Author Archives: thedoctor

Twenty Years, and Nothing’s Changed. It’s still all about the Pentiums!

Today they might be called Xeon Ws or something similar, and power Mac Pros, but at the core, they are still, more or less, Pentiums!

Rock on, Al Yankovic, Rock on!

Because It’s All About The Pentiums (Original Video!)

Al may have been Running with Scissor, but no one did a better job of predicting the future of the IT industry.

     
My new computer’s got the clocks, it rocks
But it was obsolete before I opened the box
You say you’ve had your desktop for over a week?
Throw that junk away, man, it’s an antique
Your laptop is a month old? Well that’s great
If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight

  It’s All About the Pentiums
    by “Weird Al” Yankovic (@alyankovic)

I Am the Twitter! (Repost)

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.
See how they run like fish from a whale, see the bird fly.
I’m crying.

Sitting on a hashtag, waiting for the tweet to come.
Corporation tee-shirt, stupid bloody tuesday.
Man, you been a naughty boy, you let your tweet grow long.
I am the poster, they are the posters.
I am the twitter, goo goo g’joob.

Mister celebrity ranting,
Pretty little celebrities in a row.
See the tweets fly like texts from a teen, see how they stream.
I’m crying, I’m crying.
I’m crying, I’m crying.

Random insane drivel, dripping from a newbie’s feed.
A desperate housewife, pornographic priestess,
Now you been a naughty girl you let your secrets out.
I am the poster, they are the posters.
I am the twitter, goo goo g’joob.

Standing in an airport Starbucks … waiting for the brew.
If the brew runs out, you get your fix
From candybars at the news stand.
I am the poster, they are the posters.
I am the twitter, goo goo g’joob.

Expert textpert channel blasters,
Don’t you think the joker laughs at you?
See how they smile like whales in the sky,
See how they snied.
I’m crying.

Internet Spinal Tap, cranking up the dial to eleven.
Gary William Brolsma syncing Numa Numa.
Man, you have to see them kicking that Mark Zuckerberg.
I am the poster, they are the posters.
I am the twitter, goo goo g’joob.
goo goo g’joob goo goo g’joob.
Goo goo g’joob goo

Reposted in recognition of the doctor‘s 3000th tweet!

And remember, if you’re not following the doctor on Twitter, what aren’t you missing?

The Category Sourcing Scorecard – Still An Essential Tool for Category Sourcing

As we noted when we discussed this topic seven years ago, if you want a successful event that generates significant savings, you have to select the right category — and the best way to do that was often to evaluating them with the right scorecards that could predict savings opportunity.

But success requires more than just selecting the right category, it also requires executing a successful event, and this requires:

  • selecting the right sourcing event and
  • adapting quickly if market conditions change

However, today, to be successful, a sourcing scorecard is more than just a point-in-time snapshot of market factors, buying factors, supplier factors, internal factors, and category-specific factors. It’s historical data, even if anonymized, on past events with respect to size, savings, geography thereof, relevant market conditions, and event type.

This way a buyer not only knows the potential savings associated with a category at a particular time, but what type of event will be needed, and what market conditions need to hold throughout the event to maximize the chance of success. And if there are good projections as to how long conditions will hold, the buyer knows how long he or she has, or doesn’t have, to complete the event to maximize chances of success. And if conditions change unexpectedly, the buyer can halt the event and decide what to do next.

Plus, sometimes you can’t just select the category with the greatest sourcing potential, you have to select the category where the contract is going to expire in 60 days and you can’t be without a contract or risk a production line shutdown. Even if the market conditions are the opposite of what you’d need for best results, you still have to proceed — so having the best information possible on the option likely to give the least unsatisfactory outcome is still a positive. And having a platform that can use a modern category sourcing scorecard to enable the right workflows to drive the right events is most likely to minimize a less-than-ideal event as well as maximize an ideal event when it comes.

Two Hundred and Twenty Nine Years Ago Today …

The first foundations were laid for the patent pirates with the introduction of the first U.S. patent to Samuel Hopkins for a potash process. While patents are a necessary evil to protect the investments of real inventor and corporations that have to spend millions upon millions (sometimes to the tune of hundreds of millions) to produce a truly new technology, software patents are an unnecessary evil that allow the pirates to plunder millions upon millions of dollars from rivals with fundamentally different products (but covered under an interpretation of a sufficiently abstract description) and prevent true innovation in our space.

It’s been a downhill trend ever since the first software patent was issued 51 years, 3 months, and 8 days ago as it was a mere 4 years before the software patent pirates saw an opportunity when the first software patent case went before the courts a mere four years later.

That’s right, we’ve had almost five decades of pirates in cyberspace, and you thought malware was the big problem?

Knowledge is Power

So why would you want a platform that doesn’t embed any knowledge?

There is not a product or service in existence that cannot be made more valuable with information, and in technology, there does not exist a solution that cannot be made more valuable through embedded information. So why would you ever want a platform without it?

In fact, if the platform has enough embedded information, and can use it to power adaptive workflows built on top of robotic process automation, you’ll find that you might not even need any AI at all (especially if all it equates to is Applied Indirection). If the platform comes embedded with leading market knowledge for the majority of your categories, and you can define, and embed, rules with the help of experts to cover the rest, then you have the majority of what you need.

Because, at the end of the day, the best value comes from not only getting Spend Under Management, but making the best Sourcing / Procurement decision possible for the organization — and that can only be done if the organization has the right information. No organization has expertise in more than a few categories, and it definitely doesn’t have all the information. So having a platform that comes equipped with the best should cost models out of the box, integration to current market data feeds, and historical data on previous events (anonymized if necessary) to help organizations select the right type of even tfor current conditions is very beneficial — versus just a piece of dumb software that executes a canned one-size-fits-all workflow.

At the end of the day, the more you know about your raw materials, your components, your assembly / manufacturing options, your products, your shipping, the import and export restrictions and costs, and the inherent value of each product versus your other options, the more accurately you can model your options and make a good decision. The more accurately you can model your options, the better chance you have of determining the solution with the lowest cost, the lowest risk, the highest value, and the best value (defined as risk reduction, profit generation capability, etc — whatever makes sense) to cost ratio.

This is how leading Supply Management organizations can save 12%, off-the-top, in an optimization-backed information-enabled sourcing event — and even more if they collaboratively work with their peers to identify all of the options that may be available and all of the associated tradeoffs.

Plus, good, timely, information allows an organization to:

  1. constantly improve products and services by way of the fact that they are able to
  2. collect more relevant, timely, accurate, detailed, and integrated data.So get an information enabled platform – at the end of the day, it’s better than all the platforms with the fake “AI” that do nothing more than automate static, dumb, one-size-does-not-fit-all, workflows!