Ethics Takes Centre Stage

Last night I attended an event where Ann Roberts of Badoo and Nick Lisher of Nextdoor were discussing the meaning of enterprise values and their application to governance for Digital Platform based enterprises.

In the wake of the various regulatory issues that Facebook has had with Data Privacy legislation in Europe and Uber has encountered with employment law and regulation of taxis in a number of countries and cities, including London, this was a highly relevant discussion. It was pparticulalry refresshing to hear Nick Lisher say "I find GDPR liberating." as he went on to expound the fact that Nextdoor's values and approach meant that they had not had to alter or adapt their product at all to ensure compliance, which confirms assertions that I made in an earlier post that GDPR forces you to do the things that you should do anyway. It gives a great argument to persuade finance that it is necessary to pay for them.

All in all it boils down the the issue of running a digital enterprise as an ethical concern, which is a pre-requisite that I identified in "The Way of DAU", my take on how to adopt a Business as Usual business model.

Digital Business models amplify the concepts behind customer care theory. Traditionally this has proposed that 70% of sales are repeat sales to existing customers and that it is roughly 10 times cheaper to do something to keep a disgruntled customer, by addressing complaints positively, than it is to gain a new customer. Also if you manage to delight a customer, he or she will tell 10 people and sell your company. If you annoy them, they will tell even more and damage your reputation. Badoo's business model actually relies on this, because if you successfully match someone up with another person, Badoo may lose them as customers, but they will tell everyone that it was how they met and sell Badoo positively. Conversely, there have been significant backlashes over how Facebook uses people's data, and recent slow downs in growth and consequent loss in market value, are not the first time that Facebook has suffere significant customer defections.

Google used to have a great reputation when everyone believed in its "Do no Evil" credo, but is gradually losing mindshare with significant portions of people as a result of failure to translate this into a positive corporate culture where ethical concerns are addressed and seen to be addressed by the people who work there, its customers and increasingly EU regulators.

However, whilst we were discussing this and what happens in many traditional PLCs, a penny dropped. It's not just the the Leaders of a digital enterprise who need to be focussed on instituionalising ethics as a core of company culture, but also the shareholders. The llatter need to align themselves with the long term view and how value is created. There's too much emphasis on quick results and returns and not enough on long term value and scalability. Ethics needs to be seen part of a digital business's scalability, not just the architecture of digital products and operational robustness.

Time to Get Ethical About Human Computer Interfaces - Mind Reading

MIT is experimenting with a device which can read the words which you sub vocalise. The device is fixed to the user's face and uses electrodes to read electronic signals associated with "speaking inside your head" and AI to interpret them.

So far so good, this might have a number of practical applications and in an office environment would be better than speaking out loud to an intelligent agent such as Alexa, which would be intrusive and potentially annoying to other office occupants.

It also might have useful applications for communicating with people with speech disabilities. It might for example have sped up Steven Hawkin's communications via speech chips. The potential may exist for communicating with people with Locked in Syndrome etc.

However there is the potential for use in police interrogation and the technical ability over ride "the right to silence" or "not to self incriminate oneself", which exists constitutionally in certain judicial domains. This potentially provides a quite dangerous tool to state authorities in certain draconian regimes. Although, it could be considered more humane than water boarding.

As ever, with technological progress comes ethical questions about control of acceptable use of potentially beneficial innovations. So who is going to do this for the Direct Human AI interface?

Digital Reputation Is All

In some of my early posts, I likened Digital Disrupters to Vikings, in terms of being fast moving, launching asymmetrical market attacks and continuously changing their angle of attack to pursue value, whilst using light weight tools, agility and simple instrumentation to facilitate this. 

Latterly, I have been stressing reputation, which was important to vikings too. In fact some people would say that a Viking's name and reputation were more important to him (or her) than gold and land. As they wanted their reputations to last for ever and reputation was a strong means for recruiting a band of warriors for the next viking voyage or raid.

In the digital world, reputation is important to digital enterprises, becasue customer loyalty is much more volatile than with traditional businesses and a whole new set of organisations are embracing Customer Care (CC) as well as Customer Experience (CX) in what could be termed C2X. I touch on this in my book ( The Way of DAU ). If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then loss of reputation destroys company value for lunch. A strong digital brand should have a positive and engaging reputation based on positive values.

A recent story about Cloudflare in Wired, is a salutary lesson about reputation and proactive reputation management. For those of you who don't know about Cloudflare, it provides a cloud service for intermediating and absorbing DDoS attacks. It does this by sitting between a cloud service and its users and sampling traffic to detect patterns associated with DDoS attacks and filtering out any DDoS transactions against the service.

The founder & CEO, Mathew Prince, takes a strong stand on Freedom of Speech so is happy to provide services to some organisations which many may find distasteful. Interestingly enough early experience with escort services in Turkey showed that learning to protect a service which many people attack, actually improved the overall capability of the DDoS service to defend against similar attacks against more innocent targets.

Cloudflare relied on simply stating its position and liberal principles which are enshrined in the American Constitution. Unfortunately this was not enough and providing services one particular Neo Nazi organisation began to lead to a snow ball of assaults on Cloudflare's reputation, until the CEO felt compelled to take action and modify their stance on what protecting free speech actually meant for the company, leading to the banning of this particular customer.

This goes to show that reputations have to be actively managed and part of this is continuing review of an organisation's ethical stance as well as actual customer experience is essential; something which might be termed Ethics Sustainability, Customer Care and Experience (ESC2X), with the accronym pronounced Essex, redefining the old joke about someone with a lisping estuary accent saying that "Ethics isn't a place East of London".

At the same time, many other people and organisations are beginning to question what free speech should mean on the web. To my mind, with freedom comes responsibility, as I define freedom as the right to make your own decisions and mistakes, and not to have them imposed upon you. This is a two way deal. In the Cloudflare example, the Neo Nazi organisation appears to have gone beyond free speech to threaten and bully people, as well as slander the leadership of Cloudflare by implying that they were sympathisers to their ideology. So they broke the free speech contract and deserved to be kicked off Cloudflare's service. Cloudflare probably needed to encourage more debate about their stance and code, as part of their overall leadership practices.