Teblog

Vendor Relationship Management UK-style

One of the most challenging, charming, intelligent and irritating people I've ever met is one Adriana Lukas. She was a leading blogger in 2001, long before most people had ever heard of blogging. She understood the ramifications of social software before we knew that there were any ramifications. That would be at the end of 2002. She really was a classic voice in the wilderness and, through speaking engagements, massive amounts of networking and, in my case, arduous discussions, she brought many people to an understanding of the potential of social computing.

Now, she's mounted her charger again and her lance is firmly tilted at people's control of their personal data. In classic Lukas fashion, she's looked askance at the accepted ways of doing things and asked 'why?' Incremental developments creep up on us and we don't realise that the status quo is possibly not where we'd be had we realised the implications of each micro-step.

In this particular case, we're talking about the data that other people hold about us. Banks, social software sites, wine merchants, anyone, in fact, with whom we have dealings. Adriana's view is that we should be in charge of our personal information and reveal appropriate parts when it suits us. Thus, a bank might be given permission to check our address. This would be done through a standard feed mechanism (probably Atom) and the bank would be given an access key. It could poll the address whenever it felt like it. And, if it were a new account, the bank would be given the key and all the relevant pieces of information could be picked up, without the individual having to do yards of typing. At the end of the relationship, the ties can be cut and potentially valuable new personal information put beyond reach.

A wine buff might decide to expose their drinking habits and wine-tasting findings to the local wine merchant. Same thing. Merchant subscribes and, in the gift of the information owner, gets a glimpse into their client's life. Some people might mix their feeds (no pun intended) and others might feel more secure with separate feeds for separate 'friends'. Some might want to encrypt information. Providing the standards chosen are those which are acceptable to the accessing party then this is possible too.

This is an inversion of the relationships we have come to expect. It makes the supplier the supplicant. It puts the buyer in charge. Or, if we're talking government and civil service scenarios, it makes them the servants and the citizens the masters, which is as it should be.

This is all part of the vision of Project VRM. And, yes, this stands for Vendor Relationship Management, a deliberate inversion of the Customer Relationship Management term which, of course, is nothing of the sort. While born from the same roots and overlapping to a large extent, you will notice that Adriana's take on it is totally individual-centric, while the American-led version is more all-embracing. But, in each case, the aim is to restore some balance into the relationships.

In 2001, when Adriana started blogging, people probably thought her mad. In 2002, when she started articulating the value of social networking inside and outside organisations, she was still alone. In 2003, when Google bought blogging service Pyra, she knew she was on to something. And then, in 2005 she was finally vindicated as the mainstream media picked up on social networking.

Right now, I suspect she feels as lonely with respect to VRM as she did when she was blogging in 2001. It will be interesting to see if, once again, she has managed to hit the nail on the head.

UC, you see

Avaya, BT and Cisco teamed up to explain the benefits of the IBM Unified Communications ecosystem. This is an ecosystem, like so many these days, in which the participants are both collaborators and competitors. They carefully laid out their pitches so that they appeared not to compete too much.

What became clear is that they see IBM's UC game being played out in the higher and middle reaches of the corporate world at the moment although this might change later. You'll find some information on SMB offerings, Foundations and Bluehouse, in a recent Information World Review blog.

If you listen to two of the partners, the principal driver for UC, or UC2 (for Unified Communications and Collaboration) as IBM has branded it, is money, in one form or another. While acknowledging the monetary value of UC2, IBM took a slightly different tack which I'll come to in a moment.

BT dropped a slogan in near the end of its presentation: "we get to the money faster." Avaya talked of "reducing headcount and costs" on the one hand and "improving efficiency" on the other. Perhaps it was late in the day when we got to Cisco; we didn't ask and it didn't say, what the benefits to the customer were. But it talked plenty about market potential - in essence a $500M per annum pot to be shared over the next few years.

So, back to IBM. It made the point that squeezing out costs and improving efficiencies is a done deal. It itemised four challenges facing business today, culled from the bi-annual survey of 765 of its client CEOs. The topmost challenge was innovation. The next challenge was securing and retaining top talent. The third concerned their organisations' speed and agility and item number four was green business.

Guess what? All four are handily addressed by better communications and collaboration tools. Innovation happens more quickly when communication and collaboration are facilitated (think social computing behind the firewall and between trusted partners). Top talent will be attracted by having the right tools to hand and culture to operate in. Speed and agility are self-evidently improved by removing friction from communication. And, finally, green is enabled by having the tools to work remotely and reduce travel.

Looking at the slides, I sometimes got the feeling that 'green' or 'GREEN' in one case, appeared because it is more or less obligatory. It happens to be true that the environment benefits from these technologies, but since the commercial case was already a good one, 'green' seemed to be a handy, and very welcome, bonus.

So, with that in mind, I'll leave the last word with Avaya's Martyn Lambert who, rather poetically, came out with this line with regard to UC adoption:

"It's driven by cost, enabled by broadband and blessed by green."

Classic.

ISPs and householders in the front line

Oh dear, oh dear. Seems like our government is continuing its sleepwalk towards another disaster. What do you mean, "which one?" Okay, you have a point. Two things in particular. One is that it has a plan to shrink the police force and get neighbourhood watch members to take over some of its duties. The other, according to the Times newspaper, is to get ISPs to ban users from the internet if they are caught downloading illegal copies of copyright material.

Don't both of these proposals sound a bit daft? In the first place, I thought we paid the government to keep us safe. Although to listen to recent news, it's been failing spectacularly in that particular duty. Members of neighbourhood watch are a) probably scared witless to patrol the streets after dark and b) even if they caught someone, then what? The odds of the fuzz turning up in time to do anything useful is close to zero. There's a disconnect between the government mind and reality.

Now the government is a step closer to asking ISPs to catch people who download stuff they shouldn't, then to act as prosecutor, jury and judge. How convenient. Be seen to suck up to the entertainment moguls without actually having to do anything more than issue yet another set of regulations.

And what's the ISP to do? Inspect every single packet that passes through its hands? Divine what the content is and issue warning emails to infringers? If they infringe again, make sure they're disconnected. And, if they get reconnected and infringe again, ensure they never darken the internet's doorstep again. This, apparently, can be done by notifying other ISPs of the identity of the guilty party.

It's mad. Utterly mad. Bureaucracy gone totally insane.

Listen. With a partner I sell software online. Have done for years. We can be fairly certain that illegal copies have been made (despite our rather clever mechanisms for avoiding it). But whose responsibility is it to deal with the issue? Ours.

We try to be nice to customers so they tell others what jolly decent people we are. We try not to rip people off price-wise, although some would argue that we fail in that respect. But they wouldn't be customers anyway, so what are we losing? Some customers pay us more than once, which suggests our price can't be that wrong.

It's up to us to get the business model right so that the decent majority do the right thing. It's up to us to decide whether to chase commercial-scale infringers through the courts - a horribly expensive process and a distraction to boot.

If the government really does want to prosecute copyright infringers, then it should do it through the normal legal processes. Just as asking householders to catch criminals is mad, so is expecting ISPs to do its dirty work.

Microsoft/Yahoo!

What a time to go on holiday. Half way through a most enjoyable away-from-it-all break, I caught the news that Microsoft's Mr Ballmer had dropped another bombshell by bidding for Yahoo! (The previous, impressive, but much smaller bombshell was the pitch for search specialist FAST.)

What the heck's going on? Microsoft appears to be transmogrifying before our eyes. It wasn't like this during Bill Gates' reign. Or maybe Mr Gates was just a bit more subtle. Perhaps, in an extended parallel with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Ballmer has been champing at the bit to do things his way. It only took him a quarter of a century to get the chance.

Either it's dawned on him that Microsoft is totally adrift in the webtop world or the bid is a cynical ploy to destabilise a competitor. (Hat tip to IBM, by the way, for coining 'webtop' over ten years ago)

Yahoo! certainly has a lot of customers and technologies that Microsoft could benefit from. It is a web company from top to bottom and has some interesting ingredients. (I'm writing this in the departure lounge, no internet connection, but del.icio.us, Flickr and Pipes are the things that spring immediately to mind. I'm sure there are plenty more.)

It's interesting that when Yahoo!'s Jerry Yang was in London last October, he revealed a change of attitude in the company in favour of supporting developers rather than trying to do everything itself. This just happens to resonate well with Microsoft's approach.

Microsoft tries, it really does, to do the web bit but its efforts always make users of Internet Explorer into first class citiizens. Other software publishers can manage rich text editing (for example) in multiple browsers, so why doesn't Microsoft? Perhaps it tries but its culture doesn't make such things easy. The joining of the Yahoo! and Microsoft cultures might help with this sort of thing.

If this deal does go through, I can't help thinking that Microsoft will need a good supply of indigestion tablets and Yahoo! a stock of anti-depressants.