Our New White Paper: Achieving Transformation At Scale
This is the first of two blogs on our new White Paper: Achieving Transformation At Scale. The first blog focuses on the infrastructure challenge; the next on the need for supporting, enabling institutions.
It’s now widely understood that the way our society collects and uses personal data generates wide scale invasions of privacy, endemic risks of data breaches and fraudulent access to data, plus eye-watering imbalances of power and reward which, together, have led to a pervasive erosion of trust.
What’s less widely understood is that all these problems and issues are an inevitable byproduct of how the system itself is organised: its organisation-centric structure — the fact that the only entities really capable of collecting and using personal data at scale are large organisations. No matter how well-meaning new rules, policies and regulations might be, as long as this structure remains, the problems will remain.
New rules, policies and regulations may help to clear up the mess created by the systemic leaking bucket, but in themselves they can never fix the leak itself. For that we need structural reform.
An infrastructure challenge
Our society has faced similar challenges many times before. When the industrial revolution hit us, it dawned on people that if this new system was to work effectively, the entire population would need to be able to read and write. We needed an education system.
The rapid growth of cities created immense sanitation and public health problems: everyone needed running water and sewers. When electricity came along, letting every Tom, Dick and Harry create their own generating stations using different frequencies and distribution methods clogged the system with nightmarishly high costs and complexity. We needed a national grid.
In each case, it was recognised that for the good of the society, its economy and its citizens we need infrastructure that made things universally available.
The same goes for personal data. The toxicities created by our current systems can never be addressed, and the full potential of data can never be unleashed, unless every citizen is able to collect and use their own data for their own purposes, just as every citizen was previously empowered to read and write and access water and electricity for their own purposes. Doing so makes the whole system work better.
The scale of the challenge
To achieve such a change however, we need to get over some mountainous obstacles. At Mydex CIC, we believe we have found such a route through. Our new White Paper Achieving Transformation At Scale explains how.
To make any real headway we first have to overcome some formidable mental roadblocks. The biggest of these is market myopia — the assumption that the only way forward is to ‘create markets for data’. This is nonsense on two counts. First, none of the economic benefits of what Mydex CIC does around personal data come from trading data for money. They come from helping people and service providers strip out the huge amounts of unnecessary waste and cost they both experience when trying to handle data. Taking cost out of how the system works is not the same as creating a ‘market’ where data is traded or sold.
Closely related to market myopia is accounting myopia: the belief that the best or only way to measure the economic contribution of an enterprise is to see how big its accounting profits are. This, too, is nonsense. The social and economic value of electricity is measured by all the uses we put electricity to, not the profits electricity suppliers happen to make. (Try imagining your life without electricity.)
Only when we look past market and accounting myopia, to look at all the different ways personal data can be used to improve peoples’ lives (and the economic operations that make this possible), can we see just how big the prize of new ways of collecting and using personal data could be.
Practically and operationally speaking, the biggest challenge is to create a system where new ways of collecting and using personal data can operate at scale. Here, the Mydex roadmap is simple and straightforward. First, focus efforts on where the resistance is lowest and immediate benefits are highest: what we call ‘clusters’. These are situations where a number of different public and third sector organisations are all helping the same individuals in their own specialist ways, but where to create the best possible ‘joined-up’ outcomes, lots of data needs to be shared. Mydex’s personal data store infrastructure makes it easy, cheap and safe to do this.
Second, in a world where despite immense amounts of bravado and rhetoric anything truly innovative is instinctively seen as ‘very risky and therefore to be avoided’, seeing is believing. So we are using these clusters to demonstrate proof points. To show, without doubt, that what we are talking about actually works.
Third, in serving these clusters, we have developed solutions that can be quickly and easily applied time and time again across multiple different situations — so that they can spread. Examples include being able to use previously checked and certified information to be shared safely and efficiently, or to use improved data sharing to help multiple different service providers coordinate and integrate activities. These needs arise in countless different situations across all industries and many aspects of individuals’ lives and can now be met quickly, easily and at very low cost.
So what we have created is something that proves in practice that it’s possible to strip out enormous amounts of friction, effort, risk and cost while opening up new opportunities; that has near universal applicability; and can be easily adopted by multiple different users.
Conclusion
It’s not enough to identify what’s wrong with how things work today. What’s needed is practical ways forward that deliver real benefits now; that once created can be reapplied and spread so that they operate at scale — thereby changing how the system itself works. It took us over a decade to find a path through the mountain range of obstacles. Our new White Paper maps this pathway in more detail.
But the right sort of infrastructure alone is not enough. For this infrastructure to work and spread as it should, it needs the right institutions to support it: institutions that focus on broader social and community benefit and not just corporate benefit, and that are capable of building trust between multiple different stakeholders. That’s why Mydex has chosen to be a Community Interest Company. That’s the subject of our next blog.
