Security is the Boat Anchor to Digital Progress

Have you ever tried to row a boat whose anchor is still stuck on the bottom of the lake or  the ocean? It's really a fruitless and frustrating experience. This is how I would describe the effect that the lack of great and easy security is having on the whole digital experience today. In the coming weeks, I expect to dig a little deeper into the nature of the problems and write specifically how the lack of easy and great security has on our progress toward a better digital experience enabled by great process leveraging cognitive resources. Security is holding back a better customer experience, a more powerful and cognitive set of processes and process sharing to enable seamless value / supply chains.

Security and the Customer Experience:

Why in the world do we have to remember user IDs and passwords for each organization that we do business with these days? Every organization has a different set of rules for passwords ergo causing us to remember IDs and passwords galore. To fight this and weak memory moments, we create lists of IDs and passwords and squirrel them away in some remote spot on our computers or paper file drawers which have their own security risks. This is pure insanity and starts us off with a sour attitude towards the customer experience nearly every organization we do business with even though the processes might be OK. This sets a lousy tone for the whole customer experience. Add the fact the processes don't really know what we want and how we want to be treated. and you have a mess. You can make this misery mobile as a first step, but the point is that the customer journey starts off on a bad foot. It's time for a change !!

Security and the Powerful Processes:

Why in the world should we have to deal with dumb processes with a simple mobile access that knows nothing about us and our preferences? Processes should know who we are based on additional data, policies and rules we give organizations. Based on our history with an organization, the processes should orient themselves around us and give us the knowledge to service ourselves or be serviced by representatives that are not so specialized as to have us pick the right department to work with for results. This kind of powerful process will create a higher promoter score for the organizations. This again is dependent on better security of IDs, passwords, data and rules. It's time for a change !!

Security and Shared Processes: 

Why in the world do we have to stitch together sub-processes and the manage the result of each to contribute to a set of end goals and outcomes? As cognitive and intelligent processes get shared across organizational lines (internal or external), processes will have to have bullet proof security protecting all the policies, data, rules, constraints and authorizations. As end to end processes act in a seamless manner across legal entities, the value of air tight security raises to a critical level. When this includes shared resources such as intelligent devices like smart sensors,  robots or cognitive services (COGS) in the cloud, security is one big issue to wrestle with in the future. This kind of process is starting to emerge in adaptive case management and large scoped end to end processes.
It's time for a change !!

Net; Net:

We have been sweeping security under the rug like that fact that we left the anchor out on our new digital boat. We can't row our way out of this one. It's time to pull the anchor and make some progress navigating the new digital sea. Why can't security become easy and fool proof?