CRM Magazine has a very nice article about Vendor Relationship Management.

Titled, “It’s Not Your Relationship To Manage”, it has plenty of quotes from Doc Searls and the VRM community. Not a hint of critizism that I can spot in a CRM magazine?

VRM has come a long way. Congrats Doc!

Or should have said “spot the similarities”?

Today, two pieces of news came in right after each other:

• The US Federal Government’s Beacon Community Program has been given $235 million of taxpayer money for “… interoperable health IT and standards-based information exchange within and among providers, hospitals, and populations” “within 15 diverse communities throughout the United States” (see announcement).
• Also, Yahoo announced that they will “deeply integrate” their properties with Facebook’s in order to “provide one place for people to access information and stay in touch with the people they care about most” for their user base of “500 million” (see announcement). No money will change hands as far as I can tell.

Here are the questions:

• How come it needs $235 million of taxpayer money for a mere 17 communities to make some (limited) amount of progress on exchanging data, if Yahoo and Facebook can roll out these kinds of integrations for more people than there live in the US on their own dime?
• How come the $2 trillion+ healthcare industry does not do these kinds of strategic projects on their own? Nobody could reasonably argue the business case in healthcare (save percentage of the $2 trillion) is smaller than Yahoo’s and Facebook’s (a percentage of their revenue, which is in the $10 billion ballpark).

The detractors will say: these things are not comparable, and the announcements have nothing to do with each other. And go back and lobby for more government handouts right after, I presume.

Having worked both in a web 2.0 kind of information interchange environment (e.g. OpenID and friends, in recent years) and a healthcare and “deep semantics” environment (e.g. via our InfoGrid project, for a long time), I beg to differ. Most of the technical hurdles are the same, most of the organizational hurdles are, and while healthcare cares more about security, the web 2.0 world cares more about real-time data exchange, for example. On balance, a wash.

So here’s the challenge to the government that is spearheading health IT, for better or worse (and I am planning to submit this as a comment to Dr. Blumenthal’s blog as soon as I have it up here):

I assume we all agree that an environment in which leading-edge companies innovate on their own to the benefit of their customers is better than one in which the government has to spend large amounts of money to drag along kicking and screaming “participants” — as it is so common in health IT. How do we turn US healthcare IT from the latter to the former?

Or, to put it differently: what is the administration doing so the next Mark Zuckerberg starts a “Healthbook” instead of a “Facebook” and revolutionizes, with the corresponding benefits for everybody, healthcare IT instead of social networking? If the $235 million were spent on that question, now that’d be something!

The list of brand-name OpenID adopters speaks for itself, with — by some counts — now more than 1 billion functional OpenIDs on the open internet, but for the internet identity movement this quote from Kim Cameron, Microsoft’s Chief Identity Architect, is rather significant:

In the last year, OpenID has without doubt become the most widely adopted system for reusable internet identity.  Adoption by destination sites continues to grow dramatically: approximately 50,000 sites as of July 1, 2009.  The big Internet properties like Google, Yahoo, AOL, MySpace, and Windows Live have become (or are becoming) OpenID Providers.   As a result, the vast majority of the online US population has an account that can be used to log in at the growing number of destination sites.

What a little URL could do …

Alexander van Elsas left a comment on my post “On Identity Business Models or Lack Thereof” that I feel I have to respond to. It is not the first time I have heard a comment along these lines, so this is more a response to “everybody”, not specifically just to him. He writes:

…The underlying issue (imo) is that there isn’t a user demand. Users either don’t know or care, and it is therefore hard to get them to use a standalone hosted identity provider and pay for it.

…The technology is not the biggest bottleneck right now, it’s the naiveness of the user.

Pardon me, but this very much sounds like the old “our software is great, if it wasn’t for those darned users”. To which the equally old, and always-correct answer is: “No, the user is never the problem. As vendors, we either solve a problem for our users, in which case they pay us, or we don’t. If users don’t use our ’solution’, we either don’t solve an actual problem, or we don’t explain well enough how we solve the problem, or our solution is simply not good enough for the user.”

At this point, it is very clear that consumer identity providers do not solve a problem for users that is commensurate with paying money. (I would go further and say that the product category “consumer identity provider” is most likely never going to be able to get many users paying for it.)

To quote Pip Coburn: “People are only willing to change when the pain of their current situation outweighs the perceived pain of trying something new.” We are not there yet in identity land, even if we’d all like to be there.

Nico Popp, over at VeriSign, has an interesting post outlining how he thinks the US federal government will adopt OpenID:

… there is a clear view that the deployment of low level assurance identities is only a critical first step, not an end in itself. With the initial OpenID pilot, the administration is seeking to teach Internet users how to conveniently and confidently re-use their identities across multiple sites. Federation is a new behavior and as such, it requires training. Federal and State web sites will provide an important training ground of relying parties. … once consumers are comfortable using distributed identities, it becomes possible to alter the login experience by introducing stronger security and identity assurance. This is the ultimate end game since high assurance identity services are pre-conditions to new strategic initiatives.

He reports that there is broad understanding that identity management along the lines of OpenID is critical for many other initiatives, including health care:

To counter balance the $900B expense that the new Obama plan calls for, electronic health records must come to reality. However, eHealth requires access control across a large and complex ecosystem. Users must be able to register, login and access private data across physicians, hospital, pharmacies, labs, insurance, and employers Web sites.

And, I may add, it is clear that having separate usernames and passwords for each one of them is a non-starter. The fact that both Google and Microsoft are OpenID supporters and offer electronic health record-like software as a service could act as a very useful jolt to the health technology vendor cabal, too.

Interesting to see how this will shake out …