17

VRM

VRM is not just a “phenomenon” generated by placing cool tools in the hands of users. Yes, of course, we need cool tools (it may not happen without them). But we also need new types of service, and new types of business models to make these new types of service possible. It’s about all three, together.

—Alan Mitchell1

THE ARGUMENT

VRM is the booster stage of a missile fired into the future. To some degree, it is a guided one.

First, a few words about the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, where ProjectVRM was launched in September 2006. From the center’s Web site:

The Berkman Center’s mission is to explore and understand cyberspace; to study its development, dynamics, norms, and standards; and to assess the need or lack thereof for laws and sanctions.

We are a research center, premised on the observation that what we seek to learn is not already recorded. Our method is to build out into cyberspace, record data as we go, self-study, and share. Our mode is entrepreneurial nonprofit.2

ProjectVRM veers from that mission in just one respect: it began as a development project, rather than as a research one. That is, its purpose from the beginning has been to encourage development in an area that had been largely neglected: empowering individuals—especially customers—natively, outside any corporate or organizational framework. So, while we wanted to do research, we needed the development horse to pull the research cart.

In the beginning, ProjectVRM was continuous with my own earlier work on digital identity and work done at the Berkman Center under John Clippinger, then a senior fellow there. It was John who approached me in February 2005 to offer Berkman as a kind of “clubhouse” for the “Identity Gang,” which later became the twice-yearly Internet Identity Workshop.

But, while customer empowerment overlaps with digital identity, I saw it as a separate and much larger topic, one that would affect the whole of business once it developed fully. So the purpose of ProjectVRM grew to one that encouraged fresh work in specific development areas such as protocols, standards and databases—and in broad market segments such as retail, law, real estate, government, health care, and communications.

The effort has succeeded, and continues to succeed. By the end of 2011, the ProjectVRM wiki listed dozens of development projects, companies, and organizations. So did the ProjectVRM article in Wikipedia. Any work that provides tools that help make customers both independent of vendors and better able to engage with vendors—in the customer’s own ways, and on his or her own terms—is VRM work.

To describe that work, let’s look first at VRM purposes and then at the kinds of tools they require.

VRM Purposes

In the “Markets are Relationships” chapter of The Cluetrain Manifesto’s 10th Anniversary edition, I listed seven VRM purposes:


  1. Provide tools for individuals to manage relationships with organizations. These tools are personal. That is, they belong to the individual, in the sense that they are under the individual’s control. They can also be social, in the sense that they can connect with others and support group formation and action. But they need to be personal first.
  2. Make individuals the collection centers for their own data, so that transaction histories, health records, membership details, service contracts, and other forms of personal data are no longer scattered throughout a forest of silos.
  3. Give individuals the ability to share data selectively, without disclosing more personal information than the individual allows.
  4. Give individuals the ability to control how their data is used by others, and for how long. At the individual’s discretion, this may include agreements requiring others to delete the individual’s data when the relationship ends.
  5. Give individuals the ability to assert their own terms of service, reducing or eliminating the need for organization-written terms of service that nobody reads and everybody has to “accept” anyway.
  6. Give individuals means for expressing demand in the open market, outside any organizational silo, without disclosing any unnecessary personal information.
  7. Base relationship-managing tools on open standards, open APIs (application program interfaces), and open code. This will support a rising tide of activity that will lift an infinite variety of business boats, plus other social goods.3

To those I would add one more: Make relationships work both ways. That is, we need to create or improve tools for that on both sides. Those tools are new on the customer’s side. Old tools, such as CRM, need to adapt on the vendor’s side. We’ll visit that challenge in Part IV.

VRM tools

Even though VRM developments are still in their early stages, there are a few things we can say about VRM tools and what they do. Here’s a short list:


  1. VRM tools are personal. As with hammers, wallets, cars, and mobile phones, people use them as individuals. They are social only in secondary ways.
  2. VRM tools make us independent. They free us to perform as sovereign and independent actors in the marketplace.
  3. VRM tools help customers express intent.4 These include preferences, policies, terms, and means of engagement, authorizations, requests, and anything else that’s possible in a free market, outside any one vendor’s silo or ranch.
  4. VRM tools help customers engage. This can be with each other, or with any organization, including (and especially) its CRM system.
  5. VRM tools help customers manage. This includes both their own data and systems and their relationships with other entities and their systems.
  6. VRM tools are substitutable. This means no source of VRM tools can lock users in.

While both lists suggest specific kinds of work, they actually outline a category that could hardly be broader.

For example, a plain mobile phone is a VRM tool. So is a car. Both are personal, make us independent, help us express intent, help us engage and manage, and are substitutable.

Not that they are perfectly so. For example, nearly all smartphones today are to some degree locked inside a carrier’s walled garden. Apple’s iTunes is the cushiest Stockholm ever built by a capturing vendor. Still, we are free to leave it and cope with less fancy alternatives, some of which do their best to support your freedom and independence. One is Ting, a new MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) that wants to provide maximal independence and support to customers. In the words of Elliot Noss, the CEO of Tucows, Ting’s parent company, “We have to be a VRM company. If I worked toward anything less, my employees would kill me.”5

And, in the process, Ting is likely to help carriers and regulators understand why free customers are more valuable than captive ones.

There are many other VRM developers as well, which we’ll visit in the next chapter.

SO THEN

It’s still early in the day for the intention economy, but sanity is dawning, and we’re doing our best to make the sun come up.

..................Content has been hidden....................

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.
Reset
3.135.200.211