Re: [projectvrm] Microsoft's Personal Health Care Records

This is an interesting one: I am not so sure VRM has to be predicated on the idea of relationship.

 

Here is a different angle: for the last hundred years our commercial system has revolved around a persuasion paradigm - where sellers send out messages attempting to persuade buyers to buy their particular products; employers send messages to employees telling them what to do; poltiicians send messages to citizens urging them to vote for me, and so on. All top down.

 

Thanks to all the technology advances that we have been discussing, we are now evolving towards a personal-decision making paradigm. Here the epicentre of added value lies in helping individuals gather, sift, judge and compare the information they need to make better decisions, and then to implement these decisions as efficienlty and effectively as possible.

 

This shifts the focus from organisations' definitions of value and purposes to individuals' definitions of value and purposes. But it doesn't stop there, of course, because in pursuit of personal value, people want to do business with each other and with suppliers. They want to buy and use things. And the fact that individuals are able to go to market with all this rich, real time accurate information about the exact nature and source of demand creates enormous opportunities for suppliers - to talk to the right people about the right things at the right times; to develop the right products and distribute them to the right places and so on.

 

So it naturally leads to new types of win-win relationship. But it is not necessarily 'predicated on relationship'. Instead, it is predicated on providing individuals with the tools they need to gather and manage information (including their own personal data) far more efficiently and effectively than they can today.

 

Angels on a pin-head? Perhaps. But it is a slightly different focus.

 

Alan M