The User Stories in our My Data Simulator

..., and how many personal data records do we think there are worldwide?

The primary purpose for our Simulator environment is to enable us to look at data sharing relationships from a number of perspectives, see what works well, and not so well. And then look at what improvements might be made, and what new capabilities need to be specified and built.

The primary users / stakeholders currently present in the environment are:

• Individuals - representing people going about their many and varied ‘jobs to be done’ that somehow involve sharing personal data

• Organisations - those that have or wish to have a digital connection/ data sharing relationship with an individual (including people in their ‘at work’ context). And within those organisations, multiple user types but initially focus on CRM/ Marketing/ Martech/ Adtech users, Customer Experience Leads, and Chief Privacy Officers.

Data sharing relationships in the Simulator are always between two parties; even though the parties may be running many such relationships in parallel. But as each is underpinned by standard information sharing agreements then we end up illustrating a ‘many to many’, or indeed an ‘any to any’ data sharing network.

By that I mean that when tools like a CRM system are deployed in an organisation that enables ‘one to many’ relationships to be managed by that organisation. But obviously multiple organisations are doing the same in parallel, each creating a silo-ed approach to data sharing between them and their connected base. And when the equivalent is deployed on the side of an individual then that builds the same, one individual able to connect to many organisations - but with multiple individuals doing the same in parallel. In other words, a giant mess of silo-ed data sharing relationships all doing their own version of the same thing many times over - with huge amounts of duplication, waste and carbon consumption. That’s what we have at present.

Let’s divert for a second to try to quantify that problem…. Have a guess at the knock on effect of the above via one dimension….. With current architectures, how many personal data records do we think there are in the world right now? That’s based on an actual world population of roughly 8.1bn people..

I think about a trillion (1,000,000,000,000). My high level logic is that:

• There will be zero digital records for a big chunk of that population

• For huge chunks of that population there will be many digital relationships in place (my password manager says 853), which ignores the thousands of adtech organisations that have profiles of me

• So my best guess of an average of 120 ‘digital twins’ for each person in that 8.1bn takes us to roughly a trillion. And that’s without counting all of the archived and sandboxed records.

That’s an awful lot of duplicated effort and waste!!!

What we model in the Simulator then is a different way to run these relationships; via a point to point data exchange protocol (JLINC) rather than the many to many silo-ed relationships. We’ll come back to how that might reduce the numbers over the next few months; but it will make for a considerable potential reduction.

That then takes us to the additional user stories in the Simulator that sit off to one side over and above the core individual and organisation types. we see those as:

• Regulators/ policy makers - who can envisage a new set of capabilities and circumstances brought about by empowering the individual

• Entrepreneurs - who can see opportunity in the emerging governed ecosystem

• Technologists/ Developers - who can see where new things could be built to improve the above further

We’ll be digging into each in more detail over the next few weeks and months.

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