JP Rangaswami (@jobsworth) Former Chief Scientist at BT, and now Chief Scientist at Salesforce.com posted a link via twitter a few weeks back http://bit.ly/c6XaCZ . It was in relation to a little running, personal exercise management application called Runkeeper. You run, it tracks your route and performance, and you can share that with your friends or compete with others.

It plays on a number of themes I am personally interested in:

(1) Personal Data Loops

The Personal life of Data: with relative ease we can now measure our own performance, track our progress, get suggestions as to how we might improve in ways that were impossible prior to the iphone / android mobile experience. This personal data is radically horizontal in some respects such as your location data and your social graph (Facebook) and your availability to others (Google Calendar, Outlook, or Tungle see this ). But now that “the location” is being tracked could another application not offer you the ability to see how your movement through a city centre affects how much money you spend? Retailers have known this for years, it’s called footfall and there are some pretty big decisions made about where to put retail outlets made on the back of it. But could this data about your location be made useful to you? Well I think we’re about to enter an era where you are about to find that out.

(2) The Game Mechanics That Change Behaviour: so you’ve gone for a run and now you share it on Facebook. Why? because by publicly posting (or setting it to automatic posting) you are signalling to yourself that you better do your best because everyone is going to see it. Basically you are taking what was a private activity and making it social so that your private behaviour is changed. Where decisions are to be made public we alter some of our decisions. Sharing also opens up some competitive dynamics in that we want to do better against ourselves, and competing against others creates a strong motivational incentive.

(3) Sensing to Create Data About Our Behaviour: so you’ve heard about the Sleep Cycle App? It’s an iphone application. You put the iphone on your bed and it measures your tossing and turning during the night and its makes a map of your sleep including R.E.M cycles. Pretty useful if you want to find out if you are getting enough sleep or to locate environmental reasons as to why your sleep is being broken. I was speaking to a technical guy and he and his wife both measured their sleep cycles to see “who got the best nights rest”. The one with the best nights rest got the job of driving the kids to school. Maybe that’s a reverse incentive at work there, but it illustrates that data often wants to be social, and people will create competitive dynamics to drive personal or collective goals. As the ‘raw data” about ourselves and our behaviour becomes available it will become used in ways that we probably don’t appreciate at the moment.

(4) Product Centric Data Versus Customer Centric Data

So the Runkeeper guys have a great little application that is not tied to any device, that is inherently social, that is linked to the other great platforms of our day. It has built up a strong community around the application of people that want to connect, compete, share. So they should be terrified of a new application from Nike, Adidas, and other footwear specialists right? Well the big marketing spend by Nike et al actually drove up sales for RunKeeper because it grew the overall market. But in the long term the “family of devices” approach will lock RunKeeper out, right? i.e. Sensors in Shoes, bio sensing wrist strap, etc. that all “just work” because they are from the same family, right? I am reminded of a business case from 20 years ago called the All in One Media Center: it had TV, Video, Radio, all in one. It was cheaper than buying all three separate, saved space, looked great. But people didn’t want an all in one because if anything at all broke down they were without any entertainment system at all. I’d also speculate that the mother might want to bring the radio into the kitchen for company as she completed the after diner clean up (something my own mother did), or the teenager wanted to bring the cassette recorder up to their bedroom to play some music or make a mix tape (something I did). It was a failure in understanding the ‘product in use’, the job the product does for the customer, and the social use of the product. The All In One was Product Centric Thinking.

I am guessing that the “customer lock” of the device based approach of the Apple/ Nike/ Adidas is actually a “design around inter-operability issue”. If working standards were in place any device would connect and share with any other device. As Apple say “we do the integration so you don’t have to”. So as long as this integration stuff is hard to do, or inconvenient to do, pre-integrated offers will still be attractive to some.

What Job Can The Data Do – Can Data be Product Centric ?

So it got me thinking. Are the devices “doing a deep enough job” for the customer to warrant being a “closed system”? There is (to the best of my knowledge) data equivalence between the Nike-Apple closed system and the RunKeeper system. Having the shoe as a closed element just isn’t doing enough “customer work” to justify the lock down. The product isn’t differentiated enough, and the customer experience isn’t inherently enhanced because nothing extra is baked-in. A more customer centred view of data sensing, sharing, and utility may have produced different service directions. Let’s ask a very simple question:

Why Do People Run? What Job Does Running Do ?

I haven’t done the research on this yet, but I am going to speculate that people run for a variety of reasons: decrease weight, decrease health issues, increase energy. I think of these as a desire to ‘take responsibility for our health’. Then there are reasons related to “feeling better”, “feeling healthier”, “feeling connected to ourselves”, which I think of as self identity issues, and ‘taking responsibility for our emotional state’. Motivations relating to feelings of socially located identity, or aspirational identity are probably also in the mix (I am the type of person who runs 5 miles in the morning, high energy, an achiever, who values balance and drives a Prius). I am also going to guess that some people run in order to get out of another environment (work, home) and create some personal space, away from the chatter of others. So running might do a “number of jobs” for me.

If Nike thought about their devices (shoes, bands, watches, clothes) in terms of Added-Health then why doesn’t it sense the weight distributions of your body as you run in different terrains and make assessments for you? You are literally standing in your shoes yet it doesn’t take basis weight measures? Do your shoes help you manage your stride length or adjust your stride for maximum overall goal attainment? What are those shoes doing that intrinsically provides unique personal data that can only be captured in that closed system deployment? And isn’t most of this data probably attainable with an intelligent insole, as opposed to an intelligent shoe? Why didn’t Nike create an insole that would work for any shoe? Because they weren’t really customer centric they were product centric.

Am I running in the morning? Did I get enough sleep for a good run? should I recalibrate my objectives for this run based on my sleep cycle? What other personal data can be collected that helps me make better decisions? What is the life of the customer that can be enhanced with better design, better experience delivery? What is the wider context of my life that these new data streams can help me with?

What Nike did well was to understand that the mechanism of competition could be deployed through a virtual race without destroying the benefits of running alone (you time, reflection time, connection to yourself time). They socially augmented the private experience. What they haven’t done is expand the concept of the product through the concept of “product as service” or “product as end result of a customer collaboration”.

Feedback Loops – Sensing, Data, Behavioural

A lot of this talk about personal data, and data about the physical context of our personal lives, and its social context is about providing the sensing necessary to create the opportunity for feedback loops. Without feedback loops that are close to the ‘event”, timely and accurate, we are not afforded the opportunity to re-steer our course. We are less Agile. Tighter loops are more effective at correcting courses. The problem with behaviour is that sometimes the effect is not obvious, immediate, or certain. If you take up smoking today, you may not feel ill for a whole bunch of years, or ever. And since you’ve never been old before, you have no idea what the affect could look like in the future.

As companies and organisations we should be constantly looking for the opportunity to create feedback loops. Most companies think of this as including website feedback mechanisms, commenting, and official customer surveying. Those to do with on-site navigation and customer journey’s are probably the most top-of-mind.

These are Voice of the Customer (VOC) initiatives and to do it well requires some skill. One of the best I know is Scott Rogers (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/scott-rogers/0/20/31b) most recently head of Strategic Planning at Dave’s Bridal, a major US Retail Chain. In some recent posts  for the Accidental SCRM (@ac_scrm) Scott was making the points that (a) customers value their time at three times their actual hourly pay rate, so you really do need to make it feel that it was worth their while taking the time to feedback; (b) you need to drive the customer experience metrics, not just customer satisfaction metrics; (c) you need to drive insights into why people have certain beliefs, reactions, experiences etc. as only then can you create appropriate sets of actions. When you are at scale, like at a large scale internet retailer, generating an active Voice Of the Customer strategy is a key customer feedback loop, but you most follow it through with serious analytics, capable of working on unstructured data, and then worked on by a a thoughtful analyst.

Just as a person might smoke and not think of the lung cancer, a retailer might offer product on credit to those that can’t pay/ won’t pay, or at risk of not paying. Often a sales person gets their commission calculated on the sale, not on the money collected. In effect there is a missing feedback loop between sales and the credit function. Indeed we have seen the macro effect of this in the mortgage and real estate crises.

Thinking About Feedback Loops Between The Enterprise, The Customer, and the Not- Yet-A-Customer.

The new data streams from personal data, social data, and specific data relating to the customer-enterprise relationship will be key elements in creating these feedback loops but to entice participation in the feedback you have to start start thinking a bit more about exactly how this helps your customers life, and not how much it populates your CRM system with more data to sweat.

You need to think of Architectures of Participation more than Architectures of Perspiration.