Much of the digital economy has been built around a powerful assumption: Understanding people’s behaviour creates economic value. Observe more. Measure more. Learn more. Predict more. Personalise more. Influence more. Over time, information about human behaviour has itself become commercially valuable. Volume IV asks a fundamentally different question: What would digital business look like if…
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For much of the digital economy, the customer relationship has expanded far beyond the original transaction. Someone buys something. But the interaction also creates information. What they looked at. What they ignored. What they bought before. How often they return. What might interest them next. Gradually, the behaviour surrounding the transaction becomes valuable in its…
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Every organisation makes promises. We will protect your data. We will respect your privacy. We will only use your information for the purposes described. We will not share it without permission. We invest heavily in policies, governance, compliance and security to make those promises credible. And then we ask people to trust us. But there…
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Modern organisations are built around visibility. We monitor. We analyse. We track. We measure. We justify these activities as necessary for security, compliance, operations and customer service. But what if we’ve mistaken visibility for necessity? For decades, digital systems have been designed on the assumption that providers must observe users in order to deliver services.…
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Every time we interact online, a record is created. A login. A purchase. A search. A message. A click. Most of us accept this as a normal part of digital life. But why? Why should every interaction generate a permanent trail? Why should organisations be expected to collect it? And why should customers accept the…
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Every few weeks another organisation asks me to prove who I am. My bank knows. My employer knows. My insurer knows. My airline knows. Government departments know. Countless websites know. The obvious question is: Why is my identity stored in so many places? For decades we have accepted a simple assumption. If an organisation needs…
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Every person knows this feeling. You book a holiday. You open a bank account. You use a mobile app. You join a loyalty programme. You visit a website. Each interaction comes with an invisible transaction. Your information in exchange for a service. Most of us have become so accustomed to this arrangement that we rarely…
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