The paradigm of ‘The end of redundancy’ aims towards centralised aggregation points that become hubs of trusted information for all relevant stakeholders. One such obvious aggregation point is the customer. At this stage, there is tremendous redundancy as one and the same individual is captured in all the individual CRM/sales systems of providers of services and products to this individual. However, the world of social media shows us that customers have started to take their personal data in their own hands and start to consolidate their data in dedicated platforms (eg LinkedIn, Facebook). As such, they become the managers of their own data aggregation. It could be imagined, that these platforms convert into large scale providers of customer data.
We see the aggregation of customer data across various service providers already in a number of industries. The most well known example is the movement towards central patient records in the healthcare sector. Here, substantial work across the globe is concentrated on providing trusted platforms that manage and supply patient-related information to private and public sector service providers. The patient becomes the custodian of these data and will be able to control accessibility of these data with no more need for localised data storage.
In a similar way, the aviation industry has started a movement towards more centralised passenger data handling in order to assess related risks, and based on this provide different pathways through ‘checkpoints of the future’.
How long will it take until we will see a central customer record in other industries?