Interview: Get GDPR Ready with Ian Glazer and Lindsey Finch

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re joined by two Salesforce GDPR experts: Lindsey Finch, Senior Vice President of Global Privacy and Product in Legal, and Ian Glazer, Vice President of Product Management. We’ll cover the new regulations and what you need to do to get ready.

Join us as we talk about why GDPR is ultimately about trust, and the resources available to help you get ready.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Lyndsey Finch and Ian Glazer.

Getting ready for GDPR.

Lindsey leads the Global Privacy and Product Legal functions at Salesforce, and she’s been working on GDPR for the last few years. Ian, meanwhile, is part of the Product Management organization for Salesforce Platform. “I also happen to be the lead, from a product management perspective, for GDPR for platforms,” Ian says, “I’ve been working with Lindsey and all of her team to make sure that our customers have the tools they need to get the job done.”

“The GDPR stands for the General Data Protection Regulation,” Lindsey says, “and while it’s an EU law, it really has global implications for most businesses who are dealing with customers in the EU or have websites available in the EU.” These regulations are going to change how you handle data, and you need to be ready to adapt.

Why GDPR is an opportunity.

“If you’re an Admin, you’re already doing GDPR things because you’re thinking about your customer,” Ian explains, “you’re thinking about how to give them the experience they need and you’re thinking about how to make sure you can protect their information, so in a lot of ways doing GDPR stuff is just doing what you do.” His point is that you’re already thinking about the kinds of things that you need to be worried about with this law, though you want to start also thinking about new things like how to give your customers a copy of their information.

From Lindsey’s perspective, GDPR shouldn’t be viewed as a compliance headache for Salesforce or for customers: “It’s really an opportunity to strengthen our privacy program and put individual consumers at the center of everything that our customers are doing and respecting their privacy rights.” Salesforce has even compiled a resource on the regulations and what they mean for you: http://www.salesforce.com/gdpr/.

Salesforce resources to help you get ready.

“Sometimes it’s kind of tough to figure out what a new feature means in the context of GDPR and your business,” Ian says, “so our documentation team helped build what I like to think of as connective tissue between all of our help and training,” so if you’re an Admin and you need to hide customer information, you can find pointers to things that are already there to help you solve your problem.

We’ve also been working on a feature called Individual object, which, Ian says, “is the beginning of ways that we can represent the desires and intent of the human being.” We so often view the people in our data as a Contact or a Lead, but they’re actually humans with preferences and wants and needs. The Individual object helps Salesforce keep track of how someone wants to be communicated with, if they want to be communicated with at all, and what they want to do with their information. “The Individual Object serves as the human behind the Lead,” Ian says.

Why GDPR shouldn’t be such a big deal.

“The thing that makes people successful is the ability to sit around a table and know that the customer is the thing that we’re most focused on,” Ian observes. “If you ground the conversation in what the customer wants and what we need to do to do right by them, no matter who you’re talking to, everyone will be able to speak to it.” As Lindsey says, “put the individual who the personal data relates to at the center of your privacy program rather than looking at it as a tick-the-box compliance program.”

In other words, if you’re focused on doing right by the people behind the data, you’re already well on your way toward compliance. The bottom line, as Ian says, is that “GDPR isn’t going to be the last regulation that we all have to think about, and we’re going to add new capabilities in each release.”

Salesforce’s official GDPR readiness site: https://www.salesforce.com/gdpr/overview/

Trailhead: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/modules/european-union-privacy-law-basics

Twitter:

• Lindsey: @lindseyfinch
• Ian: @iglazer
• Gillian: @gilliankbruce
• Salesforce Admins: @salesforceadmns

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