Insights from Inside

Identity and Consumers: The Power to Personalize

By Michelle Dennedy
Chief Privacy Officer

Something that truly amazes me about technology today is the180-degree turn it has made to serve the people, instead of the other way around.

It wasn’t all that long ago that people were offered very little choice or control over what they could do with technology. You had an IBM-compatible personal computer, it ran a few basic applications, and that was all there was to it. To do anything more than that, you had to be one of the technology wizards who comprise maybe 5 percent of the population.

But look where we are today: as a small example, even someone who knows virtually nothing about technology can publish music or videos on the Internet and share them with the whole world.

Similarly, individuals in the enterprise can grab back control over information, content creation, and publication like never before. If I’m putting a business plan or a presentation together, for example, I can pull some background information from a wiki page, grab my CEO’s perspective from his blog, check my topic against a dozen news outlets, collaborate using my salesforce online account, and parlay all of the information I’ve gathered into a far more powerful, effective result.

This fundamental shift in power is reflected in the many mutually rewarding relationships that exist in consumer and business interactions today. You see it when you receive personalized recommendations for books, music, or other goods from amazon.com. Or when a company Web site gives you the option to talk with a rep specializing in your interest, on the spot. Or when your in-vehicle navigation system automatically directs you to your meeting.

IDM: Enabling Change in Business/Consumer Relationships
You benefit from these interactions by enjoying a richer experience that’s tailored to your preferences — and it takes practically no effort on your part, other than signing up. The businesses that you interact with benefit, too, because the improved experience that they offer you earns them your loyalty.

Not surprisingly, identity management tools and techniques are right in the middle of all this. Customer rewards and loyalty programs are taking identity management to a whole new level. They have an enormous amount of identity-based information about you flowing in constantly, from the time you sign up to every single time you interact with them.

Do a search for vintage PCs on eBay, for example, and that particular piece of information about you — that you’re interested in old computers — becomes part your eBay persona. That information is what enables eBay to alert you when the PC you’ve been looking for the last five years goes up for auction. And it gets added to many, many other pieces of information that you’ve allowed eBay to learn about you, so that you can enjoy a more rewarding relationship with the company. You also have direct control over this persona and this conversation that you’re conducting with eBay, to further enable a better experience for you in your interactions with them.

The privacy and identity characteristics around the explosion of personal information must inform the people, tools, and process management used to govern the information. These are all elements of sound identity management tools and techniques. The greatest challenge for business in this process is to capture identity information appropriately to leverage it to serve people better — and, at the same time, to protect the information so that it can’t be misused.

Identity management is essential to using information to personalize content, create added business value, and to improve IT asset utilization. It’s also essential to protecting information and keeping it secure.

A Question of Balance
This raises some interesting questions for consumers and business users and the companies with which they do business. For example, as users, we all say we want to be in control of our information. But just how much in control do we really want to be? Do we want the companies we interact with to leave it solely to us to read all the legal notices, privacy statements, user agreements, and other data and documents and figure it all out for ourselves?

There is a balance to be struck here. That’s why standards are so important — everyone needs to be playing by the same rules when it comes to protecting the privacy of personal information.

It seems to me that the companies that succeed at identity management as a means to better asset management and risk assessment will be the ones that do well in this new era of technology serving the people. A company that manages identities successfully has the information and the ability to deliver the highly personalized experience that people want today, without compromising their privacy.

Companies that don’t manage identities successfully have less to offer — so much less that the products, services, and experiences they deliver may be considered mere also-ran or floor-level solutions, because they offer no added value.

The companies that are delivering high-value, personalized services absolutely understand that technology today must serve the people and their needs and desires — not the other way around. Technology in this context becomes the enabler of an idea or the actualization of a business requirement, rather than a cost sink or business impediment.

These companies also understand that having information, and knowing what to do with that information, is the key to creating value — both today and 20 years from today. And they understand that identity management is absolutely essential to making the most of the wealth of information that is available to them and, at the same time, to keeping that information safe and protected.