When people think about information warfare, the image that comes to mind are hackers, worms, radio jamming, etc. While these do make for good news-worthy topics, the real day-to-day war is done at cash registers and in places as mundane as the checkout line in the grocery store. Let me replace the word war with game to describe in general the framing of some conflict. In this posting, I would like to talk about the game patterns that Alvin Toffler pointed out in his book Powershift published in 1990. If you follow this pattern, you will see how power can shift once a common identifier is introduced and technology is leveraged to change the players advantage. I conclude with the assertion that this shift will happen in the compliance marketplace and again it will be all about the advantage of information superiority.
In order to see this game play out, we have to go back to a period between 1950 and 1980. It was a time when the balance of power had the giant manufacturers on the top and the wholesalers and retailer at the bottom. The giant manufacturers had control of the market information and could claim information superiority. These manufacturers had often over 50% market share and when their sales person came to call on a supermarket, the sales person did all the talking and the supermarket did the listening; they had to listen hard or else.
The giant manufacturers were the experts. It was also a time between the 50s and 80s when mass advertisement was their tool. They controlled the airwaves during America's popular events like the World Series and the Miss America Pageant. The point here is that the giant manufacturers controlled the information going to the consumer and it also controlled the information collected from the customer. When I say that they had information superiority, I simply mean that the manufacturers knew more than any of its retailers about how, when, and to whom its products would sell. It is important to note that they maintained this position by remaining between the retailer and the customer.
Then something happened. In April of 1973, a single standard code was agreed upon by retailers which we now know as the Universal Product Code (UPC) or simply the Bar Code. The committee which brought this weapon to the game had no idea the impact it would have in the shift of power; they were trying to simply solve a problem of long checkout lines and some errors in accounting. With all the products having this unified ID space, computer companies raced to bring to market optical scanners and infrastructure to make use of this bar code. The bar code did much more than just help manage the checkout lines, it transferred power; it shifted the information superiority from the giant manufacturers to the retailers.
Let me stop here and say a little more about information superiority. This does not mean that through the bar code, scanners, and computers, that they just acquired more data; more data does NOT mean information superiority. Information superiority is when the proper synthesis and analysis is done with the data so that you can outwit or maintain just a marginal (knowledge) advantage in the game.
Given this transformation or shift in power, some of the giant manufacturers invested heavily in these analytical tools and proposed to the retailer (still in transition) that it would help them model and analyze their strategy if in turn the store would share the data with them.
Let us recap: lack of common identifiers, vendors having much more domain knowledge than the consumer, very little automation in the consumer's environment, and everyone but the consumer defining the game play. Sound familiar? The consumer must find a way to control the acquisition of that information (re-orient themselves in the game play) and be able to control what information is collected, synthesized, and analyzed. They must achieve information superiority over their vendors and their adversaries.
If this makes any sense to you and you think this transition will help you, email me or post your comment. These identification standards (common ID space like UPC) need to happen and they are not going to happen if we don't make them happen. While those standards are stabilizing, we need to come together on automation. Consumers need multi-vendor automation, not single vendor automation. In closing, this is the information war or game I am most excited about fighting. There is a long road ahead but with the perspective of the consumer, we can all make it through the transformation in a way that there is more value created for everyone.
--tk