Disintermediation
The very promise of the digital revolution. A distributed network whose design cleaves to the end-to-end principle promises its users the ability, never before possessed, to reach one’s clients, friends, relations, countrymen, lovers, fighters, haters — in short, anyone — costlessly.
|
Suddenly, a generation of aspiring novelists could publish their bildungsromane direct into the colossal, cruel teeth of a world suddenly drowning in the sodding things, without the reality-dosing filter of a publisher to save them from those wasted, sequestered months. From nowhere middle-aged men could atone for the profligacy with which they wasted their own productive years by composing, recording, mixing, master and distributing their own dreary pop songs to the studied indifference of every soul on this barren crag of rock, including their own immediate families, not that they’re bitter or anything,[1] and have them at least sound like real pop music. Suddenly, maverick reality TV hosts could hot-wire their self-absorbed political aspirations into the consciousness of a nation, unfiltered by the agency of advertising, or the mediation of a traditional political party.
This was, for those at the wrong end of the agency problem — a class of people generally called “clients” —a moment of beatific liberation, until it became clear that the same barrier whose collapse allowed them into this lush meadow of direct market access allowed every other bastard in too. This turned said lush meadow into a tragic digital commons.[2] Chris Anderson’s long tail of hopeful aspiration — a supply for every demand; a demand for any supply! — morphed into a ghoulish chem-trail of worthless pap that no-one wanted to buy. The world was awash in quadrophonic noise.
Agents were suddenly back in style again, only now branding themselves as “software as a service” and similarly unintuitive things. In financial services, as Jane Seymour might have put it, they never went out.
But now financial services firms, whose only role on God’s green earth is to intermediate, desperately trying to reduce their own hideous operational burden by flexing that very same power that the digital network offered to amateur musicians: to disintermediate. Outsource! Automate! Send our KYC team to Bucharest!
But, sir, how shall we disintermediate?
And, lo, businesses sprung from the fertile soil of that lush meadow, to intermediate the disintermediation. Legal process outsourcers; management consultants, providers of software as a service, and then a second wave of intermediating specialisms to police the first one: more management consultants, more negotiators, professional advisers, internal auditors, procurement specialists, negotiators, software as a service providers engaged implement the SAAS solutions bought in the first wave.
But where now are the business change managers who so assiduously costed the handful of negotiators that were once parked in a corner of the compliance floor by way of justification for the business plan to outsource them?
See also
References
- ↑ I refer to none other than Dangerboy, of course.
- ↑ There wasn’t meant to be any “tragedy” in the digital commons, of course. But it turns out the scarce resource is not supply-side bandwidth — the good people at Amazon Web Services have got our backs on that — but demand-side attention and money.