Straight-Through Processing 2

A couple of good posts on disintermediation ...

• Prosciutto Business Models, by Martin Geddes (Telepocalypse)
• Are On-line Retailers an Endangered Species, by Bill Burnham (Burnham's Beat)
  

... prompt me to post an expansion on my previous post: Straight-Through Processing (Feb 2005)

(thanks to Stefan Tilkov for kind remarks)

Straight-through processing (STP) generally makes the following assumptions:

• There is a collaboration between several service providers
• The purpose of the collaboration is to expedite some customer transaction
• The service providers have a common view of this transaction
  
• The customer transaction belongs within some domain, in which all the service providers participate.

The concept of STP is especially popular in the financial sector.

• Web Services and Straight-Through Processing, Gunjan Samtani and Dimple Sadhwani (Web Services Architect, June 2002)
• Straight-Through Processing and Orchestration of Web Services, Gunjan Samtani and Doron Sherman (Web Services Journal, November 2002)

But in my view, STP is a strategic error, because it invites disintermediation.

From this perspective, mediation and reintermediation can look pretty naive. For example, here's a blog posting by Luke (April 2005), who is planning to bundle and brand online services from UPS, USPS, FedEx, and DHL together in a single interface. What possible value-add is he offering? Er, federated identity? How is he going to create a serious brand? I wish him well, but he's got an uphill struggle ahead.