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Reasonably Accurate 馃馃 Transcript
Morning everybody. How are you doing on the show today? We are gonna talk about applying the con method to your data. Now, what is the Kon Mary method? You're probably wondering, well, if you are a subscriber from Netflix you might have seen on January 1st, a new show dropped.
Um Maybe you follow the New York Times best seller list and stumbled across the name there. That name is Mary Kondo. She is a tiny force of organizational um power. She is a guru within the um organization and sort of tidying up community.
Um Now she has a New Netflix show tidying up with Mary Kondo. She is a New York Times best seller. It's been on the best seller list for 80 plus weeks. Um And con is her method for cleaning and tidying up.
Now, it's a little um unorthodox. Uh It's nothing necessarily revolutionary. Um But the biggest thing that uh is part of this method is when you're looking at an item, whether to uh donate it or to move it out of your life is whether or not that item gives you joy.
Now, in your personal life, that entirely makes sense why am I holding on to all of these old um clothes? Why am I holding on to this book? Is it something that is sentimental and provides joy or is it just weighing me down through a sort of obligation of keeping it uh in my life or in my space?
Um And obviously, the goal is to reduce the amount of stuff to make sure that the stuff that you have within your environment is really optimized to your or lifestyle. Now, why I want to talk about this today is because companies don't do this with their data.
In fact, the push is the exact opposite to gather as much data as you can and hold on to it just in case. So while you're not going to apply that label or that question of, does this data give me joy in an organizational context?
You do really need to ask that simple question is do we need to collect this data? And do we need to store it? The reason why this is important is because as much as data is an important resource for your business and it's worth a lot of money, just look no further than the data broker businesses.
Um how Facebook and Google survive. It's all data driven, right? The data is the new oil. I don't like that metaphor, but I mean, it kind of conveys the weight and importance that data has.
So of course, companies are like we want to gather as much of it as you can. But the flip side is that data is also a liability. If you have to manage this data, you have to store it, you have to process it, you have to control access to it.
And this is where most companies fall down. They don't keep enough data about their data. They don't uh trace the source of that data. They don't actually measure who should be accessing it. Now, there's a story last week about uh ring the smart doorbells now owned by Amazon um saying that all their internal employees, including some overseas had access to every video uh that every customer had ever streamed from the doorbell.
Um And that's not uncommon. It's shocking to hear like wait a minute, they have no internal data controls. It's pretty much most organizations that I talk to. It's essentially you're part of the organization or you're not.
And they don't go further than that to define who should be looking at customer data. For internal data like hr and finance they do, but for customer data, they don't, they just assume it's this big giant pool that everybody should have access to, but that increases your risk.
It increases your threat, it increases the potential of abuse of that data, but also increases the potential that that data is leaked out somewhere. Um in a method that you're not approving with. Now, whether that's through an hack an insider threat or more commonly, just an honest mistake.
We see that all the time in the cloud where people have miscontact continue you forward with this method of, I'm just going to collect all the data and we're gonna keep it forever. You need to apply a logical data management and information management strategy.
Now don't get me wrong. This stuff is super, super hard, but it's critical to privacy, it's critical to security because if you don't know the value and the parameters of use around what you're storing, how can you protect it?
How can you maintain privacy? How can you maintain security? So not only should you really question, you know, go back to that Con Mary method for a minute. Not only should you really question whether you are collecting this data, but in the information security world in the organizational world, you need to take that a step further and say who should have access to this data?
So do we need it in the first place? And do we really need it? Not just in case for a rainy day? Um You need to actually measure that up. Do we need this? Is there a likelihood of us actually using this data for some business purpose down the line?
If so what are the parameters around that? Um Let's track the genesis of this data and for please, please, I was gonna swear there, but I'm gonna rein it back. Please implement internal access controls just because somebody work for the organization does not mean they need to see all of the data.
The organization is stewarding that is absolutely critical. I know it goes against our nature because hey, I like Joe. Joe works for the team. I like Francine. She's on the team. Like there's no reason we shouldn't trust her.
It's not a question of trust. It's a question of blast radius reduction of risk reduction. If you do not actively need to manage data or touch that data, you should not have access to it.
It's that simple. Of course, the devil's in the details. So implementing it is far from simple, but it's something you should start asking your staff. Now if you need to take a little bit of time and binge watch tidying up with Mary Kondo on Netflix.
Go for it. That's your homework from mornings with Mark. That's your homework from me. Um I'd love to hear what you think about managing your data about tidying up your data. Do you ever tie to your data or is it just this ever growing black hole that's weighing your organization down?
Do you realize how much is weighing your organization down? Hit me up online at Mark NC A for those of you in the vlogs in the comments down below and as always by email at me at Mark N dot C A for our podcast listeners and everybody else hope you have a fantastic day and I'll see you on the next show.
