“The times they are a-changin’,” sang the Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan. “You better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone.” In the next two to three years, businesses will need to adapt in order to meet increasing demand for a heightened degree of security and greater transparency when it comes to personal information, how it’s handled and how it’s stored.
We already see GDPR and other data privacy legislation on the horizon mandating that individuals can request to limit their records processed by 3rd parties and have the right to have their personal data erased from any platform, including backups and archives. In many cases, even anonymized data processing is subject to users’ consent.
These trends will gradually create a reality where the data footprint of candidates, employees, and alumni will shrink to an extent that it might be insufficient to algorithmically make valuable predictions and drive value through analytics and AI. This will become a structural weakness jeopardizing the labor market incumbents’ promise to their constituents, inviting a new crop of startups across the globe to try to conquer and solve this problem and steal the market.
Disruption across the labor market ecosystem is inevitable, but rather than bracing for the change, Velocity offers the industry incumbents an opportunity to be confident to embrace it.
ABANDON THE “DATA HOARDING” MINDSET
The interest to include privacy protection as a key component of business models has been revived by recent events: data leaks; hacks; surveillance scandals and, especially, privacy violations by social media; data-sharing between platforms and top device makers without users’ consent. The privacy interests of consumers are now leading in the design for all sorts of products and services, while businesses are driven to explore how to reconcile their ethical and legal obligations toward their customers’ privacy with the objectives of their information systems design.
Privacy regulations have practically eliminated businesses’ proprietary rights to the personal information they have collected by granting individuals the right to receive a copy of this information, limit its processing and even insist on its erasure. Businesses in the labor market ecosystem that base their strategy on a competitive advantage gained through their data sets of personal employee data will be bound to struggle, as the heightened concerns with data privacy continue.
COMPETE THROUGH INNOVATIVE APPLICATIONS AND FUNCTIONAL USE CASES
In this new reality, competitive advantage can only be achieved through added-value, innovative applications that allow for smart processing of data based on users’ consent. Most users are found to be overwhelmingly in favor of providing their data to processors if the data is collected responsibly and benefits them. In return for users’ permission to collect data, processors will have to give them more control over how it is used; the key is value to the users.
Coming together as an industry to promote a global, shared utility layer to manage self-sovereign career data, a network that is owned by no one and managed by its members, is the natural evolution to accommodate the new reality and mitigate its threats on the incumbents’ business models.
The architecture of the Velocity Network separates the utility layer of the blockchain network with its basic elements and token mechanics from the different proprietary applications that interact with the blockchain. It is with these new and innovative proprietary applications that vendors will separately compete for advantage in the marketplace.
An initial group of innovative trailblazers, industry global leaders from across HR Tech, Education Tech, gig platforms, contingency workforce, job search platforms, background providers, and assessment processor, that came together to define, deploy, and champion the Velocity Network: a globally accessible, trustworthy “Internet of Careers”, serving the diverse constituent groups that engage with the network.