Jargon Chain

On the plane to Boston this week I was reading a research paper released by Visa Europe on the future of the payments industry. It talked about how Visa Europe wants to “move up the value chain” and become a trusted partner of the retailers not just a transaction processing platform. Throughout the course of the week I kept hearing the phrase “moving up the value chain”. It seems that it is the Holy Grail for everyone from the cleaner to the CEO; it was definitely one of Wipro’s aspirations in Europe, at least before the recent CEO change; and practitioners in the world of Business Intelligence (BI) have often talked about the need to move up the value chain and start talking to the business if they want to be successful.

This got me thinking – what the hell is at the top of the value chain?! What’s the actual end point of this journey up a chain and what does the phrase actually mean….Is the buyer the end point i.e. you’re just trying to get closer to the final consumer who actually does the purchasing? Or is this view a bit simplistic – is not the top of the value chain the person who actually spends his time creating demand in the market place? Or might it even be government agencies that set the rules of the game meaning that lobbying becomes probably the most important corporate activity if you want to move up the value chain? I think the only conclusion I reached is that the phrase is fairly non-descript and that those people who utter it are probably not thinking beyond the end of their noses.