Gunpowder, Treason and....Pizza?

Its Friday night, and the weekend approaches - so what does a gentleman do in London Town? Thats right, he goes across town in the rain and dark, and approaches a dark dive deep in a basement - but not to partake of the sins of the flesh. No, dear reader, one goes to talk about Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) with other plotters of the Customer Revolution, including one Doc Searls, who having written part of the Cluetrain Manifesto was here in London to spread sedition this Guy Fawkes week.

(Aside to clarify - VRM as used here is the concept of turning CRM on its head, not to be confused with the ERP based module attached to Purchasing Management)

We (along with many others I suspect) have been working on some aspects of what is emerging as the "VRM thang" for several years, so it was very interesting to meet fellow plotters from various walks of life and compare notes, as it has become apparent to us over the last few months that the full articulation of the VRM concept taps into a number of parallel universes (Customer aggregation, C2B thinking etc, Social Networking), needs to understand complex Transcation Theory, the Semantic Web - or at least M2M comms - and has to deal with the emerging Digital Trinity (Privacy, Identity, Security). Plus there is enough cryptography and smart database design to keep even the Broadsight geeks happy (Quadruple-play real time OSS systems being pretty geeky, let me tell you...)

And be simple and instinctive to use, of course....

The net present value of the customers' future spend is a large number, and to return proper value to the user it has to be under the user's control. And right now nearly all the commercial interest is in building tools to disenfranchise the users, not empower them. (Despite the official blurb, many of the Web 2.0 sites are designed to monetise your work and content and hand you back very little value in return).

So, this Guy Fawkes week made it a very timely soiree - as you may have observed reading this blog, we are more than a bit concerned with the more Orwellian aspects of what players like Facebook and Google can do with data, and we feel that the customer needs a more coherent form of defence. If we don't hang out together, we will most certainly be hung out to dry separately.

Thanks also to Adriana Lukas for organising the soiree, the pizza, and the beers. If Guy Fawkes had had Pizza, who knows what turn history may have taken.