Disintermediation and You

Disintermediation is a term that we use to describe getting rid of middlemen; bypassing intermediaries.

We see this a lot; it’s a common technology strategy. Think about a business process. What if technology could to simplify the process? Online ordering a book is an example of disintermediation. Doing so, you go directly to Amazon, search a catalog of millions of possibilities, find what you want, buy it, and have it shipped to you. Doing so, you bypassed a lot of intermediaries: the book store, the gas it’d normally take to move around an inventory of books, the trucker it’d normally take to drive the book around. It’s faster, more efficient, more economical.

Disintermediation is everywhere. It’s happening all of the time. Look at anything in the economy that has been shifted to self-service. There’s a lesson to be learned in what you’re seeing.

The first lesson is for producers. Your competitors are constantly learning how to disintermediate and do more with less. In the process of learning, they’re figuring out how to do things better, so they’re making fewer mistakes, too. If you’re not disintermediating, questioning assumptions, and learning, you’re stagnating. So now what?

The second lesson is for employees. Take a critical look around you. What tasks do you perform which can be automated? What business processes are you responsible for at work that couldn’t be disintermediated? What are you expecting – as a consumer – from other businesses? Are there similarities between your expectations and others? What’s to keep your boss from disintermediating you? So now what?

As a producer, tomorrow you might wake up and somebody’s learned how to do your work better, faster, and smarter.

As an employee, tomorrow you might wake up and your job is gone.

And I’m a betting man. I’m willing to bet you that disintermediation will be both continuing and essential in this economy of doing more with less. It’s something that you should leverage; it’s something you should be aware of so you can prepare yourself.

Producer or employee: what’s your disintermediation strategy going to be?

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