Jon Udell in a post today in Wired Cloudline uses a story of his son’s car accident and hospitalization, and the related auto and health insurance issues, to paint a hopeful picture of how a “Personal Cloud” might, sometime in the future, simplify and streamline the flow of documents and bills.
What’s interesting is that instead of the usual ranting about the inefficiencies of various health care providers (doctors, hospitals, rehab clinics) and insurance payers (auto and health, he acknowledges that only he can be the “router” of documents for this single event.
His business relationship with particular providers and payers, combined with the event (an accident and subsequent treatment) makes him the only party uniquely able to be the traffic cop for data flow.
One View of the customer is a laudable business mantra. But a customer often engages with many businesses in the context of what is, from the customer’s point of view, one business process. It’s a decentralized game with many players, and the only referee is the customer. Only we can create the One View that we need. Today we do it the hard way, using phone calls and faxes and piles of papers on our desks, and we do it poorly. I’m hoping our personal clouds will enable us to do it easily and well.
He’s right. There’s no magic way to take these burdens off our shoulders. But the right technology could make it lighter and more efficient.
