ntouk.com - Jerry Fishenden's technology policy blog

If you haven't already heard of Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) and the way it may displace CRM (Customer Relationship Management), it's worth making the time to learn more. In a sense it's a similar flip in the model of information governance as that provided by Microsoft Healthvault, which puts the user in control of their health information rather than the service provider.

I believe that this is a model whose time has come. And that it will become increasingly adopted as a means of overcoming the issues being seen with the loss and mishandling of personal information, including that related to our identity. This latest development in the digital revolution is all about systems designed on the needs of consumers and citizens, not providers.

Of course, much more thought is yet needed in this area around its potential implications and the way in which private and public sector organisations alike evaluate how much they build in-house as opposed to how much they leverage what already exists in the cloud. For example, would the NHS have commenced a project to build an in-house medical records database if it could instead have exploited patient-centric systems such as Microsoft Healthvault or Google Health? What are the implications for procurement, governance and technical architectures if such a citizen/consumer-driven marketplace model develops in the future?

They seem to me pretty profound questions that deserve coherent answers. I've written many times about the current digital revolution being like the industrial revolution in terms of the fundamental changes it will engineer (and remember that by the end of the industrial revolution one person was able to do work that had required 200 people at the beginning of that revolution). And then remember that we are still at the very beginning of the digital revolution.... Ideas like VRM are one of many key indicators of the way in which we will need to rethink our assumptions about IT systems.

And after all, isn't what VRM offers the manifestation of what a truly citizen-centric model would mean? Up until now we've heard a lot of talk about citizen-centricity, but the VRM model seems to me the first significant attempt to actually deliver it in a meaningful, sustainable way.

Could we see a new market in health, education and other areas that mirrors the market that already exists in financial services? We've long been accustomed to being able to choose where to handle our financial information, one where we are free to swap and change banks whenever we choose. If systems such as Healthvault continue to gain traction, we're going to see that same model applied successfully elsewhere. Will it in the future seem as absurd for health or education to build large scale systems as it would seem if HMRC or HMT assumed it had to build a banking system for itself, rather than let the financial market provide it?

Which leads me to think that the current agenda needs to focus much more on addressing this transformation in governance, and understanding its implications across both public and private sectors.

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