Accenture Technology Vision 2013

Trend 1. Relationships at Scale
Accenture Technology Vision 2013
Sidebar: Gauging the Value of Trust
During its bankruptcy proceedings in
2011, Borders, the bookstore chain, won
judicial approval to sell its intellectual
property, including a customer
database, to Barnes & Noble. The
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issue at stake: shoppers’ data privacy.
Anticipating privacy concerns,
Borders’ lawyers persuaded the court
to appoint an independent third
party to consider the privacy impact
on the 48 million Borders customers
whose personal information would
be transferred with the sale of the
intellectual property. In the end, the
customers were given the chance to
opt out of the transfer.
The bookseller’s readiness to tell
customers how their data could
potentially be used and, crucially,
to give them a choice in the
matter shows how companies and
consumers may interact in the future
on issues of privacy. It’s also a prime
example of the mobility of data
these days—and a good indicator of
the importance of establishing, let
alone maintaining, accountability for
such data.
A decade ago, Accenture asked
whether enterprises could
differentiate themselves based on
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consumer trust. We flagged five
dimensions of trust—safekeeping of
personal information, control over
the data, personal access to one’s
data, accountability, and the benefits
of letting corporations use one’s
data—and we spelled out practical
steps that would help companies
move toward operating models
based on trust. Even before the
age of social media and big data,
our recommendations were clear:
companies must seek ways to use
knowledge about their customers
to provide better services to them,
doing so in ways that increase trust,
not suspicion.
Ten years on, plenty has changed:
the entities collecting information
are savvier than ever about data, and
they have more channels through
which to gather it (think “big data”)
and more powerful tools with which
to extract insights from it. For
their part, individuals are far more
sensitive about the use of their data,
even though more and more data is
sought from them and more is
given by them, both willingly
and unwittingly.
In general, individuals are more
likely to think in terms of what’s in
it for them if they give out personal
data. “When you put information
about yourself out there, that’s a
transaction,” Margaret Stewart,
Facebook’s director of product
design, told Fast Company recently.
“But you need to feel that you’re
getting something back in return.
When we start to provide things
that feel valuable to people, it will
make that transaction make sense.”
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