Pull platforms need powerful coordination mechanisms

Pull platforms are a great way to build your businesses upon. It will be highly disruptive to whatever industries you are in. Building it however requires lots of experimentations on the right form and shape.

One of the challenges is resolving the coordination problem. With so many partners and resources available in a pull platform, how do you make it easy for any party to find, retrieve and use the resources that he needs? It was hinted in the paper that I linked to that Li & Fung uses a low tech solution of calling and faxing to pull in the necessary resources:

Li & Fung would be challenged without basic telephone and fax communication networks.

How can we make it easier than this? Tagging might one solution. This new perspective makes it clearer to me that we are not done with tagging yet. Maybe we have been looking in the wrong area i.e. search. Maybe the potential of tagging lies in its coordination power i.e to pull in resources multi-dimensionally.

Any mechanisms that help us to sort through the proliferation of options and find the resources that are truly useful to us will have great value. Mechanisms that capture and build on the insights and experience of others will be even more valuable because they will create a classic increasing returns opportunity. That's the potential of tagging - if it can scale.