Architecting Reality

If you were looking right at it, wouldn't it be obvious?

[architectingreality-blog]

Personal.com

A relatively new start-up called www.personal.com is looking to become a central location for everyone's personal data. They provide the ability to host your data, in a structured fashion within what they term 'gems'. These represent categories and subcategories of information about you, your family, car, kids, allergies, preferences, travel plans, etc. and you are able to selectively allow other people and applications access to your gems. The idea is that it saves you having to fill out forms, make lists and deal with all of the information that you have to deal with on a day-to-day basis and you can share it with whomever you like.

One key difference to other web-based stores of personal information is that their privacy and security policies put you in control of your data. If you want it removed from their servers, you can ask them to delete it and they guarantee that it will be gone. They also look at this as a long term play as they believe that it will take years before people are ready to use this type of service on mass.

What do you think? Would you use it? How do you feel about a commercial entity having effective control of your personal information, all in one place? As one person put it,

"It's a hacker's wet dream!"

I'm on the fence on this one for now.

[architectingreality-blog]

It's all very competitive

When you look at your business in terms of how competitive it is, what do you look for?

The best price?

The fastest possible delivery?

The highest possible quality?

With the advent of business process outsourcing (BPO), it's likely to get a whole lot more competitive moving forward in ways that we’re only beginning to wake up to.

99 Designs (http://99designs.com.au) does just this... They provide a competitive environment for designers to go after your hard earned dollars by creating what they term "competitions" for design work to be done. Designers then compete against one another to provide you with the best design that they can and you're under no obligation to accept, and therefore pay for any of them if they don’t meet your needs.

A Vendor Management System (VMS) is designed to get providers (or vendors) competing with one another in a similar way. These systems, which are continuing to gain popularity with everyone but the vendors themselves, are designed to allow consumers (or users of the VMS) to configure rules about how vendors attempt to provide their services to the consumer. Some VMSs allow consumers to send out orders to specific vendors or panels of vendors allowing them a first chance to fulfil their needs. In the event that they are unable to do so, the VMS can then submit the order to additional vendors for consideration. In terms of when an order is considered filled, rules can be used to govern this behaviour too. The lowest price might be given an automated purchase order or it might be the vendor providing the best match to the original order's requirements. It's all very competitive and we're seeing this gain popularity with companies with orders needing to be filled in seconds instead of hours or days.

Imagine a merged future with all of these approaches fused together in a cacophony of competitive behaviour and reduced time-to-supply. With business process outsourcing coming to the fore, perhaps you’d like your accounts receivable function to be completely removed from your internal business? Are they currently able to reduce the number of debtor days for clients making payment? What if you simply outsourced your invoice data to a range of accounts receivable providers and only paid them if they were able to get your money within some pre-agreed timeframes? They might provide a range of incentives to your customers to encourage them to pay earlier. They might be affiliated with providers of other services that you couldn’t even dream of offering your clients at this point in time and they’d have to be better than every other provider of these services if they were to expect any form of payment. Sound good to you as a business provider? To me, it sounds both fantastic and incredibly scary because you’re also going to have to compete with these businesses in the same competitive environment! The worst of this shows up when the only thing you’re providing is a service based on data because data, in today’s world, has few boundaries. This means that you’re likely to need to compete with people who will work for a lot less money than you will and with little justification on increased price.

I could be way off here however I’m expecting the future of business, particularly data-driven business, to get much, much more competitive than it is now. I know that a lot of people believe in local knowledge and the need for face-to-face contact however with the constant improvement in video conferencing and communications, this seems like a crumbling wall of comfort. The overseas competition is also getting much, much better while we sit here thinking we’re safe in our local markets.