Saving money and time by reducing intermediaries (Economical)

Description

With the existing brokers today, it has become inefficient to share data via the internet. It costs time and money. Reducing unnecessary intermediaries, by redesigning the processes and analyzing the cheapest way, will only lead to more efficiency and thereby more effectiveness. In this way, intellectual property could help, by providing direct communication.

Enablers

1) The need for communication and information
Because there is a need to communicate information, there will always be sharing of information. The best way to achive this, is by communicating as efficient as possible without spending too much time.

2) The open standards
The availability of open standards already reduces intermediaries. This is an example of how to reduce them. Because it is available and free to all, everyone can use this standard to share data in the same way. Hereby, intermediaries are unnecessary.

3) Technology
The technology is already existing to support intermediaries, so the technology is sufficient enough to deal with information sharing without the intermediaries.

Inhibitors

1) Increased demand for privacy and security
Because people sometimes demand their privacy being protected, they require a intermediary to take care of this protection. So others can not directly access their personal information.

2) Piracy
The piracy problem has a lot of negative influences. For the same reason as protecting your property as described above, intermediaries could play a part in securing the main information.

3) Costs savings
On the other hand, intermediaries are also often assigned to reduce time and money. For example when there is an overload of information to process and structure. In these cases it is the aim to redesign the process of information flow and check whether it is the best way.

Paradigm

The threshold to communicate is reduced and people will feel more freely to communicate directly to the other party. As a result, there will be less mis-communication.
Others will feel this reducing of intermediaries is only time consuming, because they rather want to outsource the communication. Intermediaries are sometimes used to reduce costs and time. In these cases, it is not applicable to remove them. Of course, reduction is possible, but then the aim is to make it more effective and efficient.

Experts

Proffessor Benjamin Friedman
Office Address: Department of Economics, Littauer 127
Contact Information
Tel: 617-495-4246
Fax: 617-495-7730
Email: bfriedman@harvard.edu

http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/friedman/friedman.html
http://www.greenstar.org/pressroom/lunarsociety.htm

Timing

This action has occurred as the phenomenon of disintermediation already [1] in a world where EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) has become more important.

Web resources

[1] http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~bakos/roles-of-elec-interm.pdf
[2] http://www.subscription-agents.org/