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The economy in the digital world has evolved in parallel with that of the physical world – from a focus on products to services and now experiences. Joseph Pine and James Gilmore first introduced the concept in their book[1]“The experience economy.” There they found that “getting personal with customers is the DNA of the experience economy.”
As consumers increasingly adopt digital technologies, the experience economy is firmly entrenched in the digital world. And end users have significantly raised their expectations for digital experiences tailored to their interests and needs at every moment.
As a result, it has become necessary for organizations to deliver digital experiences that are personalized, real-time, geosensitive, predictive and omnichannel. In addition, the teams creating these digital experiences need a good methodology to firmly and securely represent personalization attributes in the digital world. The “digital double” is a concept created to meet this need.
The idea of a digital doppelgänger first came to my mind in the spring of 2016. I was traveling to give a keynote at WSO2Con Asia (the APAC edition of WSO2’s annual user conference) on the topic “Building a Digital Enterprise: Learning from Experience”.
So I started making the keynote storyboard during the long flight from San Francisco to Colombo, Sri Lanka. However, the storyline did not go as I had hoped. So I turned on the onboard entertainment system and came across the movie Tron Legacy, where the characters are drawn into a virtual world. Then it dawned on me: the digital universe requires a good representation of physical and digital assets, a digital double.
Contents
Defining a digital double
There are similar concepts to the digital doppelgänger, fostered largely by the rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT). Digital twin and digital self are good examples, but each only represents one type of asset. The digital double, on the other hand, is a representation of people, places, and things in the digital universe.
Your digital double is always active in the digital space, regardless of physical activity such as sleeping or watching TV. Not only that, it makes decisions on your behalf. Dating applications are an excellent example of understanding the behavior of a digital doppelgänger. Once you’ve created a profile in the dating application, your digital doppelgänger will start dating people on your behalf. As a result, you miss your first date, but get a better match.
Therefore, as digital professionals, we must protect the digital doubles we create within digital applications by applying basic principles – such as privacy, trust, confidentiality and security controls – that enhance security through a privacy ecosystem and regulation to protect the digital double. protect against cyber threats.
Identity vs personality
To understand the digital double, it is important to recognize the difference between identity and personality. Identity sets you apart from others and makes you unique. Personality is how you describe yourself; it’s your sense of humor, your emotions and how you react in different situations. Identity verification determines that it is you using a particular system, but the system knows nothing about you except for a few identity identifiers. Until the system knows your personality, it can’t get to know you and provide a personalized experience.
“Identity in the form of continuity of personality is an extremely important characteristic of the individual.” ~Kenneth Lee Pike, anthropologist.
Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) is the path to intimate personalization. Today, CIAM is mainly about access control, but in the future, CIAM will integrate the customer’s personality into the company.
Identity and personality traits vary in permanence. These attributes can be categorized by how often they change.
- Never change: DNA, blood group, fingerprints;
- Rarely change: name, nationality, religion, gender;
- Often changes: Place of residence, age, social status, job, education;
- Quick toggle: Social media, heart rate, playlists.
Connect the dots
The digital double is the amalgamation of your identity and personality. As we discussed earlier, the digital double represents the people, places, and things of the digital universe. In addition, the digital doppelgänger contains the identity and personality attributes. However, representing, storing and uncovering these traits is challenging due to the dynamic nature of both identity and personality traits. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has laid the foundations for a solution to this problem through the introduction of decentralized identifiers (DID) specification, which covers the core architecture, data model, and representations of identity and personality attributes.
The digital double changes the traditional digital representation of identity by moving from geocentric (owned and controlled by the identity provider) to heliocentric (owned and controlled by the individual). Its heliocentric nature is a great way to handle content management, and compliance requirements should be addressed when accessing and storing identity and personality traits.
In addition, the dynamic nature of these attributes makes the digital dual adaptive and decentralized, which the industry is trying to address through a identity fabric concept associated with Web 3.0. My preference is the distributed identity network one “Identity meshsimilar to other distributed and cloud-native architecture styles such as service mesh, data mesh, and event mesh. Unfortunately, there is no unique identifier for the digital assets in the digital ecosystem; therefore, a digital doppelgänger must be highly interoperable between different digital identity representations.
CIAM is the base
CIAM is the foundation that creates and manages the digital double. Therefore, the CIAM provider should take this into account and provide the digital twin as a service to facilitate application development. To do this, the CIAM provider must integrate a new set of capabilities, such as full authorization and authentication, in addition to core identity and security features. CIAM systems already capture identity attributes of defined policy information points (PIPs).
In addition, the CIAM provider must introduce application programming interfaces (APIs) and event synchronizations to capture and record personalization attributes based on user activities from various sources. This is mainly interaction data from omnichannel applications and transactions from archiving systems. In addition, the CIAM system will silently observe the customer by monitoring their social media posts, including sentiment analysis, and detect interaction patterns and anomalies. The CIAM system then triggers alerts when anomalies are detected.
Once customer attributes are captured, the CIAM provider must enable APIs that allow applications to query and use the attributes in the digital experiences delivered by the app. Therefore, graphing APIs based on GraphQL are essential for implementing attribute retrieval APIs. In addition, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) processes can be linked to the attribute data store and provide insights on behalf of the business. With the expanded capabilities mentioned above, the CIAM provider can combine the characteristics of a digital doppelgänger across the company to build a comprehensive personality profile.
Pathway to creating a seamless access experience with the digital doppelgänger
The company and its CIAM provider must work together to achieve a seamless access experience with the digital doppelgänger. The CIAM provider must provide the extensive capabilities discussed in the previous section, and the company must leverage these capabilities in application architecture and development.
The end result cannot be realized overnight. However, the following five steps CIAM maturity model can help the organization and the CIAM provider make iterative but steady progress.
- Level 0 — None: Customers are strangers and interactions are anonymous.
- Level 1 — Managed: basic identity management, registration, password management, and user management.
- Level 2 — Siloed: Easy integration with silo business systems, customer information replicated within apps.
- Level 3 — Connected: Business systems integration, 360° customer view, omnichannel customer experience.
- Level 4 — Optimized: Intelligent, adaptive, and personalized customer experience.
From a business standpoint, the organization reaches CIAM 1.0 once they have access control and identify an individual as described for level 1 (Managed) and 2 (Siloed). The organization then moves to CIAM 2.0 by integrating the identity of the user into the business, as described in level 3 (Connected). Finally, the organization will graduate to CIAM 3.0 by improving business applications to know every person as stated in level 4 (optimized).
Final thoughts
We mainly looked at customer-centric personalization using business-to-consumer (B2C) CIAM, but as a digital craftsman you need to build digital experiences for other types of users. The same concept can be extended to other business models that use CIAM, including business-to-business (B2B) CIAM for handling partners and suppliers and business-to-employee (B2E) CIAM for managing employees.
Getting personal with customers is the DNA of the experience economy, and in the digital world, CIAM is the way to drive personalization. Moreover, because the digital doppelgänger is the fusion of everyone’s identity and personality, CIAM is needed to lay the foundation for creating and managing the digital doppelgänger. To use this capability in application development, the CIAM provider must enable the digital double as a service. The CIAM maturity model can be used as a stable, iterative, and frictionless path to create a seamless access experience with the digital doppelgänger.
Asanka Abeysinghe is chief technology evangelist at WSO2.
[1] Ii, JPB and Gilmore, JH (2019). The Experience Economy, with a new foreword by the authors: Competing for Customer’s Time, Attention, and Money (revised). Harvard Business Review Press.
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