Enterprise Resource Planning for the People

Discussion

Vinay Gupta:

"The production systems of the world run on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, of which SAP and Oracle are probably the two best-known examples. Similar systems exist in the world of finance to manage capital inside of banks, and to allocate resources in private equity firms. This is the software which runs civilization’s arteries and veins, its digestive system and its lungs. It’s the nervous system of industrial capitalism, and without it, we would almost all be destitute.

But these systems are corporate, intimately tied to the Investment and Production phases of society, but only very weakly tied to Consumption and Waste management. They are, essentially, direct descendants of the mainframe paradigm: one big computer that rules the whole organization.

And these systems interoperate only with great reluctance; the world is not run by a big, interwoven, interoperable mesh of big ERP systems seamlessly talking to each-other to make optimal decisions. It’s all still largely stuck in the mainframe phase, on arcane standards that are impossible to parse, and worse to debug. In short, these systems are due for an upgrade. What we need is ERP for the People.

We need smaller, more flexible software systems to help individuals manage the same kinds of tasks that ERP systems handle: physical assets, time, money, commitments and more, as integrated systems. We would all really benefit from having tools that bring the power of knowing what you’ve got, where you have it, what you paid for it, and what it’s worth to somebody else right now. Imagine how much it would change if it was all at our fingertips in a series of dapps which help us optimize our personal relationship with matter itself, mediated by the marketplaces we all participate in, plus new marketplaces for information about the quality, provenance and value of physical objects.

Our working title for this model is Effective Abundance Platforms: platforms which help us manage our relationship to the abundance that industrial capitalism produces, while optimising the hell out of the inefficient capital allocation mechanisms which are represented by error-prone purchasing and reselling behavior among consumers. It’s clean, it’s green, and we think, with Mattereum in the lead, it could be extremely profitable as a new class of businesses." (https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/how-post-industrial-capitalism-and-a-new-type-of-big-data-will-save-the-planet-6574b1d75bf6)