Trials & Jubilations: the two sides of the GDPR coin

We have all heard about the totally unhip GDPR and the potential wave of fines and lawsuits. The long arm of the law and it’s stick have been noted. Less talked about but infinitely more exciting is the other side. Turn over the coin and there’s a whole A-Z of organisational and employee carrots. How so?

Sign up to the joint webinar the 18th of April 3PM CET with Smartlogic & Findwise, to find out more.

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Signal Tools

We all leave digital trails behind us, trails about us. Others that have access to these trails can use our data and information. The new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) intends the usage of such Personal Identifiable Information (PII) to be correct and regulated, with the power to decide given to the individual.

Some organisations are wondering how on earth they can become GDPR compliant when they already have a business to run. But instead of a chore, setting a pathway to allow for some more principled digital organisational housekeeping can bring big organisational gains sooner rather than later.

Many enterprises are now beginning to realise the extra potential gains of having introduced new organisational principles to become compliant. The initial fear of painful change soon subsides when the better quality data comes along to make business life easier. With the further experience of new initiatives from new data analysis, NLP, deep learning, AI, comes the feeling:  why we didn’t we just do this sooner?

Most organisations have a system(s) in place holding PII data, even if getting the right data out in the right format remains problematical. The organisation of data for GDPR compliance can be best achieved so that it becomes transformed to be part of a semantic data layer. With such a layer, knowing all the related data from different sources you have on Joe Bloggs becomes so much easier when he asks for a copy of the data you have about him. Such a semantic data layer will also bring other far-reaching and organisation-wide benefits.

Semantic Data Layer

Semantic Data Layer

For example, heterogeneous data in different formats and from different sources can become unified for all sorts of new smart applications, new insights and new innovation that would have been previously unthinkable. Data can stay where it is… no need to change that relational database yet again because of a new type of data. The same information principles and technologies involved in keeping an eye on PII use, can also be used to improve processes or efficiencies and detect consumer behaviour or market changes.

But it’s not just the business operations that benefit, empowered employees become happier having the right information at hand to do their job. Something that is often difficult to achieve, as in many organisations, no one area “owns” search, making it is usually somebody else’s problem to solve. For the Google-loving employee, not finding stuff at work to help them in their job can be downright frustrating. Well ordered data (better still in a semantic layer) can give them the empowering results page they need. It’s easy to forget that Google only deals with the best structured and linked documentation, why shouldn’t we do the same in our organisations?

Just as the combination of (previously heterogeneous) datasets can give us new insights for innovation, we also observe that innovation increasingly comes in the form of external collaboration. Such collaboration of course increases the potential GDPR risk through data sharing, Facebook being a very current point in case. This brings in the need for organisational policy covering data access, the use and handling of existing data and any new (extra) data created through its use. Such policy should for example cover newly created personal data from statistical inference analysis.

While having a semantic layer may in fact make human error in data usage potentially more possible through increased access, it also provides a better potential solution to prevent misuse as metadata can be baked into the data to classify both information “sensitivity” and control user accessibility rights.

So how does one start?

The first step is to apply some organising principles to any digital domain, be it in or outside the corporate walls [the discipline of organising, Robert Gluschko] and to ask the key questions:

  1. What is being organised?
  2. Why is it being organised?
  3. How much of it is being organised?
  4. When is it being organised?
  5. Where is it being organised?

Secondly start small, apply organising principles by focusing on the low-hanging fruit: the already structured data within systems. The creation of quality data with added metadata in a semantic layer can have a magnetic effect within an organisation (build that semantic platform and they will come).

Step three: start being creative and agile.

A case story

A recent case, within the insurance industry reveals some cues to why these set of tools will improve signals and attention for becoming more compliant with regulations dealing with PII. Our client knew about a set of collections (file shares) where PII might be found. Adding search, and NLP/ML opened up the pandoras box with visual analytic tools. This is the simple starting point, finding i.e names or personal number concepts in the text. Second to this will be to add semantics, where industry standard terminologies and ontologies can further help define the meaning of things.

In all corporate settings, there exist both well-cultivated and governed collections of information resources, but usually also a massive unmapped terrain of content collections, where no one has a clue if there might be PII hidden amongst it. The strategy using a semantic data layer should always be combined with operations to narrowing down the collections to become part of the signalling system – it is generally not a good idea to boil the whole-data-ocean in the enterprise information environment. Rather through such work practices, workers are aware of the data hot-spots, the well-cultivated collections of information and that unmapped terrain. Having the additional notion of PII to contend with will make it that just bit easier to recognise those places where semantic enhancement is needed.

not a good idea to boil the whole-data-ocean

Running with the same pipeline (with the option of further models to refine and improve certain data) will not only allow for the discovery of multiple occurrences of named entities (individuals) but also the narrative and context in which they appear.
Having a targeted model & terminology for the insurance industry will only go to improve this semantic process further. This process can certainly ease what may be currently manual processes or processes that don’t exist because of their manual pain: for example, finding sensitive textual information from documents within applications or from online textual chats. Developing such a smart information platform enables the smarter linking of other things from the model, such as service packages, service units / or organisational entities, spatial data as named places or timelines, or medical treatments, things perhaps currently you have less control over.

There’s not much time before the 25th May and the new GDPR, but we’ll still be here afterwards to help you with a compliance burden or a creative pathway, depending on your outlook.

Alternatively sign up to the joint webinar the 11th of April 3PM CET with Smartlogic & Findwise, to find out more.

View Fredric Landqvist's LinkedIn profileFredric Landqvist research blog
View Peter Voisey's LinkedIn profilePeter Voisey
View James Morris's LinkedIn profileJames Morris

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