"Thing" Relationship Management

With consumers as the beneficiary, are we willing to let "things" takeover?

My current research led me down a path injected a concept into my brain, Thing Relationship Management (TRM). Unfortunately, Paul Lopez beat me to the punch when he wrote a brief abstract on it about 5 years ago. Oh well, I’m a little slow. However, there has been some discussion on “Anything” Relationship Management. In fact, Microsoft leveraged the term when they came up with xRM; which basically meant their platform supported more business capabilities than just sales and marketing.

But that has little to do with some of the concepts we’ll be faced with very soon:

• Industry 4.0 (The Fourth Industrial Revolution)

• The Internet “4” Things

• The Coordination Age

All of these predict that things must ultimately become more autonomous in order to make the world run better - faster, more efficient use of resources, less waste, less burden on people. In this world, consumers are doing fewer traditional jobs since many of the consumption chain jobs in their lives will be automated, and orchestra…