Kuppinger Cole, an analyst firm headquartered in Germany, has been hip to VRM for a long time.
They gave ProjectVRM an award (that’s it there on the right) at the EIC (European Identity Conference) in 2008, and have been following VRM developments closely ever since. A number of VRM developers were there again at this year’s EIC, where I gave a keynote titled “Free Customers: The New Platform”, and the topic was front and center.
In fact VRM has always been about more than relating to vendors, which is another thing Kuppinger Cole has believed as well. It’s been about personal empowerment, and better means for dealing with all kinds of organizations. There are also many more VRM developers now than there were back then, with many different labels for what they do. We have personal data stores, lockers, vaults, clouds, services and networks, for example. We also have and much activity in overlapping and adjacent development areas, such as with quantified self work, which includes self-hacking, personal informatics, self-tracking and much more.
Martin Kuppinger now throws a loop around all of these with Life Management Platforms, which is also the subject of his paper here. I like the term, and think it does a good job of encompassing both the internal (self-managing) and external (relating with others) sides of VRM.
Martin’s latest post is Intention and Attention – how Life Management Platforms can improve Marketing, in which he notes the main thrust of The Intention Economy, and adds,
Taking this view, the one of Doc Searls, and the idea of Life Management Platforms the way we at KuppingerCole have it in mind shows that this is where things become really interesting: A Life Management Platforms allows expressing your Intention. The Intention is nothing other than a vital part of where your current Attention is focused. In other words: Knowing the Intention is about knowing at least an important part of the current Attention, which is much better than trying to change the Attention. Furthermore, Life Management Platforms could provide more information about the current Attention in real-time, but in a controlled way – controlled by the individual. That allows getting even more targeted information and makes this concept extremely attractive for everybody – the vendors and the individuals.
Control by the individual is what VRM has been about since the start. What I’d like to know now is how Life Management Platforms sits with VRM developers, and others who have been following or involved with VRM from the start.
I like the idea of “life management platforms” but think it may be better implemented as “life management apps” as in Marcel’s QIY system. In my mind the main difference between a platform and an app is that the app does not store the data that is pertinent to the intention of the person. This data consists of previous choices a person has made and that information is already stored in other databases. Information about intent can be stored in a personal data store or more likely it is inferred from previous actions. By going the “apps” route it is necessary for the person to be able to electronically access their previous transactions held in other data stores. From the point of view of privacy the last thing we want is multiple copies of our data spread around the internet (and that includes copies of data in personal data stores). The interesting point about a person being able to access their own transactions held in data stores is that this is already a right in most countries – this right is rarely taken up unless it is in the holder of the data interest to do so.
The Intention Economy will be an emergent property of the system when our rights as individuals to know what others store about us is implemented electronically on demand and is not an option for the holder of personal data.