Stats are not something the doctor obsesses about. This is the second oldest continuously running niche blog in the space, and if you broke Spend Matters into its constituent blogs and measured them individual, there are many weeks this blog would get more hits.

And while the statistics have not been interesting to the doctor since SI reached #1 on all the ranking engines many years ago (when Spend Matters was just one blog and not a family) and stayed neck and neck for a while, it is interesting to the doctor to see what people are reading (and figure out why).

It’s also interesting to see if any posts of they year make the top 10 visited posts of the year. One thing about taking an educational and informative focus is that posts on this blog stand the test of time. The most visited educational post of the year is actually from 2007! In fact, only one of the top ten visited posts this year is from this year. (But that’s a subject for our next post.)

The most visited post of 2018 was a GDPR post and, in fact, five of the ten most visited posts of 2018 were on GDPR back when it was coming into focus. It seems no one was really ready for the new EU data tax and were scrambling to figure out how to comply. (And it is a data tax. If you don’t keep someone’s private data private or can’t expunge it to the extent legally required when asked, you get a big fine. But if the government exposes millions of records in a data breach, nothing happens. Companies, and even individuals, can get penalized while governments can continue to keep poor privacy standards to no ill effect. Sounds like a tax to me!)

The other five posts were:

1. Maybe You Can Be a Procurement Hero
   Let’s face it, it sucks being stuck in the dungeon of the The Tower of Spend day in and day out. It sucks that sales and marketing get all the glory when every dollar you save is ten times as impactful as every dollar they bring in. It sucks that the C-Suite is telling you to cut 10% across the board on already lean categories while they still fly business class, have no restrictions on meal spend, and upgrade their perfectly functioning laptop and phone every year while you have to wait three. Of course you want to be a Procurement hero!
2. One Hundred and Fourteen Years Ago
   This was a surprise! A short post on the construction of the Panama Canal, an important development in the history of Ocean freight (as it cut two to three weeks and 7,872 miles off of Atlantic-to-Pacific (and vice versa) voyages.
3. Ariba Live Europe Needs a Mascot
   This was also a surprise! Of course Ariba is still a significant player and of course news from Live is always sought after. But a mascot recommendation? Maybe the doctor is right and smart, talented, sexy Procurement people do prefer cats to dogs!
4. Is TCO a No Go Without Optimization
   This is a bit of an odd-ball for a top 10 post. The holy grail for most Procurement professionals is TCO — Total Cost of Ownership — minimization (so of course the topic is popular), but many Procurement professionals still feel they do not need, and sometimes even fear, strategic sourcing decision optimization, because it is heavy math and early solutions were extremely difficult to use (and, despite the doctor‘s insistence since the beginning of this blog that you need it, it is often avoided. But new solutions hide the math, walk the user through scenario (and constraint) construction, and are often easier to use than first (and even second) generation e-RFX solutions which, as pointed out last week, are often (still) kicking you when you are down (Part I and Part II).
5. Of Course Catalogs Cant Be Trusted to This was about the only no surprise. Catalogs are a staple. Low value spend is a pervasive problem. And the doctor‘s rants are his most popular posts.

Come back tomorrow to find out the nine most visited posts of the year which, as per above, were not actually published this year! Proving that, unlike blogs that focus on news (or, in some cases, speculation and rumours) of the day, blogs that focus on education and explanation really do stand the test of internet time. Even if they maintain an old-school look! (Because, sometimes in unglamorous Procurement, we’re lucky to have old school tech. Unlike modern tech, it always works! And being the world’s second oldest profession, we know how to make old-school work!)

No one wins a trade war.

Progress stagnates when borders close.

Freedom is jeopardized when dictators are praised.

Human Rights suffer when power is abused.

… and the world goes to hell.

So, if the world is going to hell, Sourcing Innovation is proud to be part of that “special place” where fairness is sought, openness is an ideal, multi-party cooperation is a way of life, and human rights are always upheld as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms trumps any law or power.

How do we do it? No personal data!

That’s right, as of today (May 25, 2018), we have no personal data!^*

But you’re a blog, don’t you have subscription lists?

Nope!

Sourcing Innovation turned subscriptions off three (3) months ago and deleted any and all lists it had to allow sufficient time for all the regular backups at my host to overwrite all the old backups to make sure that even backups at the host didn’t have any personal data.

But doesn’t that hurt your traffic?

Nope!

1) If people get the posts, they don’t come to the blog.
(And it’s traffic stats that matter, right? At least that’s what marketers tell me since I would never, ever send anything to my lists on anyone’s behalf, not even paying clients of ToP KaTS!)

2) Subscriptions accounted for, like, at most 1% of traffic anyway (with generous rounding).
(Most people these days that don’t directly come to the blog come in through LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google. Bulk email gets relegated to spam or deleted by most mail clients [and sometimes mail servers] anyway. Even the few people who wanted the posts in their inbox often told me in the past they didn’t get the posts when I could check the logs and see they were sent out.)

But what if I want to subscribe?

Fear not! Subscriptions will be re-opened in the (near) future!

Yesterday, my host implemented the new version of WordPress that came with WordPress’ new GDPR Privacy and Security policies and the new WordPress tools to help remove, and ensure removal of, private user data on user request.

My host’s new GDPR privacy and security policy goes into effect today.

As soon as:

1) I can test and confirm that you can easily opt out when you want to opt out and your data goes bye-bye if you do opt-out and

2) I am sure that my host’s systems and procedures have been updated in line with their policies to ensure 100% compliance across all their clients (which includes backup erasures / overwrites on request to ensure expunging of personal data),

subscriptions will be cued to reopen!

In the mean time, keep doing what the 99%+ do — blog, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google.

The Fail Whale rarely makes an appearance these days, so you can always start with Twitter!

^* This statement is valid only until such time as subscriptions re-open. At that point in time, SI may begin to collect personal data subject to our Privacy/PIPEDA/GDPR policy, so please bear this in mind if accessing this post after May 25, 2018.