The Accidental Chief Privacy Officer

Earlier this week, Intelius Chief Privacy Officer Jim Adler spoke at O’Reilly’s Strata Conference.  His talk, The Accidental Chief Privacy Officer (CPO), discussed how the industrial privacy professional is evolving from a compliance enforcer to a product innovator.  Here are the slides and interview with O’Reilly’s Alex Howard (@digiphile):

Jim Adler interviewed at Strata NY 2011

The key takeaway from the talk (see summary slide) is that the privacy pro is becoming a key evangelist for responsible innovation within fast-moving, high technology organizations. To be successful, four lessons:

1. Innovation is a team sport. Communication is key. So talk and (more importantly) listen to your toughest critics, both inside and outside your organization. They’ll better understand your perspective and you’ll often get great ideas.
2. Build a confluence of influence. Good decisions come from every corner of the business, early in the product cycle. Find the members of any team that are inventive, collaborative, and capable of creating the Reality Distortion Field (used so effectively by Steve Jobs) that’s so vital to disruptive innovation.
3. Be the happy warrior. Innovation, by definition, changes the status quo and makes some people uncomfortable. Engage with them in a constructive, respectful way inline with Graham’s Hierarchy of Disagreement.
4. Find clarity in the confusion. Use math, data, and history to find the clarity within the confusion. Privacy issues are especially difficult. As Jeff Jarvis points out in his new book, Public Parts, even defining privacy is a journey through an Escher maze. Jeff has a great, well referenced chapter on What Is Privacy? that illustrates the perennial struggle we all have navigating the privacy maze.
   
   The good news is that the privacy labyrinth can be traversed with sufficient situational assessment, data analysis, and historical perspective. Then, to remix metaphors, you can be that excited child in the room of manure who finds that elusive pony.

More from Jim Adler, Chief Privacy Officer at Intelius