Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Organising demand & VRM

The supply side of the economy is well organised. Small businesses to the largest corporations have the ability to deploy employees, technology and capital/money to put together their offering in a supply chain. Massive silos of data surround these activities.

All the supply in the world is meaningless without demand. Demand is not well organised today. An individual, yes can have employess working for them, yes has access to technology, yes can have access to capital/money but all not on the scale of a business. Plus the main point is, from an individuals point of view, you would need to create a corporations capability for multiple industries, food, energy, transport etc. Why, life dictates the need for these services and products every day.

There is an industry that wants to solve this multiple service management issue, they call it VRM, Vendor Relationship Management.

Within the VRM framework there will be the need to provide not only this multiple vendor management interface (why would you want a different 'flavour of tool' for every service/product you need to manage?) but also tools that allow individuals to build/find/share information with other individuals i.e. social networks.

Social networks within VRM will look and feel like existing social networks but I don't foresee a world that you belong to a myspace or facebook or flickr sized for all the activities within VRM but you could if you needed to.

This organising of demand is just starting. We can look to the supply side to see what can be done. Demand will become as well organised as the supply side and I don't think it will take centuries to get there.

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