Items tagged "consumer empowerment"
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Today, Scottish Power becomes the first company to start releasing data back to customers as part of the midata programme. Midata is a UK Government-backed initiative to encourage companies to release data back to customers in a portable electronic format so they can use this data for their own purposes. Ctrl-Shift is advising the Department of Business on midata.
We spoke to Andrew Ward, Operations Director at Scottish Power, about its involvement in midata.
What are you doing?
We are releasing customer consumption histories in an electronic format, so they can take their own information to find the…
It has been a busy month where we have attended and hosted several events. They highlight the way that public opinion, technology, regulatory and commercial pressures are all lining up to unleash a sea change in the personal data landscape. What’s also becoming clear is that the UK is leading the world in giving individuals control over their data. In this issue we’ll tell you about these events, our new research and a smattering of market news.
A £1bn opportunity?
Our latest research (to be published on Monday April 30) is a comprehensive review of all the players in the…
As a result of our discussions at our last Explorers’ Club event we have created a Infographic (see below) mapping the timeline of changes in the personal data landscape. To download simply right click on the image.
We’ve mapped out the events and predictions from now until 2017 looking through the lenses of: social and cultural changes; corporate commercial activity; entrepreneurial activity; technology; and legislation, regulation, policies, protocols and standards.
The timeline suggests that market savvy consumers will soon start taking control of their data (as Tim Berners Lee has recently urged); short-term winners will be entrepreneurs (see In our newsletter this month we have new research to tell you about. We also highlight our project looking at the Internet of Things market and round off with some key news, including some international developments. Decisions Decisions We’ve published our briefing paper about the development of a revolutionary and disruptive industry for consumer decision-support services. These services empower consumers by helping them to make better decisions and change their own behaviours. The report explains why this revolution is happening now, what forms it’s taking, and what its impacts are: this is a new market that changes…
In this issue we highlight our forthcoming reports each of which delivers fresh insight into emerging markets. Also covered are some suggestions drawn from our recent research about what constitutes best practice in building positive, two-way data sharing customer relationships. The market round-up includes some of the key news this month. Understanding growth markets Over the next few months our research is focused on some of the new market opportunities emerging as a result of developments in the empowered consumer marketplace. Two new reports will provide evidence and analysis of the implications and possibilities created by developments across these different…
Following the recent London Green Hackathon, the winning hacks have now been announced. It’s inspiring to see what a few ingenious minds can create over a weekend using only data that’s freely available. When organisations start releasing customer data in a portable, reusable way (for example, as part of the Government's midata programme), innovative applications will offer much, much more. The Department for Business Innovation and Skills, which is running the midata programme, supported the Hackathon to get a flavour of just what kind of innovations the future could hold. The data used in the hackathon…
At our Explorers’ Club event last week we had a fascinating session mapping out the events and predictions from now until 2017 that will influence the development of the control shift and evolving consumer empowerment. We honed in on just one aspect of the control shift – how personal data is managed, collected and used – and grouped predictions in terms of: social and cultural changes; With 25 knowledgeable attendees – representing large corporations, small entrepreneurial businesses, suppliers of new personal information…
Phew! It has taken us six months but we got there in the end. Today (27 January), in the lead up to Data Protection Day (28th January) we’ve published new research assessing the privacy policies of the UK’s top 100 online retailers – the sector where many consumers most commonly experience the benefits and pitfalls of e-commerce. We don’t think anyone has ever done this before and now we’ve got to the end, we’re not surprised. The project kicked off in the summer of 2011 when we started to think through an objective assessment of the state of the nation…
In this first issue of the year we highlight some of the proposals in the leaked draft of the European Data Protection legislation and we’ll give you a preview of our research looking at the privacy policies of UK online retailers. Also covered is our thinking as we debunk a few myths in a forthcoming series of blog posts ‘5 ways to misdirect resources in 2012’. In the market round-up we’re spoilt for choice but have picked out some of the key news. EU law looks set to mandate electronic data handbacks We are expecting to see the first draft…
We're delighted to announce a new addition to the Ctrl-Shift team. Chris Nutt will be joining us at the beginning of February to help us develop our business. Chris has a 20 year track record in helping organisations harness technology – mainly in the retail area – and so adds considerable experience to us. He has worked as a strategic advisor with some of the UK's most successful brands. His experience ranges from designing and implementing customer insight solutions through to the development and management of strategies for transforming multi-channel businesses. We’re anticipating 2012 to be an exciting growth year…
Last week in our blog post on consumer empowerment trends in 2012 we predicted that managing personal reputation and identity will gain even greater prominence this year as people increasingly conduct and manage their lives online. The first significant development in this space took place yesterday when Miicard (which provides a digital passport to prove who you say you are) and Callcredit (one of the UK’s leading credit reference agencies) announced a strategic partnership. They are bringing to market a completely new consumer-friendly Electronic Identity and Verification (eID&V) service removing the need for paper based checks such as…
So what trends will take shape in 2012 as the control shift continues in this era of consumer empowerment? Consumers will continue to assert their ‘voice’ harnessing social media to organise themselves and share information. This level of active participation as people engage more vocally with organisations and each other is likely to grow and increase in momentum. Using technology people will connect and collaborate in new ways causing disruption to established order. People’s shopping habits will continue the trend from ‘bricks’ to better-informed ‘clicks’. Consumers will be more active and demanding in their relationships with businesses; ‘I like this’ or…
A video of a talk I gave recently to a conference of lean practitioners has just gone up on YouTube. In it I discuss two themes. First I argue that, as individuals emerge as managers of their own data and with voice – the ability to express their plans, preferences and specifications to suppliers – the lean goals of making exactly to demand and getting things right first time on time can now be taken to a new level. There are two ways of thinking about lean. The first, traditional factor, treats ‘the customer’ as an out-there exogenous factor:…
So much has happened and changed in 2011 and the control shift is well underway. We've captured below some of the significant milestones that have unfolded this year with links to the relevant news items taken from our Market Watch. Consumer empowerment Consumer habits are rapidly changing driven by technology and use of social media. Consumers are becoming hyper connected and active participants in markets and they are recognising the power of acting collectively (think Occupy London). They are changing their shopping habits: according to Reevoo’s research nearly 90% of respondents would not purchase a product before reading others’…
We're now planning our next research reports and we'd like your input. We're already committed to two reports (see below) and would like to choose two more from the options list. Feedback very welcome. Privacy comparisons. Which of the top 100 e-commerce e-tailers has the best privacy policy and which has the worst? Decision-making market. As a follow-on from our work on personal information management services (PIMS), we look at the broad scope of suppliers in this market and chart what benefits consumers get from making better decisions. Options for early 2012 - The Personal Data Store (PDS) market.…
Playing down good news isn’t something one expects from politicians these days, but there’s at least one real driver for growth buried in George Osborne’s Autumn Statement. In it he announced new Open Data measures, and this signals a battery of initiatives that will present new and exciting opportunities to outperform our decreased growth forecast. According to the Cabinet Office the measures will, ‘open up public sector data to make travel easier and healthcare better, and create significant growth for industry and jobs in the UK.’ More Open Data will ‘allow entrepreneurs to develop useful applications for business and consumers’.…
At our recent event ‘To hoard or to share: midata and the personal data-sharing revolution’ Alan Mitchell discussed the Government’s midata programme in the broader context of changes to the personal data landscape. We’ve now published a report on the New Personal Data Landscape that identifies these transformational trends, highlights the emerging market for new personal data management services and analyses the opportunities and threats for organisations. For the last fifty years organisations have had a monopoly on the collection and use of customer data. But this is changing. Individuals are starting to collect and manage their…
Our midata event takes place tomorrow and we wanted to say thank you to our sponsors Mydex and Callcredit for supporting us. Both organisations provide revolutionary services embracing and underpinning the new personal data landscape. Tom Ilube from Callcredit will be giving an update at the event on Noddle a ‘poster child’ of midata. The service simply turns the existing personal credit rating on its head. Usual practice for credit reports is that they are requested by the credit provider at the end of a sales process. But when it is launched later this year, Noddle will allow any…
There's been quite a lot of news coverage of the midata launch - which is about time given its potential long term significance. The BBC has a vox pop from midata chair Prof Nigel Shadbolt. The Wall Street Journal asks some pertinent questions about how these ideas need to be packaged and presented. The FT reports on Ctrl-Shift's estimate that the first round of midata could involve 20 million individuals. Ctrl-Shift's press release about midata identified three new and very large growth markets made possible by midata. The very existence of these markets has been rendered invisible…
Today the following businesses announced their commitment to the midata principle of releasing customers’ data back to them in a portable electronic form: Avoco Secure; billmonitor; British Gas; Callcredit; EDF Energy; E.ON; Garlik; Google; Lloyds Banking Group; MasterCard; Moneysupermarket.com; Mydex; npower; RBS; Scottish Power; Scottish Southern Energy; The UK Cards Association; Three; and Visa. At Ctrl-Shift we’ve been talking about midata for a while now, partly because we’ve been advising the Government on the programme, but mainly because we genuinely believe it marks the beginning of a fundamental shift in the way companies and customers manage their relationships…
The countdown to Ctrl-Shift’s midata event, 'to hoard or to share: midata and the personal data sharing revolution’, which takes place a week tomorrow, has started. We’re delighted that Richard Anson, Founder and CEO of Reevoo, will be taking the stage. Reevoo is a great example of the new wave of decision support services using personal data. It’s taken an ad hoc consumer activity - posting the odd review here and there - and turned it into a disciplined, structured process: carefully collecting reviews from only known buyers of products and slicing and dicing the resulting information in multiple…
Theo Bertram, UK Policy Manager for Google, will talk about data openness and transparency at Ctrl-Shift’s forthcoming event ‘to hoard or to share: midata and the personal data sharing revolution’ on 9th November. Theo will showcase Google Dashboard as a great example of a ‘midata-enabled’ service – a service which releases back to customers the data held on them in an electronic, reusable format. All the data generated by people when they are signed in to their Google Account is transparent on the Dashboard, users have options to update and delete their data, change settings, and control their experience, and…
Consumer Focus, the statutory consumer champion for England, Wales and Scotland, has asked Ctrl-Shift to add to its body of research regarding how use of the internet and new technologies have made powerful new approaches to consumer empowerment possible. Specifically we have been asked to help build an inventory of all the potential consumer risks and downsides of the emerging digital age. The goal of this research is to build a publicly accessible database of all the potential ‘digital detriments’, to update this database as new issues arise. This is to provide an understanding of what the issues are for…
Many of you familiar with our work will have heard us use the phrase "tipping point"; and one of these may well have emerged with Facebook Gestures - as one commentator put it Prepare for the Oversharing Explosion. Well, we think we've reached a smaller one, albeit still significant, in our business - it is time to expand! It's exciting and you may be able to help us. First up, we're after two business development professionals. And no, we're not using BDM as a euphemism for sales. We need two people who can listen carefully to our clients'…
We're now planning our Autumn research programme and are looking for input on the top three projects and some suggestions for what we should cover in early 2012. October - PIMS 2 - the personal information management market This report is about the market that changes markets - how third party vendors are helping consumers work across markets. Building on Ctrl-Shift’s 2010 initial foray into this market, the report is focused on how services are being built to allow consumers to keep information about themselves in one easy to manage place. The report will include updates on Mint, MoneyStrands, Google…
Just come across the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee’s report on Government’s use of IT. Entitled “recipe for rip-offs: time for a new approach” it covers lots of things but one in particular struck my eye. Here are its conclusions on the specific issue of Personal Data Ownership. “Giving control of personal data to the individual has the potential to improve data quality while reducing both costs and risks. Individuals are used to controlling their own data with private sector companies, such as Amazon and with utility companies. In this month’s issue we highlight our new briefing paper on the government’s Identity Assurance programme, give an update on progress with mydata, and cover the knotty issue of informed consent. This is all followed by a quick round-up of some interesting market news. Identity Assurance Instead of establishing a huge, centralised National Identity Scheme, the aim of the government’s Identity Assurance programme is to establish a decentralised market of competing private sector identity providers. Each will provide an identity assurance service, so that public sector and other providers can be confident of the identity of…
We are setting out to track the ‘control shift’ through a tracking survey that will, over time, provide evidence of which changes are unnfolding, where, at what pace, with what impacts and implications. Our initial research is now available and it sets a benchmark to track that progress. The research is based on a GB representative sample of nearly 1500 consumers surveyed in April 2011. Fieldwork was conducted between 28 April and 5 May 2011, with 1464 adults responding. After the raw data was collated (data tables are available), Ctrl-Shift analysed the data to draw its conclusions. The analysis looks…
The Ctrl-Shift Explorers' Club met on May 12 to share experiences and understanding of the changing consumer market place. It was an eclectic mix. Attendees included large corporations and small businesses; public and private sectors; different vertical markets; and suppliers of marketing services and the creators of some of the new tools available to consumers. The event had plenty of time for discussion around a number of topics we've been researching including The Government’s ‘mydata’ initiative - what the paper says, what the implications are, and what companies should do to take advantage of the hidden radicalism in this…
The May newsletter covers the Government's mydata, a Europe wide assessment of consumer empowerment, a market round-up and to plug your chance to meet the Control Shift team next week. The initiative aims to encourage companies holding customer data to release the data back…
A new EU-wide research survey published in April 2011, has shown that the UK lags behind many other countries according to a consumer empowerment index. The research revealed that less than 50% of the 56,000 respondents (in 29 countries answering 70 questions) felt confident, knowledgeable and protected as consumers. The European Commission said that the "results show that consumer awareness and skills are worryingly low. However, there is a considerable potential to empower consumers and thereby to improve consumer welfare and reduce consumer detriment. The internet and the media have a key role to play in…
Attended an excellent event at Nesta this morning. Four great speakers all revealing how new services designed around the user are making real savings for the NHS and other parts of the NHS. The introductory remark was that if 1% of consultations could take place at home, this would save the NHS £250m a year. It's a huge saving and opportunity. * Adil Abrar, founder and director, Sidekick Studios. Sidekick are behind the Buddy project, part of NESTA’s Reboot Britain programme looking at new solutions for public services, helping patients with anxiety and depression to track…
The Government’s new programme 'Better Choices: Better Deals' represents a significant acceleration in the trend towards consumer empowerment. They even call it a ‘Consumer Empowerment Strategy’. We’ve prepared a mydata briefing on what this means for organisations. It’s free! The announcement is a first on two fronts: 1) Its ‘mydata’ programme encourages companies to release data they hold about individuals back to them, so that they can use this data for their own purposes. This is the first major Government initiative, globally, towards a changed personal data consensus: personal data is a personal asset, and individuals should have…
Today the Government launched its new Better Choices: Better Deals Consumer Empowerment strategy, of which Mydata is a key part. Mydata is an initiative to encourage businesses to release data back to individuals in a portable re-usable way - so that the data becomes a useful resource for the individual as well as for the company. This is a landmark move towards personal information empowerment. Ctrl-Shift attended a special Roundtable at No 10 Downing Street as part of the consultations around this proposal. I was asked to give a short presentation. Here is what I said: What does the phrase 'consumer empowerment' mean to you? Depending who you are it may seem like a threat, or 'about time too'; or a 'trend' to be observed. Right now however, very few people see it as a business opportunity. That needs to change, because empowering consumers is probably one of the biggest opportunities for innovation and growth we've seen for decades. We (Ctrl-Shift) have just published a report which begins to outline the scale of this opportunity. Called 'Personal Information Management Services - A Market Poised to Disrupt', the report makes this simple observation: everyone wants to…
We're still progressing our thinking on how to provide the consumer side of the evidence of the control shift. Thanks to those who commented on the original (either on site or via email). We are now close to our final questions (see below). We're looking to get these out on a survey before Easter and reporting back at our Explorers' Club in May. Our Questions: Trend: information as a tool in the hands of the individual (decision-making) 1. When making a non-routine purchase, the first thing I do is seek out independent information…
I’ve just been reading the World Economic Forum’s report Personal Data: The Emergence of New Asset Class. Here are some of the key points in the report. First, it highlights the vast amounts of personal data that are now being generated and that this data (‘digital data created by and about people’) “is generating a new wave of opportunity for economic and societal value creation.” It continues: “Increasing the control that individuals have over the manner in which their personal data is collected, managed and shared will spur a host of new services and applications. As some…
It's our job here at Ctrl-Shift HQ to track what marketing and customer service departments are up to but sometimes that does cross over into our personal lives. So this brief post (well rant) is a result of stuff I've been sent at home that really does highlight the major challenges that industry faces in getting "opt-in" sorted - or they will be faced with a major trust problem. First up, a leading telecoms supplier sent me an offer for a broadband and call offer. Apart from the fact that the small print was in light grey (and close to…
Two more articles explore the on-going control shift. The first article comes from McKinsey and discusses the effects of word-of-mouth on marketing. The article starts off thus: “The sheer volume of information available today has dramatically altered the balance of power between companies and consumers. As consumers have become overloaded, they have become increasingly skeptical about traditional company-driven advertising and marketing and increasingly prefer to make purchasing decisions largely independent of what companies tell them about products. Unfortunately, the rest of the…
I’ve nicked the following extracts from a report by Neil Davey at mycustomer.com. Of course we’ve been saying this sort of stuff for years. But it’s good that people like Gartner are finally getting round to recognising it: it shows which way the wind is blowing. “Kicking off the London Summit, Gartner VP Steve Prentice painted a daunting portrait of the sector, describing how issues relating to data, reputation, trust and customer empowerment are all undermining CRM efforts. In short, customer relationship management’s days may be numbered, he said, as a new age of ‘customer managed relationships’ begins. To be honest we weren’t that surprised at the results of our recent research: for all the talk about consumer empowerment most consumers don’t feel that empowered … yet. Does that mean ‘the trend towards increased consumer empowerment’ is all hype? I don’t think so. I think it means we need to dig deeper into what ‘consumer empowerment’ actually looks like, and how (and therefore) where it is unfolding. The first level is choice. The classic arena of choice is between competing products and services. More recently however, consumers have also gained much greater choice over the sources of…
Just received some new research we’ve been doing into consumers’ own perceptions of how empowered they are. It throws up some interesting dichotomies. It’s a common theme nowadays that thanks to the Internet, social networking and so on, consumers are much more empowered than they once were. For example in a speech last month Asda CEO Andy Bond said: “There’s no doubt we’re seeing the dawn of a new age. It’s no longer about the traditional holders of power and influence, but where consumers dictate the way we do business and the products we sell.” “The digital era has brought…
corporate commercial activity;
entrepreneurial activity;
technology; and
legislation, regulation, policies, protocols and standards.
Moving to a model where the citizen maintains…
The Government’s mydata initiative - covered in our last newsletter - is moving to its next stage. We’re glad to announce that Ctrl-Shift will be working with Department of Business Innovation and Skills as a member of the Project Board to set up the programme of work and make the strategy a reality.
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This tectonic power shift toward consumers reflects the way people now make purchasing decisions ….”
"Among the…