Another way of looking at buyer- and person-centric business opportunities is by offering services that help individuals enrich the outcomes and/or cut the cost of managing their life 'departments', events (such as 'having a baby', or 'moving home' or 'getting married'), and processes.

Every individual has to manage a wide range of life departments to flourish in a modern society. These include:

• my home
• my money
• my health
• my career
• my communications
• my transport
• my social network
• my causes, hobbies and beliefs
• my leisure

Each one of these departments can be broken down into many sub-challenges. Managing my home might include the following sub-departments, for example:

• home improvement: professional, DIY
• home maintenance and repair:external (walls, roofs, drains etc) and internal (drains, plumbing, electricity etc)
• cleaning and tidying: floors, windows, fabrics, clothes, dishes, toilet etc
• protection: locks, alarms, contents insurance, building insurance
• replenishment: kitchen (food, utensils, cleaning materials etc), bedroom (clothes, bed linen, beauty products etc), bathroom (personal hygiene, cleaning materials etc)
• decoration: external, internal (bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, sitting room, etc)
• fitting: capital goods (boiler, oven, fridge etc), furniture (bedroom, sitting room etc)

In today's seller-centric world these markets are recognised and served by a myriad of specialist sellers, each one focused on, and supplying, one tiny component of the overall solution - selling many copies of the same product to many different consumers.

Buyer- and person-centric services address individuals' needs from the other end of the telescope. They focus on bringing together one or a few of many different components to help one individual achieve a desired outcome. They address questions like::

• what is the individual's desired outcome when it comes to this aspect of his or her life?
• how can this desired outcome be achieved via better use of the individual's personal assets (the amount of work or physical energy they have to put into it, the emotional costs and benefits, time, the information they need to gather, use or pass on, the money costs, the attention they need to give to it and so on)?

Rather than supplying components to solutions, in other words, buyer- and person-centric services focus on how to achieve richer outcomes at lower personal cost. This requires different skills, infrastructures, processes, relationships and business models.Typically they involve a customised combination of:

• actual service: work done
• information management: information gathered, passed on, connected etc
• integration: of many different inputs from many different suppliers
• coordination: of many different activities

The scope for new services, doing these things across all life departments, sub-departments, and events is huge, both in the private and public sectors, affecting the individual in every role (as 'consumer', 'citizen' and 'employee').

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