Sowing CoRM

So The Head Lemur wrote this about customer service, got this response, and replied back.

For me this brings up the larger subject of CRM, or Customer Relationship Management. It's a big business, made bigger by SugarCRM's open source-based offerings. Which is fine as far as it goes, which isn't very far, mostly because approximately all CRM systems are silos. They isolate the vendor's customer relationships to those only of the vendor. They don't care a whole lot about what else the customer might be doing in the marketplace. There may be some knowledge of customer relations with partners — such as you'd find with hotels and airlines, for example. But for all their virtues as technological solutions, CRM systems in some ways cause more problems than they solve.

The problems I'm talking about here are in the form of lost market opportunities made possible by relationships on the customers' terms. Which may be far more rich and complex and potentiated than those contemplated by the CRM system.

This isn't any CRM's fault. I'm sure they're all fine, as solutions to the customer relationship problems that usually come up. But the conceptual framework is not the open marketplace where fully empowered customers interact with vendors open to more than what their sales and CRM systems contemplate.

What we need is a reciprocal of the CRM, on the customer's side. Drummond Reed came up with CoRM, for Company Relationship Management. It's how the customer relates to various vendors with which he or she has relationships in the wide-open marketplace.

CoRM is what we'll eventually get out of a truly distributed, non-centralized, real-world, customer-centric identity system such as what we called the Common Identity System when Kim Cameron described what he's doing for his part, at Microsoft, in compliance with his Laws of Identity.

So much is happening around this thing right now that I hardly know where to begin. I suggest reading... Hmm... Kim's Final Witness, explaining, with a remarkable combination of intelligence and grace, how he's trying to do the Right Thing. Also Drummond's response, which is no less smart and gracious, especially considering that Drummond has probably done more, single-handedly, to create human-friendly identity standards, than anybody else out there, so far... Then there's this by Eric Norlin. And whatever Craig Burton writes next.

Meanwhile, I'd like to invite some Linux hackers out there to take an interest in All This. (Or to reveal what interest you may already have.) I'll be writing it up for Linux Journal soon, and I'd like to cover What It Means for the Linux community, if not also What's Going On there as well.