Re: Quis custodiet
I've had similar experience - run a rough set of numbers for a specific purpose, before you know it some tit has shown them to the main board without caveats (and without even due credit for the rough work), and then they start asking for it to be modified for different and more favourable outcomes, and extrapolated far into the future. Even used with external investors to make an investment case based on this "market forecast", when all I'd originally done was a bit of short term extrapolation to establish whether we could potentially grow the business line over the next couple of years. But that's always been the way, and always will be.
I reckon that Gartner are like my forecast - a bit right in the near term, guaranteed wrong in the longer term. And that's because their logic is correct that CIOs are being asked to monetise data without regard to the risks, but in the longer term, the value of data is fairly finite. In the grand scheme, data can save a few modest costs (with most of the low hanging fruit already gone), and then there's the advertiser/seller value of data. That's all priced in to a zero sum game at the moment, where Google get most of the money. No matter what you do with the data, analytics don't give consumers more money to spend, or advertisers bigger budgets. And all of the value is a subset of what wealth people spend, less the materials, less processing costs, less physical services, less administration, less financing costs, less tax less the delivery costs of advertising. Individually, in the UK the value of an average citizen's data must be about 1-2% of their actual spending, excluding VAT and other consumer taxes, I'm guessing about £300 a year, most of which is already being picked up. Gartner are wrong, there's going to be no big data monetisation bonanza for lard arse corporates - for them, the best outcome is single digit pounds to be made per customer, against a huge potential risk of GDPR fines.
Take an energy supplier - plodding fuckwits for the most part, but they still know a fair bit about their customers, and can infer a fair bit more from energy use patterns. With smart meters they'll have about three orders of magnitude more data. But what value is that? Much of what can be known or inferred is already known by somebody else....if you've got kids, the energy use pattern can imply that knowledge, even the number and rough age, potentially. But Tesco (or others) already know that from you buying nappies of given sizes at given times. Or you gave the data away to somebody in an online survey, or when you signed up to get a Mothercare discount. DWP already know it - and have probably already welched your data to a credit reference agency and any marketing database company that came knocking. Google already know it from all the searches you've done. Facebook know it - and even if you don';t have an account, they'll still pick it up from your friends who do.