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Disintermediation: Difference between revisions
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This turned said lush meadow into a [[Tragedy of the commons|tragic]] [[digital commons]].<ref>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''.</ref> {{author|Chris Anderson}}’s [[The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More|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 at once awash with quadrophonic noise. | This turned said lush meadow into a [[Tragedy of the commons|tragic]] [[digital commons]].<ref>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''.</ref> {{author|Chris Anderson}}’s [[The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More|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 at once awash with quadrophonic noise. | ||
The cry went up: “'' | The cry went up: “''Help! Find someone to sort this out for us!''” | ||
And, lo, [[agent]]s were back in style again, | And, lo, [[agent]]s were back in style again, branding themselves now as providers of “[[software as a service]]” and similarly fishy things. | ||
And agents were back in style, too, in [[Financial service|financial services]] though, as Jane Seymour might have put it, it isn’t like they ever truly went out. But now these firms, whose only role on God’s green Earth ''is'' to [[Look, I tried|intermediate]], began desperately to shed their own hideous operational burdens, flexing the very same power that the digital network vouchsafed to giftless amateur musicians: ''to'' ''disintermediate''. | |||
The cry rang out: “Go at once and outsource! Automate! Send the KYC team to Bucharest!” | The cry rang out: “Go at once and outsource! Automate! Send the KYC team to Bucharest!” | ||
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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 consultant]]s, ''more'' [[negotiator]]s, professional advisers, [[internal audit]]ors, procurement specialists, negotiators, [[software as a service]] providers engaged ''implement'' the [[Software as a service|SAAS]] solutions bought in the first wave. | 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 consultant]]s, ''more'' [[negotiator]]s, professional advisers, [[internal audit]]ors, procurement specialists, negotiators, [[software as a service]] providers engaged ''implement'' the [[Software as a service|SAAS]] solutions bought in the first wave. | ||
But unlike | But unlike quotidian forty-something dads with their MacBook home studios and self-published kindle novels, the [[Interdisintermediation|''interdisintermediation'']] of [[Financial service|financial services]] has not been quite the same<ref>On a ''personal'' level, you understand.</ref> roaring success. At least we dads have an MP3 to show for our effort, never mind that no-one will ever listen to it. | ||
Where now are the MP3s of financial services? Where, indeed, are the business change managers who so assiduously costed out of existence that handful of quiet negotiators that were once parked in a corner of the compliance floor, now that they are replaced by | Where now are the MP3s of financial services firms? Where, indeed, are the business change managers who so assiduously costed out of existence that handful of quiet negotiators that were once parked in a corner of the compliance floor, now that they are replaced by a dispersed undertaking spanning three continents, four corporate service providers, an entire IT stack and a permanent operations and procurement infrastructure? | ||
Onto the next project. | Onto the next project — it has something to do with [[distributed ledger technology]], apparently. | ||
{{sa}} | {{sa}} | ||