Boston Linux Meeting Wednesday, March 18, 2009 Doc Searls on Vendor Relationship Management

[Tom Metro]

> When: March 18, 2009 7PM (6:30PM for Q&A)
> Topic: Doc Searls on Vendor Relationship Management
> Moderators: Doc Searls, Senior Editor, Linux Journal
> Location: MIT Building E51, Room 395
> 
> Doc discusses Vendor Relationship Management (VRM), the antithesis of 
> Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Where vendors use CRM to manage 
> relations with customers on the vendor's terms, VRM is intended for use 
> by customers to manage relations with vendors on the customer's terms.

Some of you might be wondering what is VRM, and what does it have to do 
with BLU. Wikipedia has a decent summary:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_Relationship_Management

   VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management, is the reciprocal of CRM or
   Customer Relationship Management. VRM describes a set of tools,
   technologies and services that help individuals go to market and
   manage relationships with vendors. In turn, vendors who align
   themselves to these tools, technologies and services will have the
   opportunity to build better relationships with their customers.

   The goal of VRM is to improve the relationship between the demand-side
   and the supply-side of markets by providing new and better ways for
   the former to relate to the latter. In a larger sense, VRM has the
   potential to improve markets and their mechanisms by equipping
   customers to be independent leaders and not just captive followers in
   their relationships with vendors and other parties on the supply side
   of the marketplace.


More practically speaking, VRM lets the customer publish information 
about their needs, and invite vendors to access that information. Here's 
one example use, as described by someone in a blog comment:

http://www.customerthink.com/blog/vrm_customer_data_and_competitive_advantage#comment-13391

   I cut and paste the ingredients from the recipes, plus my standard
   always-need list, into a shopping list VRM tool. I 'expose' this
   need-data to the four stores...along my driving route, and I get back
   a grid showing which stores have which items at which prices, plus a
   total price for each.


Vendors can also collect together the information provided from multiple 
individuals through VRM to create buying groups, such as the residents 
of a town publishing their heating oil requirements, and inviting 
quotations from suppliers.

Or a group of hackers looking to build some specialty computers, that 
individually would be cost prohibitive, but when the buyers are 
aggregated through VRM, it becomes an appealing market for the vendors 
and cost effective for the hackers.


As for the BLU connection, the Wikipedia article goes on:

   ProjectVRM, at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and
   Society, is working to support development of VRM tools and
   methodologies to provide customers with both independence from vendors
   and ways to engage with vendors. The project is headed by Doc Searls,
   a fellow with the Berkman Center.

And http://projectvrm.org/ :
   ProjectVRM is a community-driven effort to support the creation and
   building of VRM tools.

There are several open source projects affiliated with ProjectVRM, which 
I'm sure Doc will discuss.


OK, so even if the tech angle isn't that strong, and VRM itself doesn't 
seem that exciting, some of this should still appeal to the 
entrepreneurs in the group. Doc straddles the line between tech and 
marketing, and is sort of a futurist in the realm of marketing. This 
concept of inverting the CRM model is already leading to new startups. 
Here's something Doc said in another blog comment:

http://www.customerthink.com/blog/vrm_customer_data_and_competitive_advantage#comment-13390

   In the entire Industrial Age we have never had a market condition
   where customers controlled most of their own data. The Internet not
   only makes that possible, but inevitable. The Internet has blown up
   many other asymmetries. (Just ask the recorded music business.) This
   one will get blown up too.



  -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/