Sunday, December 31, 2006

First last post of the old year

On Thusday I wrote,

Somebody suggested to me that VRM is "the opposite of DRM" (Digital Rights Management), rather than (or in addition to) the reciprocal of CRM (Customer Relationship Management). I had never noticed the "RM" coincidence before. It is, indeed, suggestive.

VRM is Vendor Rights as well as Vendor Relationship management. This rights thing should go both ways, no?

Then, on the Project VRM mailing list, somebody asked me to unpack that a bit. I did, then unpacked it some more in my latest IT Garage post, How VRM can help CRM get past DRM. A sample:

DRM excludes even the possibility of a relationship with the customer, beyond that of jailer to prisoner -- because DRM's "solution" is to sell damaged goods to chained customers inside jails the supplier maintains.

The jailer-to-prisoner relationship isn't a stretch for CRM, which too often has a customer containment objective in any case -- though usually with softer walls and longer chains: memberships, discounts, incompatibilities with competitors and so on. So the CRM mentality doesn't have a hard time rationalizing DRM, because it's just a harsher form of the same old thing.

It still needs a lot more unpacking, since we're just at the beginning of whatever VRM will become. And I'd like to leave as much as possible of that to the rest of ya'll.