I spent a day this week inside Google’s “Big Tent” – essentially a high profile event on privacy, hosted by Google, Privacy International and Index on Censorship, with an audience of the very cream of the British digital elite (and me).

1. It is clear that the law cannot keep pace with changes in technology. If I had a buck for every time someone on a panel said “technology has made an ass of the law” I would have precisely $16.73c.  Although this point was universally agreed, there seemed to be no clear way forward to address this.  Simon Davies from Privacy International had a particularly pragmatic solution – do nothing – effectively let it happen and let them learn. (The context for that point was the discussion around super-injunctions and Twitter in the UK).
2. Organisation vs the individual. The focus remains to be on what can the “organisation” do to make an individual’s privacy better. Despite pushing from the audience (advocates from Mydex et al in particular) there was little interest in a discussion around what it would mean to put the individual in full control of their information.
3. Collation vs Publication. There was still a desire to focus on the search engine’s role in collating the content (i.e. the index) vs the actual publisher of the content. I’m wondering why this point is so hard for people outside the industry to grasp.  (see 4 below).
4. Search is not the internet. Google’s Drummond put this well, “It’s a search engine, not the internet” but the conversation never followed suit. We should have been pushing Jeremy Hunt on the legal changes and leadership required from government i.e. you tell us which is the content we should remove and we’ll do it, the best example being religious extremist content – you want us to remove it, but you won’t tell us what is and what isn’t? Go fish. (My words).
5. The “Right to be Forgotten” is a jingoistic phrase that not many understand.  Common (mis)perception means that this should allow me to have control about anything about me on the internet.  They forget of course that this conflicts with free speech.  Where we need to move on this discussion is an understanding that individuals should have the right to remove data _they_ have posted about themselves, but not data that _others_ have posted about them.
6. Privacy Boundaries.  We established at least three clear boundaries around privacy that need to be explored further: Privacy vs Innovation (consensus was that privacy has _never_ impeded innovation), Privacy vs Free Speech (what’s private to you, may be free speech to me – who decides?), and Privacy vs Public Interest (are super-injunctions an expensive waste of time in a digital age).

Like Max Boyce, always said, “I know ‘cause I was there” – but what did _you_ think?

As we speak more and more about how social networks and associated media affect the lives of our children and younger generations in general, we often make the assumption that younger people care less about their privacy than older generations. What I think is interesting about this is the presumption that their different view on personal privacy is _worse_ than the standard established by ourselves. (Arrogance of the present anyone?)

Now I don’t doubt that we have to do much more to help people (young and old) to better understand the consequences of public communication – this is usually the point where someone will bring up the inevitable friendly warning about prospective employers screening candidates via their Facebook escapades, but that notwithstanding, it’s important to dig a little deeper around this issue as the reality is much more interesting.

This article from Danah Boyd and Alice Marwick, starts to show that the reality of how younger people think about and deal with their individual privacy is more about having your cake _and_ eating it.

My theory is that younger generations are much more binary about elements of their personal lives that they share versus keep private or within a very close circle of friends.

They may have a broader list of personal data “elements” they are willing to share with the world, but they maintain fierce control over a smaller subset of their personal identity that they will only share with their inner circle of their closest friends.

The truth is, younger people are very adept about managing what stays inside the private circle and what gets broadcast outside, often using complicated obfuscation techniques, encrypting private messages in public conversations using language that no parent could ever penetrate.

The other thing to remember is that there’s really nothing new about the view that younger generations have a looser definition of what they are willing to broadcast to the world. Since the beginning of time, young people have been more public about their personal likes and dislikes as a means of establishing their identity in their society. As we become more confident in our identities we lose the desire to be so promiscuous with the elements of our identity and settle into the shoes we were destined to wear.

For my own example, having reached a certain age, I no longer feel compelled to tell the world I am The Men They Couldn’t Hang’s biggest fan by wearing t-shirts and other paraphernalia emblazoned with their logo or boring people in the pub with how much I know about BMW motorbikes and beer (OK, scratch that last one), frankly, my identity is established and I am free to live in my size 12’s and worry more about other things (like life, death and taxes).

So understanding this, what do we need to do? Well as technology providers, we need to provide an open and transparent means of letting individuals (young and old) establish and maintain a firm boundary between public and private, with the understanding that the line will be different for every single individual, and will change based on the context of what they are doing at any given point in time. Failure to do that will only result in more embarrassing headlines about unintended personal data breaches and a continued lack of trust in how we use technology effectively in our personal and professional lives.

Oh, and by the way, if you really are worried about prospective employers judging you on your Facebook feed, worry not, these days you can probably turn the tables by looking them up first…

Last week, I was lucky enough to get some time and present at one of the Social Media Week London events. It was a great opportunity to meet with a diverse range of people and organisations, all looking for better ways to use Social Media across their business and their lives.

It was timely too, as we’ve been doing a lot of work about the importance of Social, especially when it comes to search.

What’s key in all of this, is the understanding that Social search is absolutely _not_ what it says on the tin – this is not just about “finding people” and searching Twitter archives, but is in fact much more about how you can use the power of the social “signal” to make searching a much better, more trusted experience.

Watch the presentation to find out why:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The presentation is also available as a handy download for your favourite mobile device – Social Signals in Search (MP4)

You can find the slides here – Social Signals and Search (Slides)

Regular readers will know I’ve been absent for a few months, there are some boring reasons for that and some well, rather more interesting ones too.

The truth of it is that I’ve decided to put my money where my mouth has been for the last few years and joined our consumer business focusing directly on the potential and importance of “search” in our digital world.

It ticks all the boxes for me, is firmly rooted in all the “consumerisation” hyperbole I’ve been spouting, but most importantly because I firmly believe it’s a crucial area who’s time has yet to come. The delay in posts has simply been because I needed some time to “find my voice” in this brave new world.

For me, search is essentially the UI for the internet, the means by which we extract value from all that the internet has to offer a digital society.  The trouble is, like the web, it’s based on an evolving (and increasingly outdated) metaphor and as a result, I think we’ve all got a long way to go before we can really start to get all of the potential that is on offer.

I was reminded of just how far we all have to go by this sign, posted in the ICT lab at my son’s (primary) school. Now look, I totally understand why this is there, but to me it’s more evidence that we’re missing something rather fundamental – why doesn’t the search engine _know_ that the people using it are aged between 5 and 11? Why isn’t it smart enough to understand that and adjust the results accordingly?

The answer of course is complicated, but within it lies a conversation I hope to explore with you about semantic language, user intent and relevance – fundamentally about how we can turn this blunt tool into something much sharper but without sacrificing our fundamental digital rights like privacy.

Search needs to be the best way to leverage the knowledge that exists on the internet, across multiple mediums and a vast ocean of data – this is no easy task but the good news is, I think we are well on the way.  We need to stop thinking about the task-oriented nature of the web, (remember HTML is built on a book metaphor) and start thinking about how we incorporate all aspects of our digital lives to create far better relevance – getting beyond “10 blue links” and into a far richer service that is truly representative of the internet and the potential it offers a modern society.

We’ll explore all of these areas over the coming months and I hope you’ll join me and get involved in the conversation.

Yesterday, we launched HealthVault in the UK, in some ways I think it is one of the most interesting (and perhaps, significant) products we’ve had for some time. 

Not just interesting and significant in the context of the product itself, but more because of the approach to privacy that has been taken throughout the development of the platform.

For the uninitiated, HealthVault is simply a cloud based application platform, that allows people to develop rich UI based applications that feed off an individual’s secure and private datastore (in this context for applications that focus on “wellness”). 

HealthVault is unique because it puts the individual in control of their health information, they have full visibility of what data is being consumed, by whom, which applications they use and more importantly, in every decision they make about which apps to use, or who to share their data with, the user is made explicitly aware of what data is required.

What is important in this approach is that the platform was developed using a series of key principles that were there when we started – we didn’t create the code and then “bolt” privacy on as so often happens.

Those principles were simply:

1. The record you create is controlled by you.
2. You decide what goes into your record.
3. You decide who can see and use your information on a case-by-case basis.
4. Your information cannot be used for commercial purposes unless you are explicitly asked you clearly tell us we may.

Privacy isn’t a binary problem, there is no single answer, but we can’t afford to ignore this key area, we need to listen to (and engage with) the experts – organisations like BigBrotherWatch, Privacy International, and NO2ID are excellent examples of people who are actively engaged in Privacy discussions across the board in an attempt to help us all do a better job of getting this right.

Sure, there’s more to it than this, but the point I’m trying to make is Privacy is going to be the “killer” topic in IT for the next few years (if you don’t believe me, ask Mark Zuckerberg )  Our collective success in addressing it properly will only come if we work together to understand the issues and build on the above principles to make it stick. 

Click here to view the embedded video.

Back in the Summer, Matt Deacon asked if I’d like to give a presentation on the subject of Cloud Computing to an Architect forum he was planning in the UK for September. I said “yes” immediately because I was getting increasingly frustrated with all the hyperbole about Cloud Computing being “the Future of IT” when all that was really being said was about cost containment and greater agility and frankly I wanted to prove that there really was more to it than that.

So, several weeks passed, the deadline loomed, and I set out to prove my theory that Cloud Computing would enable some significant outcomes that would transform society’s use of technology. Take a look to see how I got on…

You can download the webcast here (right click and “save as”) or click here to subscribe to the Envisioners podcasts on iTunes.

This presentation uses the superb Productivity Future Vision video generated by Microsoft’s Office Labs team. You can find this video (and get the background and more detail) here…

Finally, you can also download the slides I used here – like everything on this site, they’re available for use under Creative Commons license, so feel free use them if they’re helpful to you, but please respect the copyright of the image authors (see last slide in the deck) and ensure you are licensed properly for their use.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Wow, time flies.  It’s been a busy and slightly ugly Summer, but enough of that, it’s finally time for us to bring you the presentation I made at this year’s Architect Insight Conference back in May of 2009.   A particularly important event for me as it marked the first public release of the 6 key themes we’ve been working on for the last 12 months or so.

This presentation walks you through the 6 key themes that are the foundation of all of the challenges (and opportunities) we face in helping move the value of technology in our society even further forward and why, in some cases, our initial perceptions of them are not always correct.

Sit back (remind yourself what Summers _used_ to be like) and enjoy…

You can download the webcast here (right click and “save as”) or click here to subscribe to the Envisioners podcasts on iTunes.

Another week, another data security problem hits the headlines. It’s the same old story, human error results in the “misplacement” of a piece of technology (disk, USB stick etc) but the easiest way to deal with it seems to be to blame the technology and chase after that as the source of the problem.

The thing for me is, that people have been leaving important things on trains since Mr Stephenson stepped off the Rocket and said “Welcome to the Age of Steam, now where did I leave my umbrella?” so why is it now that we find ourselves in a world where the the humble USB key finds itself transported from “friend of the networkingly challenged” to Satan’s portable storage device?

The problem of course (beyond our own inability to deal with the implied human failure) is that we don’t have a sufficiently granular way of dealing with information risk.  We simply don’t have access to pervasive, infallible technology solution that on a file by file basis, enables us to protect data that is sensitive while leaving less important data alone.

As a result, organisations and Enterprises face a binary choice in deciding how to prevent this from happening again (which is often made even worse when they are reeling from the headlines and embarrassment of another data loss).  They can secure everything or secure nothing – it’s the only option they feel they have.  Guess which one they choose?

I’ve worked with organisations who have an outright ban on portable storage devices, some even go so far as to glue up the USB ports on their PC’s.  Let me tell you these are not organisations from the Security, Defence or Intelligence sectors, these are regular Enterprises just like yours.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t blame them for doing this, but it’s a bit of a sledgehammer for what is essentially a walnut. The technology vendors have a big part to play in this, as do the various Governments and legislators that care about encryption standards, but importantly, the real challenge lies with you, dear reader, and it is one of data classification.  There doesn’t seem to be much point in having a pervasive, granular data security solution if you don’t know which bits of your data are sensitive and which aren’t.

So what are you doing about it in your own organisations?  Easy for me to say I know, but trust me, I know how big a deal this is.  I know it’s a mammoth task and involves getting the “business” to agree on a classification schema (and sometimes for some hard truth that their “sensitive” data really isn’t all that important) but no matter how arduous or tortuous the route, you have to take it if you want to be that agile, innovative organisation you always wanted to be. 

Ignore this and you might as well breakout the Araldite ™ and get cracking…

So the last thing I’m going to try and do here is to attempt to talk to you about the principles of IT Security and Privacy.

But what we do need to understand is that people are increasingly willing to sacrifice elements of privacy in return for something we find valuable, grocery store loyalty cards for example are the gateway to a whole range of profiling and targeting that we subject ourselves to in return for some cheaper petrol and a few savings vouchers – it’s going to continue, especially as (through innovation and transformation) organisations get increasingly sophisticated in how they collect, analyse and use the data that we leave in our wake as we travel through our every day lives.

The good news is that despite the scaremongering, people are really waking up to privacy and security issues and are increasingly able to make informed choices about what information they disclose and how to protect the information they seek to remain private.
Perhaps the best example of this occurred a couple of years ago with Facebook when Zuckerberg changed the status updates to a newsfeed service.

Zuckerberg faced a massive backlash from his user base, almost 300,000 users got together to revolt but then something happened. Surprised by the reaction, Zuckerberg implemented a privacy feature that enabled people to designate which information was private and which was public (and would therefore be sent out as part of the news feed update to friends). The reaction was incredible and transformed the usage of Facebook and ultimately set the standard for a bizarre conflicting standard for personal privacy that is simultaneously vigilant and laissez-faire.

But societal changes aside, lets return to the job at hand. In light of the other topics I’ve talked about today, Security and Privacy are no different. Traditionally, these concepts have been thought of as constraints to productivity, disablers of the possible, barriers to progress. I don’t think we’re there anymore. IT Security is an integral part of everything an organisation does and just like the others, given the other opportunities that both technology and society are presenting today, ultimately, our increasingly sophisticated needs and understanding become the catalyst for truly transformational change.

However, the biggest issue I’m left with today is our own organisational view on risk, I just can’t see how we can achieve the kind of transformation that’s going to be required without being forced to revisit some things that are obviously the very cornerstone of our operation and culture.

Ultimately, we are the only people that can answer this, but I’m hopeful that by continuing to collaborate through this blog (and other forums), both we and our other strategic partners will be able to provide you with pieces of the puzzle that make what is necessary, possible.

The catalyst for the birth of “The Envisioners” was the emergence of 6 key themes that seem to be effecting everything we do with IT today (and why mostly, our understanding of these issues is not as it should be).  What better a way to start this blog than with an overview of these themes as they form the foundation of the work The Envisioners do, and will be core areas of focus as we continue along this journey of discovery, helping us all reach a better understanding of the true value of IT in a modern society.

We’ll be coming back to each of these in much greater detail over the coming weeks, but for now let’s get to meet them:

Cost Reduction
More than just today’s bandwagon, the current state of the global economy offers a real force for change. It is absolutely vital we understand how to harness this to our advantage rather than treating it as a constraint to progress. Being respectful that the current economic crisis has a devastating effect on many people’s lives, we need to be bold enough to avoid the mistakes that “easy” answers for cost reduction will bring – we’ll be looking at examples that help to unpick how we can make the biggest difference without sacrificing our future.

Sustainability
Yesterday’s news? No, I thought not, but as with Cost Reduction, this is a considerable force for change that we need to understand properly before we can figure out the best way for us have the biggest impact. Please, this is _not_ a discussion about bottled water and virtualised data centres, this is about how we identify and embrace the systemic change that is required if we are to make a real difference in our own lifetimes.

Security & Privacy
No broad discussion about technology would be complete without a conversation around security and privacy, this one however, is focused on how we need to understand more about the evolving boundaries of privacy and the changing way in which we need to think and apply security principles in all that we do. Like it or not, this is going to require some really difficult conversations about our definition of “risk”, but these are conversations we can no longer choose to ignore.

Consumerisation
Like it or not, the world is changing around us. Technology is (or has) become a pervasive part of most peoples lives and is no longer the “special” thing it was when I was a lad. This is big, treat IT as something special and “complicated” and you will fail. Why? Because no-one really cares anymore – it just has to work and we as individuals just have to get on with making it work. Don’t believe me? Ask your kids.

Agility
As individuals, we are incredibly resilient, we cope with significant change every day and mostly without blinking. There’s something about the work environment that changes this and we need to understand why. Why is it that we resist change so much at work when at home we just suck it up and move on. Ultimately, the more agile we are (as individuals and organisations) the greater our chances of success.

Innovation Management
All of the other themes point towards the need and drivers for transformation in both our personal and professional lives and innovation is the only way we can make that transition happen. But most people will tell you that having the ideas is actually the easy thing, it’s doing something with them that’s the difficult bit. Above all things managing Innovation effectively is the most critical thing for your success in the future, we’ll be looking into how other organisations approach this problem and offering ideas (and asking for yours!) on how it can be done to best effect in any given situation.