Tag: oracle

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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If your voice comes from a company, you don’t have one

June 30, 2015 / / 1 Comment

Got this in my email today:

Oracle pitch

I’m sure Oracle Service Cloud is good at what it does. Such as:

  • Deliver an integrated customer experience while equipping employees with the right tools
  • Drive and meet consumer expectations in the new omni-channel world
  • Adapt their service to customer needs by researching and considering their demographics

The problem is that this assumes customers have no voices of their own, and need to be given one. And, since every company has its own way to give customers voices, the customer turns into a Tower of Babble, speaking with many different voices to many different companies.

For example, today at a medical center I had to give exactly the same personal information to two different systems operating in the same office — and this was information already known to countless other systems with which I’ve had dealings over the years. Why? “Because we’re using two different CRM systems.”

You can look at the problem here as one of scale. Systems such as Oracle’s give companies scale: one way to deal with many different customers. Likewise, customers need one way to deal with many different companies, regardless of what CRM systems they run. This is a fundamental VRM challenge. And it’s one that should be good for CRM too. Win-Win.

You can see how it would work if you imagine being able to  change your phone number or email address, for every company you deal with, in one move. Lots of VRM developers are working on that, but we aren’t there yet.

It helps that we already have the Internet, which bridges many networks (why it’s called internet), along with email, phones and other things that give us one way to deal with many different entities.

But we don’t yet have voices of our own (meaning scale), or we wouldn’t see headlines like the one above.

Giving our voices scale isn’t a CRM job. It’s a VRM job. It also has to be done in a way that speaks directly to the Oracle Service Clouds of the world, engaging what they already have in place.

I know people at Oracle and its competitors who are ready and eager to see VRM developments that speak — literally and figuratively — to their corporate systems. They know VRM is going to make their jobs a lot easier and cause a lot more business to happen and improve.

Conversations are happening, and that’s good. But we also need more development in the direction of convergence. Expect to see reports on that in coming months.

VRM + CRM

July 28, 2010 / / 0 Comments

We’ve reached the point where VRM and CRM developers are ready to talk.

There is a lot of CRM-facing development going on in the VRM community. A number of both commercial and non-commercial projects on this list are involved, and some are far enough downstream that folks in both communities need to show what they’re working on, sit down and talk.

Some of this is already happening. More will happen next week in New York. And more will happen in some other gatherings that are in the works. Stay tuned for those.

I think that will help answer some of the questions that have been coming up — partly as a result of what I’ve been writing here, and especially after CRM Magazine’s May Issue, Julian Gay’s Beyond Social CRM post, Ewe Hook’s Edison, Insull and planning for the future of VRM and Mitch Lieberman’s VRM Who Has the Relationship Repsonsibility Anyway?, in CRM Ousiders. Martin Schneider’s follow-up, Remember, No One “Owns” a Relationship aligns exactly with what I wrote in Cooperation vs. Coercion and in R-buttons and the open marketplace. As I said there,

Markets, in both their literal and metaphorical meanings, are middle grounds. They are places where we are selectively open to society, and especially to sellers — and where they are open to us. One way to represent that is to turn our silos on their sides and open them up, so we each have a representation of containment, but also of openness, and even of attraction. So, instead of having silos, we have magnets, like this:

You are on the left. The seller is on the right. And the market is in the middle.

The VRM community is working on building this out. (As we said above, the CRM community has begun to join the effort as well.) We are doing this by creating ways of relating in which both sides are open to the other, but neither contains the other. The two can have attractions toward each other, but engagement is optional. Think of the result as a market that’s far more free than the your-choice-of-silo model.

This also realates to Larry Augustin‘s Some Thoughts on Open post. Larry runs SugarCRM. Larry and I go way back to the 90s, when he started VA Linux and I was still a rookie editor for Linux Journal. Even at a distance we’ve been manning the same barricades for the duration. (Much of the time explaining the same things over and over again. Right, Larry? 🙂

I’m also know people at SalesForce.com, including Marc Benioff and especially my old buddy Steve Gillmor (for whom I can’t find a link currently, so here’s his latest Gillmor Gang, which I was on). Plus people at SAP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. (Though in some cases not in their CRM divisions.) I’m looking forward to seeing and talking to many of those folks (and more) over the coming weeks and months. More importantly, I’m looking forward to VRM developers other than myself meeting with their counterparts on the CRM side. And with customers and users of CRM software and services.

Meanwhile I’m looking for ways that ordinary users — that’s all of us — can become more aware and mindful of the good work that folks in the CRM community are trying to do. I’m talking here about the work that doesn’t just try to “capture,” “acquire,” “own,” “lock in” or otherwise “manage” us as if we were slaves or cattle. This customer-respecting work is at the leading edge of the CRM world. Respectable customers are at the leading edge of the VRM world. The twain should meet.

I should add that there is much happening in VRM that isn’t CRM facing as well. But for the next few weeks, the focus for many of us will be on reaching across and building out the new common ground between VRM and CRM. That ground is the marketplace, and in many ways it’s still virgin and unspoiled territory.

What’s completely screwed about this picture

January 21, 2009 / / 16 Comments

So I got an email today from Forbes, with the subject “You are Important to Us”. It says this:

Dear Subscriber:

Forbes values you as a customer and your opinions are very important to us.  We are conducting a study and would like to include your opinions.

The survey will take about 10 minutes to complete and we think you’ll find it interesting and enjoyable. Your responses will be used for research purposes only and will be held in the strictest confidence.

Simply click on the link below to visit our survey.

Click here to take the survey [The link goes to a long address that begins http://forbes.puresendmail.com/print.]

Again, we thank you so much for participation.

Sincerely,

Bruce Rogers, Chief Brand Officer – Forbes

You are receiving this email because you registered at Forbes.com LLC. and signed up to receive third party emails To manage your preferences or change your delivery address, please click here.

You may also email your opt-out request to privacy@forbes.net or send your request in the mail directly to:

Forbes.com LLC

Attn: Privacy Administrator
90 5th Ave. 6th Floor
New York, NY 10011

To review our privacy policy click here.

Copyright 2008 Forbes.com LLC TM

I thought, “Hey, I’m busy, but I like Forbes, and I’m inclined to cooperate, even if I hate most surveys and would rather relate to Forbes in a less one-sided and impersonal way. So I punched on “Click here to take the survey”.

The first step was one that asked me what my title was. I have several, but none of them are from the lexicon of corporate hierarchies. So, next to “other” I wrote “fellow”. Because that’s what I am, here at the Berkman Center. (I’m also Senior Editor of Linux Journal and President of my own small company, but I went with “fellow” because I get Forbes where I live near Berkman and not at my home office in California.)

The first survey page told me the thing would take about ten minutes. That’s a lot, but I thought, “Okay, I’m still game. Let’s see how fast we can make this.”

It was over in one second. Or however long it took for the survey server to send me to a page with the title “Thank You – InsightExpress.com”. Its entire contents were this:

Return to Your Originating Web Page

I hit the back button and it went nowhere. Then I clicked on the address in the email. That timed out. So did I.

This is the point at which one might be tempted to write to Bruce Rogers or the nameless  Privacy Administrator, but Forbes has gone out of its way here to avoid human contact (no email address for Bruce, a surface mail address for ATT:Privacy Administrator — both of which scream “WE ARE AVOIDING YOU. PLEASE COOPERATE.) But that would be weak and supplicating, and I have no interest in being either. I’d rather be the good Forbes subscriber that I’ve been for years and attempt to make constructive human contact instead.

I’ll do that three ways. First is with the headline above, plus links and other bait that might get the attention of Bruce Rogers or one of his factota. [Note: I posted this at 1:12pm, and Bruce responded personally at 1:56. Well done!] Second is with an email to some folks I know at Forbes. Third, and most importantly, I’ll try to explain the VRM angle on this.

VRM is Vendor Relationship Management. It’s how customers manage relationships with vendors. (Or with other individuals, or with organizations of any kind — such as churches or governments.)

Most vendors are familiar with CRM, for Customer Relationship Management. I can’t tell if a CRM system was involved in this little exchange, but a failure of this kind is certainly within the scope of CRM’s concerns. (To visit those, check out the CRM sites for SAP, Oracle, SalesForce, Amdocs and Microsoft, which are the top four companies in an $8+ billion business.)

Right now VRM is a $0 billion business. But in the long run it’ll be big, and it’ll improve the CRM business along with it, because it’ll give CRM something more substantial than mailing addresses to relate to.

A number of development communities are working on VRM solutions right now, but rather than talk about those I’ll just say what I’d like here. Not from Forbes, but from VRM developers. If Forbes or any CRM companies want to help with that, cool.

I would like a simple dashboard that tells me what I’m subscribed to and what I’m not — both for print publications such as Forbes and for email subscriptions of every kind. I would like to have global preferences that would govern how I relate to each of those publishers, and how they relate to me. For example, I would like to throw a switch that says “No” to all third party mailings, both to my font door and to my email addresses. When I establish a relationship with a new publisher, or publication, or supplier of any kind, I would like them all to know, as a matter of policy, that I don’t want them to waste their time, money and server cycles by sending me junk mail of any kind. And that I don’t appreciate having my own bandwidth, cycles, disk space, rods, cones and time wasted dealing with any of it. I might give a global or selective thumbs up to surveys, provided I also have a standard way to send error messages and other feedback to survey sources.

On the positive side, I would also like to open conduits through which productive interaction could take place with the publishers, authors and circulation officials whose “content” I pay to get. (And even those that I don’t pay.) I would like a simple, straightforward, universally understandable way to do this, across all “content providers”, so I don’t have to relate only inside each provider’s silo. (By the way, we’re already working on change-of-address, to pick just one subcategory of subscriber-publisher interaction that can be a pain in the butt for everybody. That last link is a working draft, by the way. More work is happening off-wiki.)

That’s just one part of what we’re doing at ProjectVRM. But it’s one I’d like the “content providers” and CRM folks out there to know about. Because it’s going to happen anyway, and I’d suggest getting interested, and perhaps also involved, sooner rather than later.

VRM in 2009

January 3, 2009 / / 0 Comments

This blog is #19 and Chris Carfi’s Social Customer Manifesto is #7 on Chris Bucholtz’s Best CRM Blogs of 2008, at Inside CRM. About this blog, Chris wrote,

The bumpy economy has perhaps been unkind to forward-looking philosophies like vendor relationship management, but that has not curtailed Searls’ explorations of what will be when the business world finally understands that the customer is now running the show. He makes a convincing argument that companies are leaving dollars on the table already by refusing to admit that this is a consumer-driven world. As Searls wrote, “I’d rather have ‘-driven’ than ‘-centric.’ Because being ‘-centric’ doesn’t require you to relate. Being driven does.”

I never thought about this as a CRM blog, but to the degree that CRM and VRM will work together, it makes sense.

It will be interesting to see which CRM companies realize that customers are driving with VRM. Some are already waiting to see VRM tools show up in customer hands. At a recent ProjectVRM committee meeting, one of the attendees from a CRM company reported that the top honcho at his outfit said “Whoever wins at VRM wins at CRM.” That’s good to hear. VRM will give CRM much more to engage with.

Anyway, Larry Dignan seconds Paul Greenberg’s expectation that 2009 will be VRM’s breakout year. He adds this:

Simply put, a VRM tool would be something customers use to relate and manage multiple vendors. Greenberg thinks that 2009 will be the year in which VRM becomes more than just a concept. What’s ironic is that vendors that have the most tentacles into companies (Oracle, for instance) may become players. Just imagine the following: here’s a VRM tool from a big vendor so you can better manage it.

Well, if the tool only helps you manage one vendor, it’s not a VRM tool. But the irony risk is not small. That’s why I’m still not eager to promote VRM before we have working code and ways of demonstrating how VRM tools make you both independent of vendors and better able to engage with them.

May the best customers win.

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