All Posts in Strategy and Tactics

|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

I have good news, great news, bad news, and good news.

The American Cocoa Research Institute (ACRI) recently reported research on (what else?) the health benefits of cocoa and chocolate.

The good news: The ACRI exists. Something this important deserves a research institute. The great news is that cocoa and chocolate are chock-full of flavonoids. Flavonoids are naturally occurring anti-oxidents, which means they help clean up nasty stuff inside you. According to the ACRI’s research, the flavonoids in cocoa and chocolate are more potent than those in red wine, and in fact are more potent than Vitamin C.

While the current marketplace for flavonoid detectors is only $10 million annually, the Froschbosch Group predicts that by 2005, it will grow to over $2 billion. This prediction is neither more nor less reliable than any of the other triple-digit-growth-rate market predictions you read about every week in this and other IT industry publications.

Have you ever taken a close look at these puppies? They’re all identical. They’re exponential growth curves — not one is S-shaped, none have plateaus, interruptions, or inflection points in their smooth takeoffs to glory. They all start with sales statistically indistinguishable from zero, and end a zillion times bigger. Add together a complete set and the 2005 total is 37 times the current US gross national product.

That’s a lot of economic growth … which, if it meant anything, would be great news.

Sadly, it doesn’t. That’s the bad news. These market forecasts are almost perfectly unreliable.

The statistics themselves are fine. I’m confident that the samples are big enough, stratified enough, stationary enough, and unbiased enough, and the computations are handled with precision. But they’re based on surveys.

So. The Froschbosch Group calls a CIO and asks, “Are you currently using XML to define workflow metadata?” The CIO answers that he is not with confidence.

“Are you actively investigating its potential?” The CIO doesn’t want to look like an incompetent bowb, so “Yes,” he responds, with no real understanding of what workflow metadata is.

“Will it be in production by 2002?” The CIO just said his organization is actively investigating this mystery cure, and two years is a long time. “Yes.” Heck, for all he knows, he will.

But probably, he won’t. He hasn’t even started the internal selling needed to get funding approved. In the unlikely event that he sells it and the business buys it, about three of every four IT projects fails, which means XML-based workflow metadata never will go into production in his company.

Okay, let’s give our survey respondent a break. Maybe the question is about the future of object/relational databases, and the CIO understands the subject. Every RDBM vendor has announced object/relational extensions, and his policy is to stay current on releases. Will he have object/relational database technology in production by 2003? “Yes,” he answers, and the survey company announces exponential growth for the object/relational marketplace.

The bad news is that most of these market forecasts don’t mean very much. What’s the good news?

The good news is that none of them matter to you. Amazing market growth doesn’t mean a technology is important to you, any more than a more modest market growth rate means it’s not.

All that matters is whether your business can benefit from a technology. No growth curve can tell you that. Market growth matters only to venture capitalists and Wall Street analysts, not CIOs and CTOs.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Can we give the president some privacy? Zippergate, which was a trivial scandal compared to its recent presidential predecessors, pretty much ended it.

Not that the current crop of candidates helps anything by parading their religiosity on their sleeves. It goes beyond poor fashion sense. The presidency already resembles an episode of Big Brother. Why worsen the situation by making yet another private matter public?

Presidential privacy may be both an oxymoron and a hopeless issue, but the issue of customer privacy is very much alive. Consumer advocates thunder (as always) that it’s important, industry (as always) whines that it should be self-policing, and Congress (as always) holds hearings on the subject.

But what’s the subject? “Privacy” is more slippery than a presidential candidate. But since IT helps formulate and implement privacy policies, you need to understand it. And it’s complicated.

For example: Does automated identification violate privacy? Yes! Consumer advocates yell, but does it really? As stated here last week, the Internet has properties of place — your activities in cyberspace happen there, not in your home. The right to anonymity isn’t absolute in actual reality; why should it be in virtual reality?

Everyone knew Norm’s name at Cheers and that didn’t violate his privacy. Presumably, when Norm first began to patronize Cheers he introduced himself to Sam. Sam’s remembering his name was an act of courtesy, not a privacy violation. On the other hand, total strangers can’t just grab your wallet and read your driver’s license, just because they want to. Nor, for that matter, can the police, unless they’re investigating a crime.

This gives you a pretty good guideline. A customer’s right to anonymity isn’t absolute, nor solely a matter of permission, but it also isn’t waived just because they enter your web site, any more than they waive it by entering a department store. Which means your company’s identification process should be explicit and overt … a login process, or a request for permission to set a cookie.

Does privacy mean your company shouldn’t track and predict customers’ buying preferences once you’ve legitimately identified them? Woody knew what kind of beer Norm liked, and that didn’t violate Norm’s privacy — presumably, Norm would have been offended had it been otherwise.

If you tell me something, I don’t violate your privacy by remembering it. If you buy something, pay with a credit card, and provide a shipping address, the seller doesn’t violate your privacy by recording the transaction and using the information.

Until it sells the information to another company. It’s fine for Sam to know whatever Norm tells him about Vera; it isn’t fine for Sam to sell Vera’s name, address, telephone number, and size to the lingerie shop down the street.

But what if your company owns both Cheers and the lingerie company? That’s a bit fuzzier. So in your privacy policy, list the companies and brands that share customer information. If you state the policy and your customers agree to it, there’s no privacy violation; if they don’t agree to it they can take their business elsewhere. It’s a matter of mutual consent, as it should be. (If you have no policy, caveat emptor, but shame on you.)

As for companies like Doubleclick, that surreptitiously follow you from site to site, in real space, we call that “stalking”, and we arrest people for it.

Why should cyberspace be any different?

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