Remember the Shake'n'Vac ad? Probably the most cringe-making thirty seconds in the history of TV advertising. A woman sang an appalling jingle while she pranced round her sitting room hoovering the carpet. Everybody hated it. And yet you kept on catching yourself humming that awful ditty without realising, and the campaign went down in history as one of the most successful new product launches ever.

When you attend business seminars, there are certain words that have the same effect. You can't abide it when people use them, you dismiss them as dire Americanisms, and yet whenever you hear one, you immediately start paying attention again.

"Paradigm", for example. It's a ridiculous word, but whenever you hear it, you know the speaker is talking about something he thinks is going to overturn our way of looking at the world, so you'd better sit up and listen.

"Synergy" is another. There's obviously a couple of things the speaker believes work very well together, so it's probably worth making a mental note of what they are, just in case you can stitch them together into something useful when you get back to the office.

Then there's the big one, "leverage". We're talking about something for nothing here, a way in which you can get more for your money than you were before, so take note, this point might even recoup the absurdly high registration fee they're charging you to be there.

New jargon

This year, a new word is doing the rounds — "disintermediation". It means cutting out the middleman, and of course, if the speaker wasn't being paid lots of money to give this talk, he or she would have used the familiar old phrase instead of opting for new-fangled business jargon. But no-one became a guru by using words that everybody understands, and in any case, we live in a politically correct world, and whoever heard of middlewomen?

Disintermediation is something that technology is responsible for. There are therefore two reasons — presumably that would that be a synergy of reasons — why disintermediation is of enormous import for people who sell computers. There's good news and bad news.

The first is that resellers are middlemen. This one is the bad news. Disintermediation could very possibly mean cutting out the reseller. Next time manufacturers start talking about disintermediation, listen carefully. It used to be called going direct.

The other reason is that computer resellers deal in technology. That's good news as long as it's somebody else who's being disintermediated by the technology you sell. If a lot of people are being disintermediated, it could be very good news indeed, because it means you'll be able to sell even more kit.

Cut out

Disintermediation is what happened to typists. Remember them? They used to type people's business correspondence, before the word processor came along and everyone had to learn how to use a keyboard for themselves. Resellers did well out of that, because they got to sell all the computers people had to buy in order to disintermediate their secretaries, and resellers couldn't afford secretaries, so they were already typing their own letters anyway.

Disintermediation is happening to switchboard operators. This is less good for the computer trade, because it means no-one speaks to anybody any more. There's a rumour going round that one of the big wholesalers hasn't got any staff left at all, but nobody's noticed because the switchboard is jammed with resellers who've been put on hold by the automated phone system and still imagine that they're going to get through eventually.

The rise of direct insurance and banking is a direct result of disintermediation. Technology made it possible for telephone workers to provide a full customer service from a single head office location, cutting out whole layers of agents, clerks and branch staff.

But don't get the idea that disintermediation is just a sanitised word for making people redundant. It's also responsible for putting people out of business.

Well-worn phrases

To understand why, you have to look at another pair of well-worn seminar phrases — "core competence" and "value-added". These two were often seen doing the rounds of the conference circuit. One day, they locked themselves in a seminar room with a dose of synergy and ever since they've been inseparable. Disintermediation is their baby and rumour has it they're looking for a brand new paradigm of their own they can bring it up in.

What these phrases boil down to is the idea that businesses can only pay their way if they concentrate on something unique that nobody else can do. That was innocuous and obvious enough until they shacked up together and disintermediation came on the scene.

Disintermediation invites businesses to look, not at themselves, but at their suppliers and customers up and down the supply chain. It recommends examining what exactly those intermediaries add to the chain, and advises bypassing any which appear to add nothing. It says don't take the existing way of doing things for granted, but put on your thinking cap and see if technology can come up with a way of short-cutting the process.

Critical view

The financial woes of some the big generalist wholesalers is probably a shining example of this process at work. Technology is hollowing out their role, leaving many vendors asking what they offer that they couldn't do themselves with a simple order processing system and the services of a national delivery service.

Because of the doctrine of core competence, disintermediation also implies taking a critical view of any business that seems to be trying to do more than one thing, and asking what it's really good at, if anything. That's where resellers come under scrutiny, and it will force many to decide whether they're actually software houses, systems integrators or IT consultants.

But computer resellers aren't the only businesses threatened by disintermediation, and they'll probably be the last to succumb. Someone's got to set up and install the technology that makes all this possible, and that after all is the very thing that resellers are supposed to be good at. Sorry, did I hear someone stifle a laugh in the back row?


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