The fight for identity —CRM
The Internet was built without a way to know who and what you are connecting to. Since this essential capability is missing, everyone offering an Internet service has had to come up with a workaround. It is fair to say that today‟s Internet, absent a native identity layer, is based on a patchwork of identity one-offs.
- Kim Cameron
Digital disruption is summed up very nicely in the image above. Assets are a commodity and the UX layer is the thing. Those businesses have built their own identity silo with the task of: aquire, control and capture the customer (with a great user experience). As the two most important assets for any company are their customers and their employees, they will keep their silos.
Can you imagine logging in to Google with your Facebook account? Or to Alibaba with your Amazon account?
It would be very convenient for us users, but for Google or Alibaba the scenario above would not work — they want to own their users in their silo.
What about the smaller companies then — employees and customers are to them as important as to the large ones. If you as a business use Amazon as your store front, do you own your customers? Now that Amazon makes private label items, what if they compete with yours? Worst case is that you pay a commission for sales to your competitor ( Amazon ) and you pay your competitor for advertising to their ( not your ) users within your competitors media ( Amazon ).
What can be done, and especially what are businesses then doing — both to stay independent from the big ones and to make their users enjoy the same convenience as with the BigOnes of the net? What are the drivers for the change? One key driver is EU and GDPR.
Three leading German media and internet companies set up a log in alliance — being able to serve 45 million users and controlling that data stays within a bigger silo. There are other similar alliances coming up. This ends up in even more silos that do not talk to each other.
Not really optimal as a solution for us users. Or is it?
The second part of this blog series will be about Personal Information Management and MyData. The third will be about an alternative approach alltogether :)