“That was really great television show segment. What commercials have we planned for this time slot?” “I have scheduled an ad for a new hybrid bicycle”, said Billy. “I have the next time slot scheduled for a quick way to get our cars oil changed while I do other things”, said mom. “I can’t wait to see the commercial for that new banquet facility that will provide some information as to where we can hold the senior all night party”, said Jenna. “Well, we have to plan our holiday vacation, so our local travel agent has prepared an introduction to some locations we may be interested in that we can also watch”, said dad. People know that advertising pays for television shows. Why not give them commercials they want to watch? Better yet, why not let them select their own commercials?

Sound like fantasy? To most organizations, sure. To some leading organizations, fantasy is fast becoming reality. Where are you in the Customer Relationship Management Maturity Model (CRM3)? Still at Customer Relationship Management (CRM)? Moved toward Customer Managed Relationships (CMR)? Or are you researching and implementing what it takes to Cooperatively Optimize Relationships (COR)?

Using a cliché, the world is changing and becoming more equal. Yet we find an extremely large number of organizations “stuck” in the concepts of the 1980’s when it comes to CRM. As one example, most data structures that support CRM efforts are based on decade old concepts. In the 1980’s, a megabyte of data storage would cost an organization $700. Today, the price of a megabyte of data storage is .002¢! Data structures of the 1980’s were “optimized” for data storage costs – extreme time and effort was expended to minimize these storage costs, to the determent of flexibility of inquiry. Coupling “ad-hoc” inquiry to “fixed” structures makes inquiry pretty structured and inflexible. Yet most data professionals, to the chagrin of their business associates, are still structuring CRM data based on these decades old modeling techniques, severely inhibiting an organizations ability to analyze this vital resource.

Ask another question, are your analyses costing you more and more time and resources, and providing less and less measurable results? What perceptions or beliefs are your CRM/CMR efforts based on? We now have 6 “generations” that all have different personalities and profiles – the “GI” generation, the “Silent” generation, the “Baby Boom” generation, “Generation X’, the “Millennial” generation (Generation Y), and the “Homebound” generation (Generation Z). Each of these Generations provides us with different degrees of “personal” data, through various means. Are we asking each of these Generations the right questions to get maximum value? What is the definition of a family today compared to the 1950’s? Unfortunately, magic is not a part of most organizations application analysis portfolio. Well, perhaps that’s it! We need to hire more magicians!

What do we do? Well, I would suggest we throw that stuff out and start over. (I will pause as you get up off of the floor.) When I was in engineering school, I learned that I could not “reverse” engineer something that was not “engineered” in the first place. No amount of effort or technology was going to make it happen. As an analogy of the issue, let’s say you have a jar of spaghetti sauce. You know that the spaghetti sauce contains quite a few tomatoes. Now you would like to use those same tomatoes

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