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.

Comments

[Martin De Saulles]

I like the sound of Adriana's ideas for giving more control back to us as owners of our personal data. Whether her suggestions could actually be implemented, I am not so sure. I seem to remember a similar idea 6 or 7 years ago. The organisation I was working were looking into this area and I had a look at the proposed XNS standard. I think it stood for eXtensible Name Services ( or something similar)but does not seem to have gone anywhere. XRI and i-names have been talked about more recently but I have not seen much mainstream discussion about their implementation on any scale. I think Ariana is probably right and that personal data issues will become a much hotter topic over the coming months/years (especially if we have any more data loss stories making the headlines) but I'm not convinced that any of the current proposals are ready for mainstream deployment. Any successful solutions will need to be extremely simple to understand and use as most non-technical users will not be interested in dealing with RSS/Atom or whatever standard is used to run the system. The other big issue will be trust - what organisations would we trust to run such a system? In the UK, the public sector does not currently enjoy a good reputation in this area.

[David Tebbutt]

We could add Sxip and Pagoa and, no doubt, many other identity schemes to the mix. The main difference here is that Adriana recognises that organisations like the NHS and government will still hold records about us but she'd like to put us in as much control as possible of our personal information and, indeed, our personalities.

At the moment, you and I probably have a collection of stuff about ourselves that is in the public or semi-public domain (a website, an about page, a LinkedIn entry or whatever). Mine's at http://www.tebbo.com . But there's stuff we don't want to put there. Personal address, for example, or home phone number. Yet some people, with our permission, would like to keep tabs on those things.

My understanding is that Adriana's proposals will take care of this faceted exposure to our personal information. It's a different approach to hiring a personal vault.

When it comes to trust, I guess the issue there is no different in real life. We could lie about where we live, blog or our phone number, but it seems fairly pointless.

I'll drop Adriana a line and ask her if she can be more clear than I've been. After all, she lives with this stuff 24x7 - I spent only a few hours rummaging around and talking to her.

[sandalye]

I'll drop Adriana a line and ask her if she can be more clear than I've been. After all, she lives with this stuff 24x7 - I spent only a few hours rummaging around and talking to her.

[Graham Sadd - PAOGA]

Good to hear from you David.
Adriana certainly has a friend in PAOGA. Have a look at http://blog.grahamsadd.com to see how our Personal Information Management (you will recall that we were calling it SRM some years ago) complies with the principles of VRM. You can also try our Spam Free Email demo of VRM at www.mysortingoffice.com.