Is VRM a solution in search of a problem?
Uber-blogger Doc Searls is now at Harvard, working on something he calls Vendor Relationship Management, or VRM. (To the right, one of the most famous images in the blogosphere, Doc's head, from his blog.)
Customer relationship management (CRM) tools are supposed to help companies deal with the people who have bought from them, so VRM should help consumers manage relationships with those they buy from.
One example Doc gives is of his alma mater, Guilford College. He worried when he got a call from the school, fearing it was some outsourced calling center. Turns out it wasn't. (Way to go, Quakers.)
The rich and famous have VRM programs called Personal Assistants, who follow up and track all the relationships needed to fill the Great Ones' desires and stay on top. I have something similar, a wife with a good memory who actually likes using Quicken.
But what can the rest of us do, especially those who (like me) have attention deficits, sometimes called bad memories, a terminal case of the stupids, or an unending stream of senior moments?
I already see the big problem here. Data collection. Unless it is automated in some way VRM is useless. And the data sources we use for payment -- credit card receipts, bank records, cash -- don't collate naturally. We don't spend with data flow in mind.
But say you could create an XML schema that interfaced with programs like Quicken and let you see at a glance where your money was going. Unless we're talking about very small merchants you can hit on personally (you know Ira, I spent $1,457.61 at your pharmacy last year) you're still talking about a CRM interface, which means you're just double-checking the merchant's data.
I've seen literally dozens of online attempts to aggregate customers and demand discounts over the years. All they seem to do is draw venture capital and bankruptcy lawyers.
In the end I think we're all looking for the same thing, transparency. We'd like to get use out of the data being collected on us. We'd like interfaces for collecting that data, and programs for managing it. It sounds like a mass market. Consumers demanding power over merchants.
Maybe we could call it the Occassionally Controlling Demand side of the transaction equation. OCD for short.