Editor’s note: Kate O’Neill, tech humanist and experience strategy expert, will give the closing keynote address at ISACA Conference North America 2022, a hybrid event to take place in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, and virtually from 4-6 May. O’Neill, the author of four books, including her latest, “Tech Humanist,” recently visited with ISACA Now to provide her view of human-centric digital transformation, how data should be integrated into companies’ business models and more. The following is a transcript, edited for length and clarity:
ISACA Now: What does a human-centric approach to digital transformation entail
When we talk about “digital” transformation, we’re really talking about data transformation, and most of what that data describes is a human experience. So, when I talk about human-centric digital transformation, I’m advising a focus on making tech-driven experiences more aligned between business objectives and human outcomes, which means optimizing for what makes those experiences meaningful and relevant to humans, and then using technology, where and when it makes sense, to amplify, dimensionalize, and deepen that alignment. Coincidentally, that alignment process also tends to make the relationship more profitable for business.
ISACA Now: How can organizations make better use of data in refining their business models?
By using it respectfully and responsibly to offer more alignment between what the business or organization exists to do and what the person interacting with the organization — the customer, user, guest, etc. — is trying to do when interacting with the brand.
Creating alignment can mean removing friction, serving up the most appropriate product, offering based on what the experience journey suggests, or anything along those lines. What serves us well is to remember that relevance is a form of respect. But when it comes to data, so is discretion. We don’t want to freak anyone out by over-personalizing their experience. And we are obligated to treat people’s data with caution and care.
ISACA Now: What do you think might be a long-term impact of the pandemic when it comes to organizations’ digital transformations?
Early on, I wrote about and was advising clients about how service providers needed to sort of downshift from solving problems at a more abstract “humanity level” to solving problems on a more tangible “human scale” — the more urgent problems that were bottom of the Maslow hierarchy were suddenly more important. So, I think companies that figured out how to solve for that urgency without losing their value proposition held their ground better than those who were either unwavering or those who pivoted too far from their original offerings.
Going forward, I think it’ll be a good mechanism and fluency for companies to be able to have, to know how their value proposition scales up and down from the more survival-oriented, everyday problems to the more abstract ideas that people gravitate to when they’re more secure.
Concerns about privacy creep from employers into employee homes, and over employee bodily agency — like, temperature scans are probably OK, but will the line of acceptability move if we determine that, say, daily urine samples are one way to prevent office-wide transmission of the next communicable disease? This is an area for us to be observant and reflective about.
ISACA Now: How much progress do you think has been made in the past decade or so when it comes to advancing women in technology?
We’ve done better at getting women involved and getting women into leadership roles, but the success has largely been with white women, and less so with BIPOC women. The efforts to make technology more inclusive for all humans largely dovetail with those to make technology development more inclusive for all humans, so that’s where I suggest and hope that we double down on our efforts.
ISACA Now: What are you hoping is the main takeaway for readers of Tech Humanist?
Using purpose as a key input to strategy means assessing, on a one-time and perhaps a periodic basis, what the driving principle of the individual or the organization is: what the company, for example, exists to do and is trying to do at scale.
At the individual level, this exercise can help us recognize what drives us, what makes us feel accomplished, what connects us with the people around us, and how to be mindful of those values and priorities as we engage with technology such as social media so that the tech we use can actually enhance our lives.
In the organization, this gives greater clarity to everything that flows from that articulation: values, priorities, brand considerations, experience design, and so on, all the way out to data modelling and tech deployment.
