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Lead story – How should digital leaders respond to the vaccine economy?

MyPOV: Granted, we are still in the COVID-19 economy rather than the vaccine economy, but we could all use a bit of light in this particular tunnel right now, eh? Based on a slew of CXO interviews, Derek asks: What should digital leaders be thinking about in 2021?. He writes:

It is likely hitting home now for companies that things won’t return to ‘normal’ anytime soon. Nor would that be a good thing, in many cases. With crisis comes opportunity, and I think many have realised that COVID-19 has provided a chance to do things differently – better, even.

It’s gone on long enough that the duration itself has become a major factor:

Long enough will have passed for new habits to be formed – both on the side of the consumer and on the side of the employee. The expectations of both have accelerated towards digital capability and flexibility.

Too many software vendors think the life they are comfortable with will soon return, starting with their legacy beloved on-the-ground events. But planning for normalcy is not a winning playbook. Stuart picks up these themes in Data privacy and the Vaccine Economy – fresh challenges ahead for enterprise users and tech providers alike. Consider the prospects of returning to the office, or business travel. A whole new set of data considerations:

Individuals vaccine status will have to be collated, stored, tapped into etc etc by healthcare providers. Enterprise employers will also need to be assured of a staffer’s vaccine status, adding one more piece of data to be collected and managed. Robust and responsible data management is going to be a vital part of ensuring a successful societal vaccination effort and back-to-work tech solutions will need to support this.

Adding to the complications: the informed view *for now* is that the vaccinated can still be carriers and potentially transmit. So, we’ve got all kinds of new data collection issues, along with mask-wearing regulations and so forth. Last time I checked, most enterprises weren’t far enough along on their so-called “digital journeys” to handle private data with the sophistication and real-time info needed. Going to be quite a year.

Diginomica picks – my top stories on diginomica this week

• Digital soars, offline slumps at Bed, Bath & Beyond – time to keep calm and carry on the omni-transformation – as NRF’s online “Big Show – Chapter One” kicks off, Stuart sets the table with a good news/bad news update at BBB. Also see: Stuart’s I’m Amazon, fly me! – Amazon Air ups the stakes against FedEx in e-commerce delivery and fulfilment.
• Could ‘Zero Trust Security’ have prevented the massive SolarWinds attack? – Jerry asks a provocative question during his interview with Cloudflare’s CTO.
• Poor data access and lack of data sharing hampered UK response to COVID-19 – Derek on unsettling new data from the UK.
• What would a hybrid event look like? Answer: you’ll need much more than a streaming keynote. Recall my potshot at legacy events? Well, here’s my latest thinking – and nine ideas on planning for hybrid events.

Vendor analysis, diginomica style. Here’s my three top choices from our vendor coverage:

• Modernising the world’s rail networks with IoT and Siemens Mobility – Mark
• HR in an RPA vendor – how bots are transforming the function – Brian
• ThoughtSpot CEO – ‘I want to kill BI and I want all dashboards to die’ – Derek

Jon’s grab bag – Stuart opines on the big tech debate du jour: Friday Rant – will 2021 be the year we finally tame Facebook? Don’t hold your breath…  Simon Griffiths issues a dandy guest post: Tech intensity – it’s not just about a tech Band-Aid.

Meanwhile, Den ruminates on tech disillusionment – and where we go from here – in The three pillars of renewal – opportunity cost, magical thinking and learning. Neil continues a notable series on the problem of AI fairness in Can fairness be automated with AI? A deeper look at an essential debate.

Finally, I just about blew a gasket unloading The myth of hyper-personalization – algorithms are still undermining the customer experience. Yeah, I have a few bones of contention with the hyper-personalization carnival barkers crowd. But is there a better way in B2B? Something tells me this topic will come up in my guest appearance on CRMKonvo this, Tuesday, January 11th. Feel free to join me…

Best of the enterprise web

My top seven picks of the week: 

• A second hacking group has targeted SolarWinds systems – “Security researchers don’t believe this second entity is related to the suspected Russian government-backed hackers who breached SolarWinds to insert malware inside its official Orion app.” Not sure if that’s supposed to be reassuring?
• Russia’s SolarWinds Attack and Software Security – Bruce Schneier weighs in on the latest: “The market does not reward security, safety or transparency. It doesn’t reward reliability past a bare minimum, and it doesn’t reward resilience at all. This is what happened at SolarWinds.”
• New York City proposes regulating algorithms used in hiring – “The bill would require firms to disclose when they use software to assess candidates.”
• AI Update, Late 2020 – dumpster fire – A bit of a sensational headline, but some well-thought critique of a problematic year for AI.
• Jobs report shows 140,000 jobs were lost in December. All of them were held by women – The unequal infliction of economic pain by COVID-19 continues.
• MIT task force predicts fully autonomous vehicles won’t arrive for ‘at least’ 10 years – Finally some sober thinking self-driving cars.
• Derisking digital and analytics transformations – I don’t think you can ever “de-risk” a properly bold digital project. Nor can you de-risk standing still. But this McKinsey piece makes a good point: surface the risks, so you can probably assess them.

Whiffs

I’m going to stay away from the obvious stuff as it’s more tragic than funny. But I did like this twist:

Is there anything more irritating than free services that keep inserting burrs into your shoes until you pay up – rather than proving value? Lately, Slack has been toying with the hard march to forced monetization pulling the rug out from those who helped build their service up, with super-phony messages like “ It’s the last day of your Slack Standard free trial” – on a free Slack account I have experimented with for years. But Scoop.It, a curation service I used to frequently extol in my articles, is the ultimate free service ankle-biter:

Honestly, Scoop.It, if times are that hard, just go out of business – it will have more dignity. A big reason why I’m not a paying Scoop customer is due to “what’s up Jon, you freemium loser?” antics like these. But my colleague Den Howlett stole the show this week with:

No way I’m topping that. Take care of yourselves out there, and see you next time…

If you find an #ensw piece that qualifies for hits and misses – in a good or bad way – let me know in the comments as Clive (almost) always does. Most Enterprise hits and misses articles are selected from my curated @jonerpnewsfeed. ‘myPOV’ is borrowed with reluctant permission from the ubiquitous Ray Wang.