"Thing" Relationship Management
With consumers as the beneficiary, are we willing to let "things" takeover?
My current research led me down a path injected a concept into my brain, Thing Relationship Management (TRM). Unfortunately, Paul Lopez beat me to the punch when he wrote a brief abstract on it about 5 years ago. Oh well, I’m a little slow. However, there has been some discussion on “Anything” Relationship Management. In fact, Microsoft leveraged the term when they came up with xRM; which basically meant their platform supported more business capabilities than just sales and marketing.
But that has little to do with some of the concepts we’ll be faced with very soon:
Industry 4.0 (The Fourth Industrial Revolution)
The Internet “4” Things
The Coordination Age
All of these predict that things must ultimately become more autonomous in order to make the world run better - faster, more efficient use of resources, less waste, less burden on people. In this world, consumers are doing fewer traditional jobs since many of the consumption chain jobs in their lives will be automated, and orchestrated by things. Digital things.
Digital-to-Digital…to-Digital
There are people are already alive that will never know what the analog world was like. They were born digital. It’s cute that consultants are still running around telling clients that AI Chat-Bots are a thing. That chat-bot sort of interaction is simply trying to simulate real-world interactions with a smaller staff. I realize the businesses want that. But, is that what customers ultimately want? It pretends to reduce the burden on their lives, but they still need to be actively involved.
Businesses benefit by giving customers what they want, not giving customers what the business wants.
There are still voices of concern about privacy, and they’re warranted. But from what I’ve been reading, these concerns are being taken into consideration as new concepts and technologies are envisioned.
So what does a world that runs better look like?
How much efficiency could we get out of the transportation industry if every vehicle had information about anything in their operating environment that could delay them, or speed them up. How could this integrate with processes at the point of origin, or at the destination?
What if communication infrastructure was tightly integrated into industries? Bezos is launching a satellite network and I bet the long game has little do to with consumer-to-consumer communication given his interest in logistics. How can Musk beat that with a consumer-only focused Starlink?
How can we automate our personal lives more completely if things could interact with people, things and processes? I’d love it if my pantry always had what I needed for my next meal. What else could we do?
What can you imagine in a future that is defined by digital-to-digital coordination? How much resistance will there be? Will the move to a digital reality mean even faster change? Leave a comment below if you have an opinion 👇