The Seamless Society

on Jan 25 by Barry Rabkin
Tags: Digital Immigrants, Digital Natives, Seamless, Supply Chains
Comments: No Comments »

Perspective is a funny thing…. it totally depends on your life’s experiences (or lack of experiences for that matter).

For the youth of today, their world is one of instant communications and information – in all forms – on demand whenever they want it and regardless of where they are at the time.  These so-called ‘digital natives’ are totally immersed in an ever-growing ocean of data flows connecting them to their friends and happenings. They take it as “just-so” that smart-phones, touch-screens and ever-more functional devices will be readily available and easy-to-use. And they don’t seem to have as much concern as should about what kinds of information they share with friends – whether actual friends or online friends living anywhere around the world.

For those of us who have to learn how to use all of these new appliances and deal with the information flows gushing over us (we are the so-called ‘digital immigrants’), our experiences are sometimes better described as chores to be done even though the end result can make our business and social lives easier. We wonder just how good we can be with those infernally-small keyboards on the smart-phones.

But regardless of our status of digital native or digital immigrant  in this evolving technological stream, boundaries are blurring. Boundaries - between people, between companies, between events happening and our awareness of them – are rapidly disappearing.

Our society is becoming seamless.

This condition of seamlessness has several implications for the companies providing us products and services. If these firms do not perceive the world around them is becoming seamless they will not be prepared to conduct business in this transformed marketplace and will lose customers. In short, companies still operating as if this was a Lego-block world will become fodder for the history books.

Some of the key implications are:

• Customers – already a rascally demanding bunch – will expect increasingly faster service. “What, you don’t know who I am? I’ve been to several of your stores and have made quite a few purchases. I really don’t care the purchases were from different stores or from different departments…”
• Real-time or low to no latency for the tech bunch reading this post) will become critically more important. Companies who say they are all about responsiveness better not have their customers on-hold for minutes at a time while they are waiting for a human to talk with about their problems or to answer their questions. Companies burnishing that ever-ready FAQs will need really good (really, really good) search capabilities so customers don’t have to take very long to find the answers that actually, well …., answer their questions.
• Companies will need to use all of those (or selected) smart-phone applications to reach and serve their customers. You will need “an app for that.” Customers will come to expect your company can be located and soon to be alerted to sales of what they care about to possibly purchase.
• Company’s supply chains must become seamless if the firm wants to have any hope of strengthening their market share.

Bringing this home to my little pond – the insurance industry – means that insurance companies will need to:

• Speed up their use of industry standards for all of their lines of business (hello, ACORD !!) and technology standards to drive data interoperability
• Finally treat their producers as equal partners throughout the distribution value chains (yes, that means you need to eliminate all paper between your agencies / brokers and the field staff and home office departments)
• Ensure all field personnel regardless of function (e.g. claims  adjusters, agents / brokers, field staff, salvage and subrogation staff, ….) have the devices they need to capture all the field information electronically.
• Ensure the core administration systems (e.g. underwriting; policy administration; billing, claims) actually share all the requisite data flows to keep the business operating, support policyholder and producer service, and ensure auditability and transparency for all of those regulators (and reinsurance companies assuming your firm’s risks). These core administration systems are the guts of an insurance company’s supply chains.
• Ensure data are securely locked down regardless of where they are stored (and yes, that means start now to experiment with cloud computing)
• Continually pull together every bit of data related to policyholders to create an up-to-date profile of the customer including the products the policyholder owns, the selling and servicing agents, and each call or contact from (or to) the policyholder and the nature (and resolution, if applicable) for tha contact. Basically bring “Moments of Truth” into the Web 2.0 world.
• Do the same as above for every agent or broker, including all of the original on-boarding information, licensing / training / certification data (for every insurance coverage the producer sells for your firm), compensation data, and data about the producer’s policyholders.

What do you think? What are some other ways insurers should prepare to compete in a seamless society?

Building a Social Media Analyst

on Jan 03 by Barry Rabkin
Tags: anthropolgy, commerce, long tail, networks, psychology, Web 2.0, Web 3.0
Comments: 1 Comment »

A magic wand has been placed in your hands. With it, you can build what you think of as a good social media analyst.

What are the major areas of knowledge you would gather together to construct a social media analyst you would look to for research, analysis and advice?

A recent Digital Tonto post  (about their recommended 2009 reading list) got me thinking about this. I agree with some of their ideas (particularly social media analysts needing to know about network theory, including power laws) on this and have added some others. I’d suggest a good social media analyst should have knowledge about:

1. Networks and network theory
2. Power laws (and the long tail)
3. Anthropology (particularly applied to communication and collaboration within digital communities)
4. Marketing and advertising within digital communities
5. Commerce initiatives within digital communities, including the acceptance (or rejection) of the hard sell within digital communities
6. Insight about the evolving web – or at least, which new capabilities (e.g. semantic technologies, augmented reality) will emerge in the next 2 – 5 years.
7. ?

And aside from reading a lot of Marshall McLuhan (that should go without saying), what would you add to this mix of domains a good social media analyst should have? Why?

O Christmas Cards, O Christmas Cards

on Dec 24 by Barry Rabkin
Tags: Analogue, Digital, FaceBook, Twitter
Comments: No Comments »

I realized this morning that Christmas cards were the analogue version of Twitter or maybe Facebook.

Think about it: if you send a Christmas card to someone, they send you a card (and sometimes that very long and boring letter recapping their year). If you stop sending that person a Christmas card, they take you off of their list of people to send cards.

Christmas cards = analogue version of social media.

We can go back further in time to find a similar trend: it only took the telegraph one year to replace the Pony Express.

Of course we are only now weaning ourselves from Gutenberg’s invention in 1450. But there is hope, always hope, that we can move from the printed page to the digital ether before another 500+ years elapse.

What examples of movement from analogue to digital should we expect in the next 3 – 5 years?

NYL Is Improving Agent Use of Social Media

on Dec 16 by Barry Rabkin
Tags: Compliance, LinkedIn, New York Life, NYL, Socialware
Comments: 2 Comments »

New York Life’s tag line is “The Company You keep.” New York Life (NYL) recognizes that the “company you keep” has to be involved with social media because that is where a growing number of their clients and prospects inhabit. In particular, NYL continues to build momentum and experience applying social media to strengthen their interactions and relationships with their agents and policyholders. Most recently, NYL has invested their time and resources with two social media initiatives supporting their agents: one involves using a technology start-up company and the second involves LinkedIn.

NYL is working on a Proof-of-Concept with a technology start-up company to ensure that their agents remain compliant regardless of which social media sites they use. This start-up technology company accomplishes this by getting in the middle between NYL’s agents’ dialogue and social media sites the agents want to post information. With the solution from this start-up, NYL agents can use Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn and other social media sites.

Is this “Big Brother” in action? NO! The life insurance industry is a heavily regulated industry by the States the insurance company does business in and by various Federal Government agencies (such as SEC or FINRA, formerly NASD). The insurance industry also must comply with industry regulations as well.

Using the solution from the start-up company, NYL is ensuring that their agents can participate in the conversations of the digital marketplace whenever they want and remain compliant to the plethora of never-ending regulations. One other benefit of NYL’s application of this solution was the immediate realization that the Compliance Department had to be brought into the (use of social media) fold from the beginning – just as it should be.

NYL’s second initiative is with LinkedIn. Working with Sales & Distribution management, NYL created a template for their recruiting managers and agents who either are using or want to use LinkedIn. The templates provide NYL agents with a way to go beyond the obvious uses of LinkedIn and get much more out of LinkedIn’s functionality. With these templates, NYL has crafted a set of Best Practices that the company and its agents can improve going forward in time. NYL is driven to facilitate the agent’s ability to put themselves forward into the marketplace in a way they can best explain their personal value proposition to their policyholders and prospects.

Also regarding LinkedIn, NYL is participating in LinkedIn’s Beta Company Profile program. NYL has added several customized features, including video to the standard algorithmically-produced page, to provide a much more robust and richer media experience for their prospective agents and employees, and of course, existing policyholders. In particular, NYL has created a customized view for prospective agent recruiting of the insurance company for anyone whose LinkedIn profile indicates having a sales background or interest in sales.  Eventually NYL wants to feature as many as 72 different sales recruiters over the course of a year.

I was told at the end of our discussion that NYL realizes their agents – social networkers by nature - are using social media. The company wants to direct those activities in a manner that benefits their agents, policyholders, prospects and regulators. They feel (correctly) that the best way to do that is to adhere to the guiding philosophy “let the community live!” But, and here are important lessons for other insurance companies, monitor the community, pay attention to the community, and most importantly, learn from the community to sharpen the company’s strategies and tactics to best meet the expectations of all of the company’s stakeholders.

What is your insurance company doing? How is it applying social media to enable its agents or brokers? What social media software (whether Socialware or others) is your company looking to best engage in the dialogue within the social mediasphere?

Volume + Velocity = ?

on Dec 10 by Barry Rabkin
Tags: Google, Pace of Change, social media
Comments: No Comments »

We all know and feel that the world is moving increasingly faster. Regardless of the current economic situation, events and issues (e.g. health care, climate shifts, regulatory philosophies) are rushing towards us at speeds we may not be able to reasonably deal with when they impact us.

Technology, particularly current and new forms of social media, are certainly bearing down on us whether we can manage them or not. Taken as a set of media channels, social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others are acting like an amplifier creating an ever-growing volume of conversations, dialogues, and commentary that resemble more of a digital tsunami of unstructured data than coherent streams of manageable discourse.

Coupled with this never-ending volume is the fact that social media also acts as an accelerator by  increasing the speed or velocity that this tsunami picks up each second. Google’s new search appliance hopes to help us surf these break-neck waves in real-time but it is only part of the solution.

What is the answer to the dynamic equation “volume plus velocity?”

I suggest one answer is pattern recognition. But the pattern recognition response itself must be a contextual solution. All of those streams of unstructured data will have to be interpreted through the prism of each viewer’s needs. And those needs – of the same viewer – will change depending on that person’s requirements at the time of viewing as well as the robustness of the existing streams and the new conversations (writ large) added at the new ( possibly seconds later) time of viewing.

What do you think other answers are to the equation volume + velocity =

And most importantly for our industry, what are the implications for insurance companies, policyholders, producers, prospects, reinsurers, and regulators?

Web Information Discovery Strategies

on Nov 15 by Barry Rabkin
Tags: Book of Odds, context, Google, Web 3.0, Wolfram Alpha
Comments: 1 Comment »

We all know that the digital marketplace is  continually creating ever-increasing amounts of digital content. And with a plethora of content comes at least two problems: a paucity of attention and an inability to find or otherwise leverage the growing amount of digital content.

Three firms – one we all know extremely well – and two others are using two different strategies to resolve both problems: 1. get in the middle and 2. wrap.

Google uses the ‘get in the middle’ strategy by putting themselves between us (the folks looking for information) and the sources of information. We don’t need to belabor what the technology company does and how it is broadening its footprint into areas other than search. Google is about finding information.

Two new companies – Wolfram Alpha and Book of Odds – both employ a ‘wrap’ strategy. Both of these web firms wrap information around other information, sort of like a donut with a jelly filling. And both firms are about leveraging information by presenting it to users in a context and in a way that seekers of information can relate … although that relationship is also about the context of the seeker (the seeker’s background, goals, objectives of seeking information and desire to continually investigate) as well as the context the information is presented.

Let’s first look at Wolfram Alpha. From their web site, the company says its goal is “making the worlds’ knowledge computable.” The About page discusses in part that “Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.” On the Examples page the web site has 29 categories from Mathematics to Physics to Dates & Times to Places & Geography to Colors. I suggest you click over and learn how the site works.

Now let’s turn to Book of Odds. Excerpting directly from the About page” “ Book of Odds is the world’s first reference on the odds of everyday life. It is a destination where people come to learn about the things that worry or excite them, to read engaging and thoughtful articles, and to participate in a community of users that share their interests and ambitions.”

And that learning is done in the context of news articles from a multitude of sources but grouped into four major categories: Accidents & Death, Daily Life & Activities, Health & Illness, and Relationships & Society. Seekers of information – and here we mean seekers of probabilities – will find articles both on the home page and on each of the four major category pages. In addition, Book of Odds also displays statements of odds that are not embedded in articles. People wanting to better understand how Book of Odds began can read a blog by the Founder. I also suggest you click over to the Book of Odds site to find out how that site works.

Both of these new web publishers are about exploration and discovery of information in a way that Google is not. Both are hoping to create additional value – beyond returning a site or set of sites that may (or may not) answer a seeker’s question – by establishing a context for the embedded information. Both are examples of Semantic Web or if you prefer, Web 3.0, firms. A new species trying to make a living in the always changing web terrain.

However, the challenge for both Wolfram Alpha and Book of Odds is generating sufficient and persistent profitability by:

• Satisfying the information seeker in a contextual manner they expect or want
• Encouraging the information seeker to continue their explorations and stay awhile, and most importantly
• Triggering the information seeker to purchase something. Each of these new firms will be looking for a variety of revenue paths driven by the capabilities or results they provide the seekers who click over to their web sites.

Information discovery on the web is obviously so much more than search. But, and there is always a but, do you think Wolfram Alpha or Book of Odds has an opportunity to succeed as a stand-alone company 5 years from now? I’m not sure. Are you?

Shazam – Come On, You're Impressed Too!!

on Nov 13 by Barry Rabkin
Tags: iPhone, iTunes, Shazam
Comments: 2 Comments »

I got an iPhone last year. Didn’t think I would ever “go Apple” for anything. Grew up in the insurance industry so I was used to and happy with IBM computing, including laptops. Later I got a Nokia and “hello, love!” Palm was my device of choice for contacts, calendar, notes and such. Happy as the proverbial clam.

Then a year ago, my Motorola cell died. What to do? I really appreciated Motorola’s form factors and designs. I looked around and increasingly more of my colleagues were getting iPhones. And I was already on AT&T and wanted to stay on AT&T (spent a little bit of time at Bell Labs before divestiture… the thrill of working at Bell Labs was as palpable for me as when I was fortunate to get to Arthur D. Little in the late 1980’s.)

So, I got an iPhone. And one of the ‘apps’ I heard about was Shazam. Sounded too much like science fiction: you launch the app, make sure the iPhone can hear the music and within 15 seconds (or 10 seconds depending on how you set it up), it analyzes the sounds and then tells you what the song is, the artist, and even enables you to buy it on iTunes?

Really? Of course, you all know the answer is YES. OMG as the younger generation might remark. OMG.

Pattern recognition. Not of numbers in a document or table but of sound waves (which are probably decomposed to numbers of a sort). And that is really magic.

Now, it doesn’t work for all music and it certainly doesn’t work for classical music (no, I don’t mean music from the 1950’s or the 1960’s). But most of the time, it recognizes the music.

So, what’s the Shazam application equivalent for insurance? Well, it’s the beginning of my weekend and I’m logging off for the next few days.

You tell me what equivalent applications the insurance industry could use.

Here's Looking At You, Kid !!! Insurers Should Look Forward to Web 4.0

on Oct 26 by Barry Rabkin
Tags: Augmented Reality
Comments: 2 Comments »

We all know the web is in a constant state of change, of evolution. I’ve thought of where the web has come from, where it is, and where it is headed in terms of groupings of capabilities. To me, right now, I see four groupings:

• Web 1.o – what we had initially and it was all about content. Companies used these capabilities, such as they were, to provide brochureware to clients and prospects who clicked over to their company web site.
• Web 2.0 – the sweet spot of where we are now and it is all about collaboration. I see the collaboration as having two major flavors – 1) collaboration between people expressed by social networking – and 2) collaboration between software programs expressed by web services
• Web 3.0 – the contextual web and where we are headed next. The capabilities inherent in the contextual web are semantic technologies which enable the meaning(s) of text data to be understood, managed and analyzed.
• Web 4.0 – the world of confluence where tangible assets and intangible assets come together in meaningful ways. We see the beginnings of that in some of the apps on the iPhone (and probably on the Blackberry but, alas and aghast, I don’t have one of those.)

Another instantiation of Web 4.0 is augmented reality - wearing goggles that have information available to the person wearing them to better complete various tasks. The Technology Review article the link points to discusses how mechanics can complete their jobs faster and more effectively.

But think about using AR goggles for insurance claims adjudication and management.

Using AR goggles, a claims adjuster could visit a homeowner who is claiming a loss and see both the actual home as it is now after the loss and the home as it was before the loss. The AR goggles could access information from the insurance company’s databases or sources from the web showing detailed information about labor requirements, building materials and costs.

More generally, the AR goggles could show the processes and resources needed to adjudicate the claim in a way that remediates the loss to bring the claimant’s home back to the way it was before the loss event.

Similarly, AR goggles could be used by claim adjusters for automobile claims.

Yes, augmented reality might be as far off as ten years from now but I wouldn’t be surprised if some industries – other than our slow-moving insurance industry – are using AR well before that. Would you?

Gourmet Magazine & Modern Bride … Gone!

on Oct 06 by Barry Rabkin
Tags: digital revolution
Comments: No Comments »

I imagine most folks saw the news the other day that Conde Nast has decided to shut down four magazines including Gourmet and Modern Bride. My reaction to that news was whoa…. even though I’m not a gourmet and certainly not a modern bride. I have had the same reaction to my weekly ComputerWorld when it arrives. I have been subscribing to ComputerWorld for many decades and to see it shrivel down to its anorexic state is just … well just depressing. Yes, I do research and analysis of current and emerging technology’s impact on the insurance  industry. But to see the impact of the digital revolution on these traditional magazines is another matter.

I know, I know, you’re wondering about the ’so what’ as it pertains to our insurance industry.

The ’so what’ is fairly straight-forward. You and I both know hard-copy print is going the way of the dinosaurs except the magazines won’t be leaving society any future tar pits. So, here’s the thing: how many insurance company departments and field offices have left paper behind? How many agencies are now totally digital? How many claims adjusters are going away from paper?

How fast is the insurance industry moving towards totally – or even mostly – digital operations? Or are they waiting for Modern Bride to disappear? Hold on, it just did!

What about your insurance company or insurance agency? Are you off the paper-diet yet? Why not?

Web 4.0 Emergent

on Sep 23 by Barry Rabkin
Tags: Augmented Reality, Confluence, Web 4.0
Comments: No Comments »

I have been intrigued with the evolution of the web and its capabilities. For the past few years, I’ve thought of four evolutionary phases of the web:

• Web 1.0: the increasingly digitization of content (and yes, I want all books, music, photographs and other materials all digitized)
• Web 2.0: collaboration but of two flavors – collaboration between and among people (otherwise called social networking) and collaboration between programs (otherwise called web services)
• Web 3.0: having the capabilities of understanding the contextual relationships between and among unstructured data (also considered the Semantic Web)
• Web 4.0: blending of tangible assets and intangible assets (what I consider confluence)

When people ask me what I really mean about Web 4.0 or confluence, I sort of wave my arms and spout heuristic explanations. But now, thank you iPhone (and Android), I can point to applications that actually describe the marrying of tangible and intangible assets.

In the Technology Review article, dated September 23, 2009 and titled “What’s Augmented Reality’s Killer App?” the author – Kristina Grifantini discusses several applications currently being developed. She defines Augmented Reality as the ability to “superimpose virtual objects and information on top of the real world.”

This is definitely a capability insurers must be aware of and understand to better underwrite business and manage claims. And technology firms involved with spatial intelligence and/or applying semantic technologies should be salivating.

What do you think? How could insurers use Augmented Reality?

Bridging the Divides

on Aug 24 by Barry Rabkin
Tags: content management, document management, Information, knowledge management, Operational Data, semantic web, Structured Data, Unstructured Data
Comments: 1 Comment »

It doesn’t seem that long ago that I thought the “great divide” insurers faced was bridging operations and information. Operations – policy administration, billing, claims, producer onboarding and compensation, reinsurance and so forth - kept the business going while information extracted from those functional processes and other sources fueled decisions.

Oh for the good old days.

We really haven’t solved the operational / informational divide but the rapidly emerging Digital Marketplace has uncovered a divide that had always existed but has now taken on more urgency: the divide between structured data and unstructured data.

Structured & Unstructured Data

Structured data we know and sometimes love: numbers, spreadsheets, databases, … But unstructured data is all around us in the insurance value chains including but certainly not limited to:

•  E-mails from external stakeholders (I’m referring to policyholders, prospects, producers, regulators and reinsurers) to insurance company personnel
• E-mails within the value chains of the insurance company (from one or more employees to other employees)
• Phone calls within and between stakeholders whether internally or externally or some combination
• Policy application forms in some state of completeness
• Product development forms
• Claim adjuster forms 
• Claim adjuster pictures or videos
• Instant messages
• Tweets (yes, tweets within and between stakeholders)
• And, well you get the idea.

This divide must be solved sooner than later. And the solutions rests with understanding the importance of investing in capabilities that enable the insurance company to mix, merge or otherwise blend, and access structured and unstructured data into one coherent data repository … and, of course, be able to visualize the results of the queries in a way that leads to effective and efficient decision-making.

What is your insurance company doing to bridge the structured / unstructured data gap?

Release Your Imprisoned Data !!

on Aug 22 by Barry Rabkin
Tags: content management, document management, knowledge management, semantic web
Comments: 3 Comments »

Insurance companies could fuel years, if not decades, of rip-roaring bonfires with their inventory of hard-copy documents. Every department from underwriting to claims to legal (and for life insurers, medical) and other functional departments all have mountains of documents stored in file cabinets and desk drawers too numerous to count.

Each one of those documents encompasses significant information assets crying out to be freed from their paper prisons and released into a coherent digital infrastructure. As long as the information is held prisoner in their forms, only the jailer can access and use the assets frozen in place. Sharing across departments is done infrequently if at all. Sharing throughout the value chains that touch the field staff, producers, regulators and reinsurers is done mostly at the proverbial point of a gun.

Be Free, Data, Be Free!!

If all the data were set free from their hard-copy prisons and poured into coherent data structures that were tagged and searchable throughout the insurance company (including by stakeholders across all the value chains), what might we want to do?

• Perhaps we could tag the various products with the terms, conditions, restrictions, endorsements or riders (depending on the flavor of insurance we are talking about) so that someone could search on any one of those attributes, Or
• Each set of claim information could have descriptions of what the claim adjuster was thinking when s/he saw the loss occurrence – something relating to the magnitude of the impact or loss of the claimant’s property, Or
• Product forms could have descriptions relating to why the product was created, the markets the insurer wanted to penetrate and the competitors the insurer was striving to gain market share from with that specific product
• Underwriters could possibly attribute why they had stipulated the acceptance or rejection criteria for each product
• Campaign data assets might have descriptions by the marketing department relating to the purpose and scope of each specific campaign
• Customer service personnel could describe the tone and nature of the calls they have received from policyholders, prospects and producers for each communication event

What would you want to do or expect if your insurance company data were thawed out from their frozen cells and released into a collaborative environment?

Is There An Insurance App For That?

on Aug 20 by Barry Rabkin
Tags: iPhone
Comments: 2 Comments »

By now most folks in the insurance industry – at least the personal lines property/casualty insurance industry – have probably heard that Nationwide has launched an iPhone app for FNL (first notice of loss) of an automobile accident. From the Nationwide web site, the Nationwide iPhone App mobile capabilities:

• Calls emergency services
• Helps you collect and exchange accident information
• Stores your insurance and vehicle information for easy lookup (by the way, I’d love a docking station for my iPhone in my BMW that automatically collects my vehicle data from the VIN to maintenance done and scheduled)
• Locates Nationwide agents near you (of course, this app leverages the location based information in the iPhone)
• Takes and stores accident photos (well, you have to take the photos – no lepechauns yet – and Nationwide states on their site they are not legally obligated to use these photos)
• Converts your iPhone into a handy flashlight (isn’t there an app for that already?)
• Helps connect with towing services
• Helps you start the Nationwide claims process (if you are a Nationwide customer… this app works for people who aren’t Nationwide policyholders so this specific capability won’t come into play)
• Finds Nationwide Blue Ribbon (sm) repair facilities

What Else?

Staying with property/casualty – either personal lines or commercial lines – what iPhone apps would make your experience easier with your property/casualty insurer? Perhaps something for new policy applications, claims other than automobile (homeowners is obviously a natural addition to the auto claims FNL, or what ??? For commercial property/casualty, fleet FNL is also an obvious extension but so is burglary, fire and what?

What insurance iPhone apps would you want or could you imagine?

Maginot Line, Part II

on Aug 04 by Barry Rabkin
Tags: risk landscape
Comments: No Comments »

Lloyd’s recently released a new 360 Risk Insight report with the Economist Intelligence Unit titled “Global Business Leader Survey: Risk Priorities and Preparedness.” The authors state that “the report explores corporate risk attitudes around the world … and is based on worldwide survey of more than 570 board-level executives.”

All well and good.  Fairly extensive reach of executives and industries across the globe. Again, quoting from the report: “The respondents were asked to score a series of key risks within five categories in relation to the priority level for the risk in their organization and the degree of preparedness to manage it.”

Troubling

But here is my problem.

I direct the reader of this report to Chart 5: Global Risk Chart and ask you to consider at least the following seven risks:

1. Corporate liability (ranked #8 on the chart)
2. Reputational risk (#9)
3. Fraud and corruption (#15)
4. Information security breach (#16)
5. Theft of assets / intellectual property (#18)
6. Rapid technological change (#19)
7. Cyber attacks (#20)

For each of these seven risks, these board-level executives have stated (of course, through the magic of weighted averages) that their company is prepared at a higher level than the risk priority. In other words, their companies are prepared to deal with these risks.

Oh really???

Can any customer – whether corporate or consumer – who really understands the pace and concomitant risks of the ever-quickening pace of the digital marketplace believe this is true? These corporations can deal with all these digital marketplace-related risks now in 2009? How many of these corporations understand the impact of social networking?  How many can accurately value their intangible assets flowing through their own digital value chains as well as the through the myriad streams and ponds of the web? How many of these corporations really know when their systems have been hacked and information stolen? Are they truly ready to leverage the ever-quickening rhythm of technological change?

Maginot Line (Original)

The French thought they learned a lesson from World War I.  So they built the Maginot Line to stop the Germans from advancing during World War II. Unfortunately the Germans took another route and conquered France anyway.

Lessons abound throughout history that using ideas from the past to compete successfully in the “now” or in the future will not work.

Circling Back

I fear most, if not all, of these executives are shaping their risk management practices by “fighting yesterday’s war.” They are ignoring the issues and implications of the digital marketplace on their businesses both today and tomorrow. They do not understand they are not truly prepared to face the changing risk landscape being significantly altered through the disruptive force of the web.

Am I wrong?

Digital Marketplace Much More Than Web 2.0

on Jul 26 by Barry Rabkin
Tags: evolving web, social media
Comments: No Comments »

It’s almost impossible to pick up a magazine whether business or technology and not see an article about Web 2.0. And the gist is almost always about the latest social media technology application. People can be forgiven if they equate Web 2.0 with the concept of the digital marketplace but these concepts are not the same. In fact, Web 2.0 is only a part of the digital marketplace.

The digital marketplace is the rapidly emerging environment where people can meet and greet people or transact business either totally within the digital domain or sometimes requiring both the digital domain and good old-fashioned Terra Firma. The digital domain is growing both because of the continual explosion of content (i.e., data) that is becoming digitally available (thank you, Google and Amazon) and the continual availability of devices or appliances people and businesses use to access these digital goodies.

More Than Web 2.0

The digital marketplace is all about the evolution of capabilities of the Web from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 and to Web 4.0 and beyond.

Excuse me? Are you just creating new versions here of the Web? No, I’m not.

• Web 1.0 was and is all about content. Content that is being digitally rendered to make it available to electronic manipulation, search, determination (in the ‘aha, there you are’ fashion) and navigation. Web 1.0 began to give life to the future ghost of e-discovery (that will bedevil countless corporations in the years to come).
• Web 2.0 is all about communication. But not just between people (such as in MySpace, FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and the rest of the social networking technology solutions and platforms). But also communication between functionality – web services, WSDL, SOAP and associated determinants that make web services possible.
• Web 3.0 is only now emerging. It is the “semantic web” and it enables smarter, more understandable functionality. Sort of like a combination dictionary / thesaurus driving communications, collaboration and commerce. (Rumor has it that Sir Berners-Lee thought that the Semantic Web would be Web 2.0 but the tsunami of personal communications pushed the semantic web to the next step in functionality)
• Web 4.0 will be all about confluence. It will be the coming together, the blending of tangible artifacts (stores, inventory, documents, ….) with intangible artifacts (logic, behavior, needs, expectations). We see it now in its earliest phases with our smartphones and their ability to blend GPS with restaurant locations and particular desires to eat a certain type of food in a specific price range.
• Web 5.0 …. don’t know yet. Stay tuned. But it will probably encompass more control as in enabling people or businesses to manage and control intangible artifacts (think either data or even physical infrastructure) with our devices that reach into the digital domain.

All of these evolving web capabilities and whatever comes in the future that impact or change the digital domain are part and parcel of the digital marketplace.

It Resonates

on Jun 14 by Barry Rabkin
Tags: Observations
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Sometimes someone says something to you that just resonates.  It strikes a mental bell.  It sets you down a path of ideas and thoughts you might not have had if that person didn’t make the remark. Back in 1990 or so, I was in a meeting with the executive responsible for advanced technologies at Fidelity Investments.  And he said, “what do you think will happen when everyone and everything has an IP address?”

If we had gone down this path back then perhaps we might have imagined ethereal threads of data woven into overlaying fabric of societal life and commerce. We might have imagined the compelling need for mobility or the necessity of devices that could pluck data from anywhere regardless of where the person holding the device was at the time. We might have realized the critical need for corporations to manage their data as crucial assets.

But we didn’t do any of that. We just began another thought of our discussion away from ubiquitous IP addresses.

What might you have thought of? What do you think are the ramifications of everyone and everything having an IP adress?