Category Archives: Knowledge Management

The 9 Cs of Site Selection

A couple of weeks ago I penned a post on Finding the Right Site where I discussed a recent article in Strategy + Business on five factors for finding the right site and noted that I thought there were at least six critical factors. It wasn’t long before Dick Locke corrected me and upped the count to seven. However, after reading this recent article in Global Services on “Location Selection Best Practices”, I am now convinced that there are 9 Cs of site selection.

In addition to the five Cs, outlined in the Strategy + Business article, of:

  • Cost
    What is the total cost of the location, including the costs of land, office equipment, communications, wages, training, taxes, infrastructure, and wages. etc.
  • Capacity
    What is the current availability of talent in the region and the expected availability in years to come? etc.
  • Capability
    What percentage of the talent has the specific engineering skills that the company needs (and/or can be easily trained to acquire those skills) and how easy will it be to find the talent to build and maintain the appropriate operational environments? etc.
  • Communications
    What will be the ability to seamlessly share information between the site and headquarters without cultural, language, or distance obstacles? etc.
  • Culture
    What is the ability of the location to attract talent that will fit in with the company culture? etc.

And the two additional Cs identified by myself and Dick Locke of:

  • Competition
    How many similar companies are setting up in the region? etc.
  • Citizenship
    What is the marketing impact of the location? Are you going to participate in the local economy? etc.

I now believe the following two factors are equally important:

  • Core
    Is the core infrastructure sufficient for your operations? Chances are that you’re going to need a lot of power and water. Can the infrastructure handle it, or is it already at capacity? If the operation can’t go down, are redundant power, water, and/or communications feeds available? You can’t always wait for the infrastructure to catch up.
  • Call
    An extended site visit is absolutely essential before you make a long-term commitment to a new location. A 2-day fly-by to sign the papers and celebrate is not enough to make a selection. The location has to be surveyed, the talent pool has to be evaluated on the ground, and the local living conditions have to be experienced. Someone has to spend at least a few weeks, if not a few months, evaluating the ins and outs, ups and downs, and pros of cons of any location on the short list before a final decision is made. And unless this factor gets its own category, and weighting, it won’t be done and “gotchas” will go undetected.

Selecting the wrong site will cost you tens, if not hundreds, of millions, so take your time and use the 9 Cs to select the right one.

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Why Haven’t You Put a Knowledge Retention Policy in Place Yet?

While reading a recent article in Corporate Executive on “solving the problem of the aging workforce”, I was shocked at a statistic they quoted from a 2008 study conducted by the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4CP) that noted that 30% of companies admitted they retained knowledge either poorly or not at all and 78% of companies admitted that they did not have anyone responsible for organizational knowledge retention. In other words, 4 out of 5 companies do not have an individual responsible for insuring knowledge in their company does not get lost!

Without anyone responsible for insuring knowledge retention, a knowledge retention policy will not be created and knowledge will not be captured. As a result, as your aging workforce retires, key knowledge will retire with them. With between 29% and 36% of your workforce eligible for retirement within the next 9 years, that’s 1/3rd of your corporate knowledge at risk of disappearing. Given the amount of knowledge that’s already been lost in the outsourcing craze, where many companies just handed functions over to outsource providers in their entirety — without any thought as to how key knowledge would be retained in case the tasks needed to be reassigned, brought-back in house, or managed internally — can you really afford to lose 1/3rd of your corporate knowledge? I doubt it.

It’s time to put a knowledge retention policy in place … before it’s too late!

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Looking Behind the Knowledge Network Curtains

Today’s guest post is from John Shaw, the Director of Education Services for Supply Management at BravoSolution.

In a recent post, the doctor asked, “Where is the Knowledge Network?” and “What is an aspiring supply management professional to do?”

Our industry is offering a growing list of online resources and supply management organizations. We can use these resources to augment the knowledge we gain through our professional activities and personal networks. As the doctor stated, each of these resources takes time and effort to build, so naturally, the goals and objectives of these networks are aligned with those individuals who invest in building each network in the first place.

Our challenge as supply management professionals is to navigate this forest of information in a way that maximizes our personal development. To do so, we need to understand where our personal objectives align with those of a knowledge network. The better we understand how each network’s objectives align with our own, the more value we will receive out of the limited time we have to invest in them.

So as both a consumer of these networks and a developer of some (see discloser below) I’d like to offer some questions for you to ask when trying to determine if participating in a particular knowledge network would be valuable to you:

  • Does the intent of the network align with the needs of the membership?
    The Network Guidelines should clearly state the audience, and the types of information exchange the network facilitates. If they are not stated, or they do not align with what your current development needs, your time may be better invested elsewhere.
  • Who are the thunder lizards?
    Look to see who the most active participants are. The most active people in a community will steer its direction. If these people are your peers, or better, if they are in roles that you aspire to, look further into participating.
  • Who is in charge?
    Successful communities are driven by the membership. If enough thunder lizards march in the same direction a community will move and take a life of its own. The builder can find him/herself in the passenger seat. In the best scenario, you’ll find that the thunder lizards are your peers, and they are in charge!

So what are we to do? Unfortunately there isn’t a simple answer. Whether we are learning about supply management, following politics or trying to get the best advice online for fixing a leaking pipe, we need to look behind the curtains to understand our information sources

Thanks, John!

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Where is the Knowledge Network?

Supply Network. Invoicing Network. Payment Network. Risk Network. It’s network frenzy out there. But where’s the knowledge network to make sense of it all?

It’s not the internet. It may be the information highway, but with all the marketing billboards, the best you can get is an obstructed view of the signage intended to give you directions.

It’s not the supply management organizations. While they collect a lot of data points from their members, they don’t necessarily distill down to the underlying wisdom, and when they do, it’s usually specific to the membership base they serve — which is typically restricted to a single country or geographic region.

It’s not the for-profit training organizations. They may do a good (and sometimes great) job of training you to be effective at a set of supply management tasks, but don’t expect any wisdom beyond what they promise in the fine print. The purpose of their existence is to take your money, so they’re not about to enable the market at large.

It’s not the new vendor wikis, forums, or knowledge exchanges. These exist to serve their members first and you second, as clearly evidenced by the restrictive nature of many of these network. And even though a few of these have opened the doors to anyone who wants to join, they exist first and foremost to deliver the education most relevant to the vendor. If the vendor is focussed on selling e-Sourcing, they don’t really care about certain aspects of e-Payment or the 3rd party logistic’s you’ll need to deliver your products. And forget about these networks playing nice with the competition.

It’s certainly not the analysts. We all know that the greatest influences on an analyst firm are the vendors who get the most face time, which, in turn, are the vendors who pay the most to get that face time. As a result, most vendor reports are simply repackaged vendor marketing. A few go deeper, but even then, the vendors that get the most focus are the ones that pay for it.

And we don’t even have our own supply-o-pedia! And even though, back in 2007, it looked like the independent blogs would be plentiful and collectively serve as our guideposts when we wandered off the path, at this point in time, we’re a dying breed. There might be dozens (and dozens) of blogs currently active in the space, but almost all of them are authored by vendors or analyst firms, who are using them as part of a core marketing strategy. And while a few of these do a great job of education, the education is focussed on the processes and practices you need to know to make the best use of the platforms and services offered by the company or firm.

And with all of these vendor blogs augmenting the traditional publications, supply management organization reports, and analyst briefs that are now focussed on online distribution, we’re drowing in a sea of infomation without a life vest. We need a knowledge management network to keep track of it all, but given that we don’t even have a common language for supply management information interchange, it’s probably a long way off. So what’s an aspiring supply management professional to do?

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Where Are The Intelligent Networks?

In a recent piece from ChainLink Research on “Remapping the Supply Chain Universe”, the author suggests that there are intelligent networks [that] are truly unique, yet little understood. What I’d like to know is, where are these intelligent networks. As far as I’m concerned, an intelligent network is as real as a griffin or a chimera.

The author suggests that they are a trusted source to synchronize the mutual data and processes between trading partners using a shared model based on agreement in policy, process, [and] security. Supposedly they separate the physical supply from the logical supply chain to enable mobility by providing peer-to-peer access and a single version of the truth.

Working backwards, the only system I’ve ever seen give a truly single version of the truth is a spend analysis system after an expert has merged all of the disparate data sources using hand-mapped rules. (Now, there are half-a-dozen companies running single instance Oracle systems that also provide a single version of the truth, but since these white unicorns are rarer than black swans, we might as well pretend they don’t exist.)

Peer-to-peer access has been around for decades, and hit the mass market on the web back in 1999 with Napster. Don’t tell me that was intelligent.

Every system separates the physical supply chain from the logical one. After all, software is an abstraction. And it’s not intelligent. It’s just code.

Marketplaces have been providing a shared model based on agreement in policy, process, and security for over a decade as well. It’s framework, not intelligence.

Finally, there’s no connection, or even correlation, between a “trusted source” and intelligence.

Plus, if you look at today’s “social networks”, there’s a good chance that you’ll wonder if there’s even any intelligence in the user base!

The reality is that “intelligent” networks don’t exist because “intelligent” systems don’t exist because there’s no such thing as “artificial intelligence”. Take it from a CS PhD who knows. If someone is trying to sell you an “intelligent network”, they are bs-ing you. Don’t fall for it.

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