Data Privacy regulations effects on digital transformation, i.e. Europe and Germany specific

This is a big issue, especially when it comes to German work councils.

Ideally I think I would start with getting alignment on the privacy policy before developing a solution. I wonder if one could develop a version of Roger Martin;s strategic choice cascade focused on privacy (I am on a Roger Martin binge at the moment, he is one of the great strategic thinkers). I would work hard to get buy in and to have users shape the policies at the beginning and not at the end, which is what often happens.

I also suspect that many things we think of as privacy issues are actually data ownership issues. Digital data is not like a physical object, it can be owned by more than one person and there are many types of ownership, it is a bundle of rights. I find that people are more willing to share data when they have an ownership stake in that data and some control over how it will be used.

We have had to configure systems differently for different regions, and we often have to locate servers and host data in specific jurisdictions. We keep EU data in the EU (Germany actually), Canadian data in Canada for our government customers, and most of our data in the US. I suspect we will have data servers in Japan, India and somewhere in Latin America in the future.

You need to design this into the system from the beginning, so that different privacy and even ownership configurations are possible.

Asking questions about this is important when choosing vendors.