Tag: Oracle OpenWorld

At last, a protocol to connect VRM and CRM

August 18, 2016 / / 0 Comments

person-entity

We’ve been waiting a long time for a protocol to connect VRM (customers’ Vendor Relationship Management) with CRM (vendors’ Customer Relationship Management).

Now we have one. It’s called JLINC, and it’s from JLINC Labs. It’s also open source. You’ll find it at Github, here. It’s still early, at v.0.3. So there’s lots of opportunity for developers and constructive hackers of all kinds to get involved.

Specifically, JLINC is a protocol for sharing data protected by the terms under which it is shared, such as those under development by Customer Commons and the Consent and Information Sharing Working Group (CISWG) at Kantara.

The sharing instance is permanently recorded in a distributed ledger (such as a blockchain) so that both sharer and recipient have a permanent record of what was agreed to. Additionally, both parties can build up an aggregated view of their information sharing over time, so they (or their systems) can learn from and optimize it.

The central concept in JLINC is an Information Sharing Agreement (ISA). This allows for—

  1. the schema related to the data being shared so that the data can be understood by the recipient without prior agreement
  2. the terms associated with the data being shared so that they can be understood by the recipient without prior negotiation
  3. the sharing instance, and any subsequent onward sharing under the same terms, to be permanently recorded on a distributed ledger of subsequent use (compliance and analytics)

To test and demonstrate how this works, JLINC built a demonstrator to bring these three scenarios to life. The first one tackled is Intentcasting , a long-awaited promise of VRM. With an Intencast, the customer advertises her intention to buy something, essentially becoming a qualified lead. (Here are all the ProjectVRM blog posts here with the Intentcasting tag.)

Obviously, the customer can’t blab her buying intention out to the whole world, or marketers would swarm her like flies, suck up her exposed data, spam her with offers, and sell or give away her data to countless other parties.

With JLINC, intention data is made available only when the customer’s terms are signed. Those terms specify permitted uses. Here is one such set (written for site visiting, rather than intentcasting):

UserSubmittedTerms2ndDraft

These say the person’s (first party’s) data is being shared exclusively with the second party (the site), for no limit in time, for the site’s use only, provided the site also obey the customer’s Do Not Track signal. I’m showing it because it lays out one way terms can work in a familiar setting

For JLINC’s intentcasting demonstration, terms were limited to second party use only, and a duration of thirty days. But here’s the important part: the intentcast spoke to a Salesforce CRM system, which was able to—

  1. accept or reject the terms, and
  2. respond to the intentcast with an offer,
  3. while the handshake between the two was recorded in a blockchain both parties could access

This means that JLINC is not only a working protocol, but that there are ways for VRM tools and systems to use JLINC to engage CRM systems. It also means there are countless new development opportunities on both sides, working together or separately.

Here’s another cool thing:  the two biggest CRM companies, Salesforce and Oracle, will hold their big annual gatherings in the next few weeks. This means JLINC and VRM+CRM can be the subjects of both conversation and hacking at either or both events. Specifically, here are the dates:

  1. Oracle’s OpenWorld 2016 will be September 18-22.
  2. Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2016  will be October 4-7.

Both will be at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Conveniently, the next VRM Day and IIW will both also happen, as usual, at the end of October:

  1. VRM Day will be October 24.
  2. Internet Identity Workshop (IIW’s XXIIIth) will be October 25-27.

Both will take place at the Computer History Museum, in downtown Silicon Valley. And JLINC, which was launched at the last VRM Day, is sure to be a main topic of discussion, starting at VRM Day and continuing through IIW, which I consider the most leveraged conference in the world, especially for the price.

If all goes well, we’ll have some examples of VRM+(Oracle and/or Salesforce) CRM to show off at Demo Day at IIW.

Love to see other CRM vendors show up too. You listening, SugarCRM? (I spoke about VRM+CRM at SugarCon in 2011. Here’s my deck from that talk. What we lacked then, and since, was a protocol for that “+”. Now we have it. )

Big HT to Iain Henderson of both JLINC Labs and Customer Commons, for guiding this post, as well as conducting the test that showed, hey, it can be done!

 

 

 

 

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VRM+CRM at IIW

October 7, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Four years and a few months ago, CRM Magazine devoted much of its May issue to VRM.not_iball1 That’s the cover there on the right. It was way ahead of its time. Same goes for ProjectVRM, which started four years earlier.

Now things are starting to shift.

I’ve heard encouraging reports from friends who went to Oracle OpenWorld last month and are headed to Salesforce‘s Dreamforce  next week. They tell me it is now becoming apparent to CRM that it needs a hand to shake on the customer side that’s not a captive one. Specifically —

  • That customers need scale across the many companies they deal with, just as companies need scale across the many customers they deal with. So, for example…
  • A customer should to be able to change his or her address (plus other form fields) for every company they deal with in one move, rather than one at a time within each company’s separate CRM system.
  • A customer should be able to intentcast as a qualified lead, safely and (at least at first) anonymously, outside of any one company’s captive marketplace.
  • An individual’s sovereign identity matters more to them — and to the marketplace — than any administrative identities conferred by companies or governments.
  • The negative externalities of unwelcome surveillance tend to outweigh whatever positive internalities the practice provides.
  • Co-creating the customer experience is better than having one side in charge of the whole thing — especially when the customer has few ways to bring consistency to her experience with many different companies.
  • Customers should have clouds of their own (aka personal clouds, stores, vaults, PIMS), and not just those of silo’d services.
  • Customers need ways to express their own policies, preferences, terms and conditions, and not be forced all the time to accept those provided by sellers — and that mutually agreeable terms will be far better than the one-sided (and in many cases unenforceable) ones nobody reads because there’s no point to it.
  • There is far more leverage on customer retention in the “own cycle” than in the “buy cycle” of the customer experience.

Speaking of which, here’s how that cycle looks, thanks to Esteban Kolsky, who drew the original: oracle-twist

There are now many dozens of developers in or near the VRM space that can be helpful for CRM as well.

Given all the action that’s going on, it would be way cool if we can get players on both sides together in one room to talk and whiteboard our way onto common ground and build new and better stuff there.

So we’re in luck, because that’s what we have with VRM Day and IIW, both at the Computer History Museum in downtown Silicon Valley (101 and Shoreline Road in Mountain View), on the last week of this month.

  • VRM Day is Monday, October 27.
  • IIW (Internet Identity Workshop) is Tuesday to Thursday, October 28-30.

The two go together. VRM Day is located and timed to lead in to IIW. The topics are ones we’ll want to be working on for the next three days — and beyond.

IIW is an unconference. There are no speakers or panels. All the topics are vetted by participants, who lead discussions and push topics forward in breakout rooms. It’s designed that way so stuff gets done and not only talked about.

While the original focus was (and remains) identity, the workshop is open to anything. High on the list of topics that get worked on, every time, are VRM ones like those listed above.

VRM Day and IIW will provide an ideal week for anybody who wants CRM to truly engage customers to get together and help make that happen.

VRM developers need to know more about how to connect with and help CRM systems and related ones, such as sCRM (social CRM), Customer Experience Management and call centers.

CRM developers need to know more about how to connect with and help VRM developers.

And, since everybody with a wallet is also a customer, that character will be well-represented too.

So I encourage everybody involved in CRM or VRM to come to VRM Day and IIW — with a special shout-out to Oracle, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, IBM, Salesforce and SugarCRM. We need you there. And so do you. 🙂

It’s time to make good on the promise we’ve seen coming for way too long.

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