Free customers

This is the second in a series of posts reviewing Doc Searls’ book The Intention Economy.  If you don’t own a copy, you should.

Doc Searls feels that we, as customers, will inevitably be free.  Free from profiling, free from siloed royalty programs, free from restrictive terms and conditions.  Customers will not be ‘acquired’ or ‘owned’ by vendors.  Marketing plans and products will be based on our expressed intentions to buy.

Why? Because the value of the data that comes freely from us is greater that the value of data Facebook and Google collect on us.

My take: Tables are about to be turned…

Web users are increasingly distrustful of how web sites (e-commerce, social media, etc.) collect our information and use it to target us with products and services.  There is a real sense of ‘creepiness’ that we experience when web ads from one site are obviously leveraging information we entered on another.

An e-commerce model where we express our intentions to suppliers has real potential.  We can decide what personal information we want to share, and to whom we share it with. We can control and own our personal information in ways that the existing creepy approach simply can’t permit.  The change envisioned by this model has real, lasting value to consumers who want to protect their identity information and are willing to work to maintain control of that data.

Mike

In-tention not ah-ttention…

This is the first in a series of posts reviewing Doc Searls’ book The Intention Economy, with my thoughts on impacts to identity.  If you don’t own a copy, you should.

Doc Searls‘ The Intention Economy documents his journey into the concept of customer-centred and directed e-commerce.  He came upon the idea in 2006 when attending a conference on the Attention Economy.  It occurred to him that all this focus on getting a customer’s attention was largely wasted.  After all, without a customer having the intention to purchase something, all the advertising in the world — including advertising based on sophisticated profiling — is useless.

Central to this concept is customers managing their vendors and suppliers.  The term Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) is the ying to the corporate Customer Relationship Management’s yang.  Searls maintains that the commercial Internet exploitation of us — using our own data — will soon be old-school.  With tools that permit us to practice VRM, we can dicate the terms of our online and real-world shopping experiences.

My thoughts: Identity information will drive VRM and future commercial interactions

All of this suggests that we will soon regain control of our own personal information.  We can then supply that information to our various suppliers, and negotiate deals based on our own terms.

Clearly, this future world will require us to record, supply and control identity information in order to supply our personal VRM systems.  We will need tools, yes, but also we’ll need to commit to the effort of maintaining identity information, and be prepared to share information with our vendors.

Mike

The Intention Economy

I’ve picked up a copy of Doc Searls’ latest book, The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge.

The relationship between Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) concepts and identity is a tight one and I’m hoping the ideas presented in the book will kick-start my own thinking about the next generation Internet.  Chapter-by-chapter posts to follow…

Mike

Personal data and a new business model

Interesting:

Instead of thinking of the digital data as something collected by others and somehow used against you, it becomes a mechanism for you to get companies to send you information about things you actually want to buy.

Wordle of blog.personal.com

Personal.com, located in the Washington, DC area, have built a personal data service that encourages users to enter personal information into Personal’s cloud-based vault.  The service allows people to organize their data into ‘gems’, then send this information to family, friends and business associates.  Here are some quick-hit videos that explain the company and the concept.

I have direct experience with personal data vaults and, frankly, the uptake on this type of service is currently poor.  It may well be a generational thing, and perhaps time has to pass before enough people will trust a cloud service with their secrets.

But I think that the real obstacle for existing personal vaults may well be the current ‘user pay’ business model.  People don’t see the value in a paid-for personal data service — but could they use a service that allows them to control and sell their own personal data?

Personal’s model anticipates a future where advertisers will seek out personal data from prospects and pay for the information.  Personal is hoping to capitalize on this by becoming the  broker for millions of personal data transactions, and take a percentage of the transaction fees as commissions.  We — as rightful owners of the data — get the rest!

Is this the future of personal data? Are we seeing a move away from intrusive data collection for the service operator’s profit alone (the Google and Facebook models) to a world where we own, control and reap the benefits of our own information?

Mike

IAM for the smaller enterprise

My clients find identity solutions to be complex and costly to implement.  For mature and/or large enterprises, these issues are simply a cost of doing business — and compliance or online strategic drivers are usually sufficient to fund and launch an IAM initiative.

For the smaller enterprise there appear to be two paths followed: do nothing or do it poorly.  When done poorly, shoddy IAM implementations  can result in poor credential management, lousy availability and inappropriate access controls.

So how does a smaller company or organization deal with identity properly? How can users be efficiently identified online without building expensive, custom solutions? What service levels and supports are possible for a login service when staff go home at 5pm? How can niche needs like strong authentication be met without excessive server license costs and complex implementations?

Enter the cloud.  Cloud-based IAM service providers are maturing and there are a number of solutions that offer the smaller organization solutions.  For example:

• Symplified offers a full IAM service that promises plug-and-play integration with surprising depth, including support for mobile devices and apps.
• PhoneFactor has a slick and secure solution for two-factor authentication that can be licensed on a per-use basis.
• TransUnion have a robust identity proofing service for the critical process of confirming the identity of an online visitor.

Using one or more of these solutions allows for rapid deployment of IAM for smaller organizations.  The cost savings are considerable and services levels are beyond what most companies could hope to provide on their own.  There still remains integration work — applications need to be ‘plumbed’ to inter-operate with the cloud solutions — but all the heavy-lifting of designing and configuring a solution is eliminated.

The maturation of cloud IAM solutions means an increased number of companies can implement secure and compliant solutions without the long lead-times and high cost of traditional product-based offerings.  In this age of rampant data breaches and increased focus on compliance, this is a welcomed development.

Mike