber knows our taxi preferences, Amazon guesses our purchases, and Google Glass presents live traffic; inevitably HCPs will expect pharmaceuticals to “just know” them.

MCM falls short of really “knowing” an HCP.

The differentiator between Netflix, Uber, Amazon, Google and the pharmaceuticals industry is a small thing called context. Knowing the context of a person, interaction, or message can improve how influence is exchanged. Brands can use context to engage instead of simply marketing. Context is not simple or easy, but powerful.

The importance of context to pharmaceuticals is not new; however, how context is identified, understood, and leveraged has shifted from depending on humans (sales representatives) to depending on information systems. This shift creates a problem.Information systems do not get context. As pharmaceuticals move further away from human-to-human interaction, increasing reliance on information systems to influence HCPs, the battle for context is lost before it has started.

We need a context renaissance.

To constructively discuss context, let us examine the difference between marketing and engagement.

What is a context renaissance?

At the core, the science of getting HCP context is about the buying journey more than it is about the selling journey.

While MCM focuses on optimizing how we influence HCPs on channels through selling, MCM + context focuses on how HCPs view themselves, and how they want to be influenced while buying, ergo engagement.

There is a pronounced inside-out, versus outside-in shift in thinking. Netflix for example is completely inside-out. Netflix does not suggest a movie based on external factors such as release dates, nor does it suggest only the best rated or most viewed. Netflix knows my internal viewer context and based on the time of the day, my location, my device, my connection, and my viewing habits, Netflix suggests the best movie for me.

Can the pharmaceutical CLM have the context sophistication to be the Netflix of brand presentations for HCPs?

This is a silly question, but a powerful idea.

Context is very personal, and it is behind a set of preferences that are not exposed to marketing channels. Context is nearly impossible for information systems to harness short of some miracle in contextual technology. We need to get into the circle of context, without invading privacy or overstepping boundaries.

To do this requires a delicate mix of psychology, information and analytics. Consider some examples.

Getting the psychology right.

1. Is Dr. Smith an introvert or an extrovert?
2. Is the persona of Dr. Singh that of a builder or an architect?
3. Does Dr. Sung lead with her head or her heart?

Getting information right.

1. Is Dr. Johnson discussing your brand as an alternative even when prescribing your competitor?
2. Is Dr. Jain growing his business with a new office in the town over?
3. Is Dr. Jerry reading your clinical trials, and to whom did she forward them?

Getting the analytics right.

1. What is the probability that Dr. Adams will change her perception of your brand relative to her peers?
2. Which of your sales representatives is better to influence a doctor who is an introvert?
3. Does a specific brand presentation provide more value to male doctors versus females, or young doctors versus older ones?

We currently cannot answer most of these questions easily, but the answers are not unreachable. More importantly, while the answer to a single question is not earth shattering, having the answer to all nine of these can fundamentally change the way we market to doctors digitally. It can set a brand apart.

It can help us stop marketing digitally, and start engaging digitally.

In the gene pool of engagement, context is the single differentiator.

Almost a decade ago, the thought leadership of a Customer Interaction Hub (CIH) was introduced to the marketplace. The CIH promised to focus on interactions, extending CRM via MCM, and enabling brands to get the channels, direction of information, and speed of influence right. While novel, the CIH fell short by ignoring context.

A decade is a long time in technology. As a result the value of the CIH has expired. During the decade the construct of context became digitally reachable with new information sources, and hence the arrival of the next generation of marketing dubbed engagement. With it comes the birth of something new, the CustomerEngagement Hub (CEH). The Customer Engagement Hub can be thought of as all that made CIH great plus context.

Cegedim is delivering a Customer Engagement Hub designed specifically for Life Sciences. The Cegedim CEH will enable pharmaceuticals to understand the context of HCPs and satisfy the growing desire from doctors to be precisely understood by pharmaceuticals. No more tone deafness.

The Cegedim CEH builds logically on our innovation stack of CRM and other MCM technology, our world class MDM (Nucleus 360), and our global gold standard of HCP data (OneKey).

It is about the context, not the content, or the channels.

I write as a labor of love, in exchange I ask that you share this writing if you think others may find value,

-Richie