Constellation Research’s Connected Enterprise conference-2019, an immersive three-day innovation summit that was held from November 4 to 7 has brought some of the great minds in the technology landscape and business executives from across the globe together. One among them was Vint Cerf, who is widely as ‘Father of the Internet’ and he was asked about everything right from Quantum Computing to Artificial Intelligence. In this reply to one of the questions about AI Vint Cerf said “Be careful to make a distinction between today’s machine learning and generalized intelligence”.

Quality Data for Better Customer Experience

Interestingly, almost every conversation at the summit be it on digital transformation or customer experience eventually led back to data, the most critical asset in this digital age. So, generally one of the main themes of the conference was with regard to data strategy. “Great experience requires great personalization and great personalization requires great data. Of course, great data doesn’t mean just volumes of data but fine quality of data collection and level of quality control,” opines Rahul Patel, from Persistent Systems.  

One of the most important factors, if not the most, in a customer-centric environment is trust of the customer. Today consumers are at the crossroads caught between companies that leverage personal data for mutual benefit and attackers who try to steal the data for their own personal gains. Also data insights sometimes prove to be not so accurate and therefore unreliable for critical business decisions. “Blockchain can be helpful in use cases where trust is low, the hardest part of trust is getting people to actually agree,” says Marie Wieck, General Manager, IBM Blockchain speaking about the trust factor at the conference.  “Data has the ability to tear down silos in an organization. However, the trouble is, people don’t necessarily want those silos torn down,” said Eric Stine, Chief Customer Innovation Officer, SAP.   

Generally, trust is earned through qualitative relationships and behaviours and rarely through spreadsheets and process automations as often misconceived by people. Therefore, it is not just about data, rather it is about the qualitative judgments that we people make.  So, qualitative relationships are the foundation for trust and success in human-led business organizations.