CRM - Designed by Everyman?

A current trend in design is the idea of "Everyman the Designer". Design isn't something that designers do for people or to people it is something that they do with people. 

So what could this mean for CRM. Well CRM has been driven by the increasing powerful Voice of Customer which has focused minds on the way that products and services are experienced. However the rise of Everyman the Designer may have an even more fundamental impact

I think what we are talking about is businesses becoming "Open Source" in the same way that IT has.

What do I mean by that. Businesses will provide the infrastructure and resources but the inspiration, ideation for the products and services along with the way that they are experienced will come from their clients. Companies will compete not on the basis of the products and services they provide, but how efficient they are in providing the infrastructure to support the vision of their clients.

If that is the case what impact would this have on CRM as an approach to business?

Well to be effective it would need to provide some way to support the ideation process - convergence of all the divergent visions of its clients. May be that would mean crowd sourcing rather than Open Source. CRM might need to manage an ecology of ideas which are fed back to its clients for their selection with only the fittest surviving.

Of course not everyone will be designing products and services because they wont have time, the interest or frankly the capacity. What I suspect will happen, however, is something similar to Linux or Mozilla. Communities of expert interest groups will grow up outside the Companies themselves who will develop an understanding of the companies business processes which would have to be open to them.

This collaboration and openness may be where CRM could be heading in the future. How to link the clients with each area of the business so that they can work with the logistics, production and other process effectively but in a much more open and immediate way than we have now. That could for example even mean CRM providing an interface between the designer client community  and the ERP system used to automate these areas.

Of course something similar to this is what Mass Customisation is all about and is already practiced by BMW, Dell and others. But what if there was a car plant that provided the infrastructure while a community of enthusiasts developed the car itself? What if they could collaborate with a high tec plant to design and deliver chips to go into the computers that are used in the Dell computers they order.

Lots of issues I know like compliance and testing - but may be these would be automated constraints managed through the CRM system as part of black boxing the component processes the designer client would have access to?