Intelligent Enterprise

We got a few e-mails from readers responding to my last blog entry, about executive defections from Oracle and consumers' concerns about handing over data about themselves. Between the two topics, it was clear that the impact of spyware and security breaches on consumer intelligence gained the most interest.

I compared the impact of spyware on online marketers to a problem faced by the polling firms that predict election results. Namely, Americans are often impatient with phone pollsters and won't speak to them. All BI considerations aside, one reader had some advice for those pollsters if they want to gather quality data. He writes, "Anyone who really wants to know what consumers are thinking, should ask everyone who comes into McDonald's and BK! Now there are the real people! And they'd have time to answer just a couple of questions while in the drive through!"

Fair enough. On a certain level, I tend to agree. But how seriously are consumers' security worries impacting the quality and volume of customer data gathered by online retailers? To at least one reader, the answer is "very seriously." I wrote, "BI, as an IT practice, needs to work more closely with IT security to address the issue of preserving consumer data quality, before the problem becomes intractable." This reader's response: "The problem is already intractable. It remains to be seen if it is solvable."