The IIG User Conference

At EMC Information Intelligence Group (IIG) in ANZ we’ve recently held a User Conference.

Fairly easy you would think – pick a date, arrange a venue, organise a few speakers, invite some customers, a few cocktails afterwards and ‘Bob’s your uncle’

But maybe Bob isn’t my uncle?

As a content management supplier we should be really good at the inviting customers portion, after all doesn’t marketing have all of the contacts sitting in a database?

All of our installed base, technical and business contacts all ready to blast with an email inviting them to the IIG event of the year?

If only it were that simple…

The issues arise when you ask how many of our contacts have opted-in to be on our marketing database. Under the Spam Act 2003, contacts need to have given express consent to receive the email. Of course, as existing customers, consent could be implied due to our existing business relationship but marketing departments are reluctant to take the chance.

Anyway, as usual, we used our existing relationships to send personal invites so all went well (very well in fact) but it raises some interesting points about how the content that we routinely collect is used.

Over the few weeks I’ve been pondering this and I’ve read a few articles that highlight the way personal information is being used (and maybe abused).

We need to ask some hard questions!

I’ll start by first looking at the Australian Government (one of my favourite topics)

The Greens Labour Government in Australia has recently taken a ‘swing’ at News Limited in the wake of the UK Phone Hacking Scandal and Julia Gillard indicated that there were (undefined) “Hard Questions” that need answering. Maybe there are, who knows? The phrase innocent until proven guilty does spring to mind however…

Then interestingly, a few days later, I read another article in The Australian describing how political parties hold far-reaching personal information on all voters, which they use for their own marketing purposes – without any oversight.

This information is made possible because the government of the day included an exemption from Privacy Laws in 2000 (against the advice of the federal privacy commissioner at the time).

Also the electoral commission is required to provide electronic copies of the electoral roll and send monthly updates. Surely some “Hard Questions” need to be answered by the Government regarding this?

This information contains name, address, date of birth, age, sex and occupation so is not too extensive but forms the basis of a repository of information that can be built upon. This is where the hard work begins or is it really that hard in these days of social media?

Social Media

Social Media sites such as Facebook, Twitter even LinkedIn are the ultimate tools for ‘opting in’, giving the world a window into your personal views, beliefs, political leanings, prejudices and behaviour. LinkedIn is a more professional tool but does betray some of your views if you post comments to professional groups or volunteer status updates. Recruiters regularly use LinkedIn to identify candidates. Potential employers use LinkedIn to vet them (and Facebook to see if they can rake up anything that would discount them as a suitable candidate).

Given that the data is there, how hard would it be to use a Content Management or Big Data tool (such as the excellent Greenplum products supplied by EMC) to link the data provided in the electoral roll with related data generously provided by the members of social media websites?

All of this leads me to another article that I read in ITNews;

The Pentagon is apparently looking to spend $42m to ‘develop automated and semi-automated operator support tools and techniques to detect, classify and track the formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts’ This is to keep an eye on potential uprisings such as those that have recently happened in the Arab world but what if the Pentagon identified an uprising against the US Government? or the ASIS identified a groundswell of support for an uprising against the Australian Government?

We have lived in what many believe to be a benign environment for the last 30 years and many people do not see the harm in putting their life online -  but  equally as our ‘digital shadow’ continues to grow then we cannot rely on governments to protect our data, especially when many of us choose to open up our lives to 6 billion people and counting…

The Census

This brings me on to the Australian Census that was taken on 9th August 2011. The questions were to be the usual type of census questions; number of people in the household, ethnicity, religion, age, income, whether you have internet access etc. etc.

In the current era where many people believe that ‘if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear’ then providing as much information about yourself is not a problem but if the last 30 years has shown us anything it is that today’s morality is tomorrow’s bigotry and modern hate speech legislation effectively creates a thought criminal of many of us…

“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.” (Benjamin Franklin)

Now, don’t get me wrong, Information has the power to transform organisations and the benefits to the world are huge and still largely untapped. At EMC that is the role we play and I’m very proud of our achievements but…

We ALL need to ensure that we protect our personal information from those that would abuse it. Much information these days is routinely collected for very good reasons but much of that is (and should remain) transient.

One of the (presumably) unintended consequences of recent legislation is that freedom of speech is not what it used to be – a lot of celebrities as well as ordinary folk have fallen foul of this and have been forced into a public ‘mea culpa maxima’. Many see this legislation necessary to ensure equality, and the loss of this liberty (in certain circumstances) is justified.

I can see both sides of the argument but I’ll leave you with another of Benjamin Franklin’s quotes

“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety”

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I recieved this email this morning from an admirer…

In the style of Monty Python’s Flying Circus – this email was written by someone who is a big fan who we will refer to as ‘Mr. X’ – although his real name is Jody-John Phillips, Public Sector Account Exec. at IIG…

I was watching A Few Good Men with Jack Nicholson, Tom Cruise and Demi Moore last night and strangely thought of you and your little blog Documentumworld.com.let me explain why – In the movie there is this scene where Jack Nicholson is being questioned by Tom Cruise in a dramatic US style court room drama.  I could picture you at a BBQ on the weekend talking about content management with the same passion.In my head it went something like this….

Captain Maynard: Random person at BBQ, we live in a world that has content, and that content is managed by organisations with Documentum and protected by men with RSA Tokens.  Who else is gonna manage and protect your content? You? You BBQ Go’er.  As the Services Director of EMC Information Intelligence Group I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom.  You weep for our competition and you pity the people who work for them.  You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know.  The competition while tragic, probably manage content as well.  And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, manages content and business processes.  You want me managing your unstructured content and you need me protecting your repositories.  Our competition use words like agile, less risk and lower cost.  EMC use these words as the backbone of a life spent managing your most value asset – your information. They use them as a punch line.  I have neither the time nor inclination to explain myself to a random BBQ Go’er who rises and sleeps under the blanket of content freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which we provide it.  I would rather you just said thank you and went on your way….

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