Big-Data on Philip Sheldrake

Value flows when data flows meaningfully through sociotechnical networks – in search of the ideal data architecture

Mon, 04 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Competitive advantage and profitable growth doesn’t come from scale anymore. The rate at which big players in any and all industries beach their supertanker is unprecedented.

Competitive advantage and profitable growth doesn’t come from efficiency anymore either. What’s the point of making unwanted product efficiently?

Competitive advantage and profitable growth comes from adaptability. Pure and simple. Adapt or die.

A 2011 article in the Harvard Business Review pronounced adaptability the new competitive advantage. It asks how your managers can pick up the right signals to understand and harness change when they’re overwhelmed with changing information. The conclusion – instead of being really good at doing some particular thing, companies must be really good at learning how to do new things.

As Peter Senge points out, organizations only learn through individuals who learn, perhaps aided by machine learning these days. And learning craves meaningful data.

Lack of data was the problem of the 20th Century, yet the opportunity and challenge of the 21st is having too much of the stuff. This is the landscape of digital transformation and, I believe, the very bedrock of the meaning of business: establishing and driving mutual value creation (PDF ).

Value flows when data flows meaningfully through sociotechnical networks, and I’ve been on a mission to find out how to make this happen.

Big data. Big trust.

Thu, 27 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This morning, my colleague Hector Arthur pointed me to a new report from Ovum’s Mark Little knowing I’d have a few comments to make. In the corresponding blog post – “Big Trust is Big Data’s missing DNA ” – Mark kicks off with:

In the rush to monetize customer data, companies risk diminishing the trust people have in services and brands. Sustaining and growing people’s trust in services is not just about “doing the right thing,” but also makes commercial sense.

As I like to say in other words, big data is worth more when wielded with customers rather than at them. Ovum calls this approach Big Trust.

Big Trust strategies are designed to build “trust equity” with customers as a basis for making core services stickier, for selling new services, and for brokering personal data to commerce under a new set of trust principles.

Public relations

The outlook is informed, directly or indirectly I know not, by the excellence theory of public relations presented by James E Grunig more than twenty years ago, which champions the two-way symmetrical PR model. This model uses communication to negotiate with the public, resolve conflict and promote mutual understanding and respect between the organization and its stakeholders. My Six Influence Flows model from 2011 extends this work for the digital / social / big data age, and you can find out more about PR models in my post here if it’s your thing.

Of course, this is not how the majority of practitioners practice PR, deferring instead to publicity and ‘spin’, which may be associated more closely with distrust than trust. But excellent practice is championed if, as a shrewd procurer, you know where to look.

A presentation to the Open Mobile Alliance conference on big data

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

According to its website, the Open Mobile Alliance “was formed in June 2002 by the world’s leading mobile operators, device and network suppliers, information technology companies and content and service providers. OMA delivers open specifications for creating interoperable services that work across all geographical boundaries, on any bearer network.”

The OMA met today in Dublin to discuss aspects of big data, and I was invited to present on personal data, social media and social business.

This decade's number one revolution

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

“Data is the new oil." So said Clive Humby back in 2006.

“Data is the new soil” said David McCandless in 2010.

In between, in 2009, Meglena Kuneva , European Consumer Commissioner, said: “Personal data is the new oil of the internet and the new currency of the digital world.”

I’ve long been excited about the advent of big data, and started posting about visualising the stuff back in 2008. If anything distinguishes the modern professional – in marketing, PR, HR, R&D, operations, etc. – from her predecessors, it’s the facility to work with data.

Influence: Socializing the Enterprise – my presentation at Dreamforce 2011

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Salesforce.com’s CEO Marc Benioff is excited that there are 45,000 delegates registed for this week’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. It sure is one helluva a show (and I particularly appreciated the Metallica and Will.i.am gig last night!)

The theme for this year’s conference is the socialization of the enterprise and the reason for my invitation to present to the Executive Summit yesterday and delegates at large today. [Disclosure: Salesforce.com is paying me to be here.]

Dreamforce 2011 presentation – Sheldrake

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake

There can be no doubt that Salesforce.com is on a mission to help its customers make the social transition with as much emphasis placed on increasing the social exchange with employees and partners as customers and prospects, and this mission entailed the acquisition of Radian6 earlier this year.

When I spoke at the Radian6 Social2011 conference in April, I felt the excitement at the opportunity to meld the Radian6 and Salesforce.com worlds, but I hadn’t appreciated how fast this integration would take place. Simply gobsmacking.

How data is transforming digital marketing

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Digital marketing has come a long way in the past decade, as we’ve moved beyond putting existing materials online and learned how to really harness the native advantages of digital technologies.

The pace of change continues unabated, and among its most important drivers is data – and the meaning of that data.

Every one of us is going to be producing more data describing our use of digital products and services. This is what I like to call digital detritus. Detritus – discarded organic matter which is decomposed by microorganisms and reappropriated by animal and plant life – is interestingly analogous to our regard for, and treatment of, the data that we’re all shedding.

Big data

When it comes to the increase in data, we’re working on a logarithmic scale: we’re talking about hundreds and thousands of times more. Data in such quantities may well prove to have important new mathematical properties that are attractive to marketers, customer service and product development teams. Moreover, we don’t actually do much with the digital detritus today – it mostly resides in inaccessible log files, although the technology for collating it is becoming increasingly achievable and affordable.

What does this mean in everyday terms?

Truth be told – Friday Roundup

Fri, 27 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

According to the renowned Excellence study, public relations is a management function that focuses on two-way communication and fostering of mutually beneficial relationships between an organisation and its publics. One might argue that one can’t aim to please (benefit) everyone, so it might be more appropriate to emphasise mutual understanding rather than mutual benefit, as indeed the CIPR’s current definition of PR does.

Despite the common association of PR with spin (spin a yarn, make up a story), the PR professional focuses on symmetrical communication based on truths and understanding. Indeed, I like to say that whilst ‘perception is reality’ may have been a dominant axiom for 20th Century practice, the 21st Century professional acknowledges that changes to media, communications technology and societal expectations now renders ‘reality is perception’ more appropriate.

But what is truth?