For decades, digital business has been moving in one direction.
Know more about the customer.
- Collect more data.
- Build richer profiles.
- Observe more behaviour.
- Use that knowledge to predict what people might do next.
The assumption is straightforward:
The more an organisation knows about me, the more valuable I become.
But there is another side to that equation.
Information creates responsibility.
If an organisation collects information about me, that information must be stored, protected, governed and managed.
- It can become a target for attack.
- It can create regulatory obligations.
- It can create reputational risk.
And eventually, the organisation may find itself maintaining an increasingly complex infrastructure simply because it decided that knowing more was always better.
So perhaps there is another question worth asking:
What if knowing less could also create value?
The economics of not knowing
Imagine two businesses providing essentially the same digital service.
One needs to know who you are, what you do, where you go, what you previously bought and how you behave.
The other simply needs enough information to complete the interaction.
Both can provide the service.
But their responsibilities are very different.
The second organisation potentially has less information to govern and less exposure associated with holding it.
More importantly, the relationship with its customers is different.
The proposition becomes:
You don’t have to give us your digital life in exchange for our service.
That itself could have value.
For a new business
For a greenfield organisation, the opportunity is particularly interesting.
Instead of automatically building customer databases, behavioural tracking and profiling into the business model, leaders can ask:
What information actually creates value for this service?
Anything beyond that threshold should have to justify its existence.
That reverses a common digital assumption.
Rather than collecting information because it might become useful, information is collected because there is a clear reason for it.
For existing organisations
The question is harder.
Data may already sit at the centre of customer analytics, marketing, personalisation, reporting and commercial decision-making.
Blind-provider economics does not mean pretending that information has no value.
It asks something more useful:
Are we accounting for its full cost?
Not merely storage.
But security, governance, compliance, complexity and the responsibility that comes with becoming the custodian of somebody else’s information.
Once those costs enter the equation, “more data” and “more value” are no longer automatically the same thing.
Trust can have economic value too
There is another possibility.
What if customers begin choosing organisations partly because those organisations deliberately know less about them?
Privacy then stops being something hidden inside a compliance statement.
It becomes part of the proposition.
We provide the service.
You retain your privacy.
That potentially creates a very different basis for digital competition.
A Question for Leaders
The question is therefore not:
How much customer data can we collect?
It is:
How much customer data does our business genuinely need to succeed?
And perhaps the harder question:
What would our business look like if knowing less about our customers became an advantage rather than a limitation?
That is the adoption question behind ICCA Design Principles: Blind-Provider Economics.
The underlying ICCA work is being openly shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence, encouraging discussion, challenge, adaptation and further development.
The paper describes the architectural principle. This article asks what adopting that principle could mean for the economics of digital business.
#ICCA #DigitalTrust #BusinessStrategy #DataPrivacy #DataGovernance #PrivacyByDesign #Leadership #DigitalTransformation #CustomerTrust #Innovation #CreativeCommons
