Understand privacy

Understand privacy and its implications in all relevant geographies as both a threat and an opportunity.

This best practice contains a number of facets. From a narrow viewpoint, privacy implications can be seen as the legal constraints and processes that have emerged and will continue to emerge as the consumer privacy debate ebbs and flows. In this sense, the organization has no option except to conform, but it should be aware of the issue of potential impact far in advance through monitoring. The organization should be involved actively in the lobbying and approval processes that all such legislations go through. Our contention, however, is that best practice in this area goes well beyond the monitoring and implementation of legislative imperatives. Organizations should be analysing the underlying drivers buried beneath privacy. For example, are customers actually happy to share data with suppliers, but just do not like the current terms and conditions? Or is it invasiveness or distrust that is the issue? The actual drivers of privacy warning bells will inevitably differ significantly by sector. Organizations should understand what the real driver of the issue is in their own situations.

Most of the organizations assessed believe they understand and have acted upon the privacy issues they face in all geographies in which they have customers. Note this contrasts significantly with the wider, more European, multi-national focused CMAT assessment base, where less than 40 per cent of the organizations claim to have robust programmes in place to tackle the more stringent legislation-driven issues emerging. Far fewer are seeing privacy as a possible opportunity to build deeper, trusting relationships with customers. This begs the question, is the recent privacy legislation that has forced US-based organizations to take note of this issue only a forerunner of what is to come? Our view is that privacy - as an issue to which organizations must allocate resources - is only just emerging, and that many twists and turns have yet to appear.