Tokenization and Your Private Data (1)

30 Jun 2014

One morning this winter, while I was sipping my coffee at the cafe below our office, a well-dressed man and woman sat down at the table next to me, and started talking. Turns out, they were my favourite kind of people — IT people! They were going to bid on the Integrated Decision Making project, and were talking about my favourite systems integrator, Deloitte.

“Is Deloitte trying to bring ICM and Siebel into this project?” she asked.

“No, not anymore” he replied “now they are really pushing SalesForce.com.”

Now this was interesting! Chastened by their failure to shoehorn social services case management into a CRM, Deloitte has adroitly pivoted and is trying to shoehorn natural resource permitting into … a cloud CRM.

(I should parenthetically point out that, unsurprisingly, the SALES people in our company find SALESforce.com very useful in coordinating and tracking their SALES activities.)

Certainly pushing a platform that is actually growing in usage makes more sense than pushing one that end-of-lifed a decade ago, but still, again with the CRM?

Deloitte isn’t being coy with their plans, they are selling them to the highest levels of the government. On October 7, 2013, the BC CIO spent two and a half hours enjoying the hospitality of Deloitte and Salesforce.com at a “BC government executive luncheon” on the topic “Innovation, Transformation and Cloud Computing in the Public Sector”.

And there’s another wrinkle. SF.com is a US-based cloud service provider, and our Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FOIPPA) says that personal data must be stored in Canada. SF.com is also a US legal entity, which means they are subject to the PATRIOT Act which allows authorities to access personal data without notifying the subject of the search. That is also not allowed by BC’s FOIPPA.

What is an ambitious system integrator with a hammer suitable for every nail to do? Not change hammers! That would be silly. Far better to try and get an exemption or figure out a workaround. Workarounds add nice juicy extra complexity to the hammer, which can only help billable hours.

More on the workaround, tomorrow.