A New Book Tells the Story of the
Man Who Paved the Way for the Big Data Revolution
Corporations,
marketers, and governments are exploring the practical and legal limits of
collecting and utilizing Big Data. One
man began thinking about its value decades before anyone else, and he’s
revealing his professional insights, personal experiences, and career triumphs
in a new book, Matters of Life and Data: The Remarkable Journey of
a Big Data Visionary Whose Work Impacted Millions --Including You (Morgan
James, ISBN: 978-1-63047-467-6; Cloth; 320 pages; $24.95; July 6, 2015).
“The man who opened
your lives to Big Data finally bares his own,” reads the introduction to this
most stirring memoir. Indeed, he has much to share, as Morgan, 72, should know
a few things about Big Data. The company he helped grow into a technology and
marketing powerhouse, Acxiom, is a world leader in data-gathering and its
accompanying technology, and has collected over 1,500 separate pieces of
information on some half a billion people around the globe.
His book, which
is being promoted to the news media by the PR firm I work for, recounts and
celebrates a journey from his modest upbringing in a small town on the Arkansas
River to his role as one of America’s all-time Big Data visionaries. During his
36-year tenure, Morgan grew a small data processing firm of 25 employees into a
global juggernaut by becoming one of the largest aggregators of data and
consumer information in the world. He transformed the small data processing
company into a publicly held, $1.4 billion corporation with 7,000 employees and
offices throughout the world.
Here is an interview with Mr. Morgan:
1.
How can we protect the privacy of
individuals but still allow companies to benefit from the use of Big Data?
Big Data has the potential to do a great deal of good in our world today and
for many years to come. On the other hand, Big Data will create a lot privacy
issues. Today, much more data is being
recorded about each of us than you might imagine. In February 2015, for
example, Samsung admitted that their new TVs will be collecting data about the
people who watch them. That data will include voice data (what you say about
what you are watching), picture data (your expressions as you watch), and
viewing data. Samsung of course claims that this data will only be used to
improve the quality of the overall experience of using their product. Do I
believe them? I don’t doubt that this is what they intended these
data-collection TVs to do, but it sure doesn't take much imagination to see a
great potential for misuse of such data. We will never be able to
write enough laws to totally solve this problem. We cannot stop companies
from using data that improves the quality of products and services.
However, we must somehow protect ourselves from misuse. At Acxiom, our
motto was “consumer privacy is a state of mind.” It didn't matter if something
was legal; the question should be posed, “Is this right? Is this the way we
would want to have our data collected and used?” Companies have to have education
programs for their employees and create that state of mind—that the security of
people's personal data is important to our whole society.
2.
You say that Acxiom Corporation,
a world leader in data gathering and its accompanying technology, has obtained
some 1,500 separate pieces of information on over a half-billion people
worldwide. How do we make sure the information is not used wrongfully? I
had great concerns about the possibility of data misuse at Acxiom. We had
literally hundreds of thousands of data files with extraordinary amounts of
in-depth information about everyone who lived in the United States and many in
Europe. I developed a philosophy that we could not create enough rules at
Acxiom to solve the problem. Eventually I came to believe that creating an
atmosphere and culture of data protection was the best answer. We chose to
educate our people and to create a simple set of rules. For example, the “do
right rule” taught our employees to think about the data that they cared for as
data about people just like themselves—in fact, it could even include their own
family members. So treat that data like you would want your own data to be
treated. Of course there were more
complex rules that applied in all of our data practices. There were—and still
are—laws that protect people’s credit data.
Credit data could only be used for preapproved credit offers and not for
other kinds of marketing. To help oversee all this process of education and
oversight with our employees and our customers, in 1991 I appointed a chief
privacy officer. Jennifer Barrett became the first chief privacy officer in the
United States, and today she still holds that position at Acxiom. Jennifer has
become a global leader in marketing data use and data protection.
3.
You are the CEO of your latest
tech venture, PrivacyStar. It’s been seven years since you stepped down as chairman
and CEO of Acxiom. What did you still find rewarding—and challenging—in trying
to grow another company? Creating and building a small
company is a lot more fun than trying to manage a much larger company.
Sometimes at Acxiom I felt like I was trying to herd cats as I provided
leadership on a multitude of fronts. Many parts of the public company CEO’s job
are really not very enjoyable. You have to deal with lawyers and boards as well
as many other distractions, like unfriendly press. I always wanted to spend as much time as
possible on new product development and leadership activities at Acxiom. Down
deep in my heart, I felt like life was being sucked out of me by activities
that were beyond my control. There were things I just had to do and couldn’t get
out of but I sure didn’t like them much. I felt like I didn’t have enough time
to do the job that would contribute most to the growth and success of Acxiom. In
a small company like PrivacyStar, I am able to spend much more of my time
working on things like new product creation and development. We are doing
things that no one else is doing in the mobile space. We built ourselves from a
big money loser to a profitable company. That is fun. There’s still a lot of
work and worry, but the overall satisfaction level is a lot higher for me when
I feel more in control of my destiny and doing things that I enjoy. If we miss
a quarter at PrivacyStar, it’s only us who are disappointed, and there are no
newspaper headlines.
4.
Early on your company was in debt
and couldn’t make payroll. You asked people to cut their pay in half for a
period of time in exchange for paying them a more once you got past the dark
period. How did that turn out? We got to a point in 1976 when
we were losing money and were in danger of not being able to make payroll. Our
principal owners, the Wards of school bus fame, were in terrible financial
shape and they had no ability to help us out. There was no one to fire and no
way to cut expenses that I could see. So
I came up with the crazy idea that if we could make our payroll a third
smaller, we could survive. All we had to do was to get the top six most highly
paid people, including myself, to take a 50 percent pay cut. I can’t imagine
going to a management team today with such a scheme. We were working on some new very promising
opportunities that would make the company profitable if we successfully
completed them. I told everyone that they would get two dollars back for every
dollar of pay they gave up, should we succeed. I must’ve been very convincing
because they bought it and no one left. And not only did they double their
money, but through this crisis we also developed increased levels of trust and
a stronger bond within the top leadership team.
5.
To what do you attribute your
success in becoming a dominant force in the market database world?
Several things. We had a number of principles guiding our business strategy and
execution. One was to hire outstanding people—we
recruited intensely at area colleges and universities and were able to attract
the best and brightest young graduates. Another was to provide world-class
service to our customers, which helped us both acquire and keep customers. Take Citibank—it became a customer in 1983
and is still a major customer of Acxiom’s today. From our earliest days we also put a premium
on designing and creating leading edge software, and that gave us a leg up in
the marketplace. In the mid-1970’s, for example, we created a revolutionary way
to manage and deliver mailing lists for the Direct Marketing industry. The List Order Fulfillment System (LOFS) was
faster, better, and cheaper than existing mostly manual systems were at the time;
more importantly, LOFS was more accurate.
Another game-changer was called AbiliTec, introduced around the year
2000. AbiliTec made large-scale name and address data far more accurate than
ever before, and to this day it remains a key component of Acxiom’s technology
arsenal. We created a business culture and an organizational strategy that
helped us be more nimble—and more efficient—than most other companies our
size. We instituted formal initiatives
that emphasized leadership, and we provided our people with training in the
qualities of effective leaders. We also
did some pretty radical things, such as doing away with corporate titles. When
I gave up the title of CEO and introduced myself simply as Acxiom’s “Company
Leader,” I got more than a few puzzled stares. All of these concepts worked
together to create an effective leadership team and to achieve solid results
for our customers, over many years. But satisfaction wasn’t limited to
customers—employees liked the atmosphere at Acxiom as well, and the company is
full of people who have stayed for decades.
6.
Do you think the laws will change
with technology as it relates to what information is gathered, shared, and
used? Controlling the gathering and use of data has
always been a complex problem to administer. The Internet is making this problem
almost too big to comprehend. Certainly laws will have to be written and old
laws amended to give basic protection to citizens of the world. On the one
hand, people say, “I don’t want anyone using any data about me without my
permission”—even as those same people post everything about their private lives
on Facebook. On the other hand, companies say, “We’re going to protect the
consumer and their information”—even as those same companies are putting
cameras and listening devices in their TVs to collect information about viewing
habits. Much of the data that companies
collect for a specific reason is used to benefit consumers. The problem is that
the quantity of the data that is being collected, by electronic devices and
over the Internet, is growing exponentially today. Access to the data that
companies collect is usually carefully protected, but not always. There have
been a number of widely publicized situations in which well-respected companies
have gotten in hot water for collecting and using data improperly. Additional
laws are going to be complex to write, but are certainly needed to cover
potential Big Data abuses. We do have examples of successful laws, such as the
Fair Credit Reporting Act—25 years and counting, and that law is still serving us
well. The best way to solve these problems is not to rush to a conclusion, but
to get industry involved in making recommendations in new areas like the
Internet. All I can say is, I’m glad I’m not a legislator or a lawyer, because
I really don’t have great answers in this area.
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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2015
