Category Archives: Miscellaneous

New Year’s Eve Blues

Flamewars and pixel fights
Back and forth in net leet
Twitter noise, another tweet
Things too hard to believe —
so log off

My heart’s in the real world
My brain’s online without you
All my friends are checkin’ Facebook
Talkin’ bad about you know who who who
My hand’s typin’ riddles
But I just can’t seem to find a clue
So I take a swig of whiskey
And jump into the chat room without a view

And I just can’t seem to break the shackles of the New Year’s Eve blues
I got the New Year’s Eve blues
I got the New Year’s Eve blues
I got the New Year’s Eve blues
I got the New Year’s Eve blues
And I just can’t seem to break the shackles of the New Year’s Eve blues

Bugs in the codebase
Worms in the server farm
All my neighbors think I’m crazy
And my girl thinks I’m losin’ my cool cool cool
And I just can’t seem to break the shackles of the New Year’s Eve blues
I got the New Year’s Eve blues
I got the New Year’s Eve blues
I got the New Year’s Eve blues
I got the New Year’s Eve blues
And I just can’t seem to break the shackles of the New Year’s Eve blues

Don’t look to 4chan to change your seasons
It’s the American dream
Souls of hackers, wireless streams
Can’t seem to find no peace so log off

And I just can’t seem to break the shackles of the New Year’s Eve blues
I got the New Year’s Eve blues
I got the New Year’s Eve blues
I got the New Year’s Eve blues
I got the New Year’s Eve blues
And I just can’t seem to break the shackles of the New Year’s Eve blues

I got the blues, I got the blues, I got the blues,
I got the blues
I got the blues, I got the blues, I got the blues …

To the tune of “City Boy Blues” by Motley Crue.

SpendFool, New Year’s Eve Day just isn’t the same without you.

2010 Was A Sad Year for Innovation

After reading “the top six innovation ideas of 2011” on the HBR blogs, it only re-emphasized my belief that 2010 was a dead-end year innovation-wise. I don’t even want to think about what could be worse. Consider:

  • Contestification
    Can’t sell your product? Use digital media to crowd-source your marketing ideas from your customers while overpaying your CMO!
  • Keep Touching Me and I’ll Screen!
    Why read an article when you can touch, tap, stroke, finger, fondle, and pinch content-free videos?
  • WWWabs
    Why spend money doing proper software development and quality assurance when you can release crappy beta and let your customers QA for you?
  • That’s Quite A Coup, Onward Group!
    Digital coupon sites are now a six billion dollar enterprise.
  • From Farmville to Pharmville: We Got Game in Business
    As the economy went down the tubes, mindless games became a trillion dollar industry.
  • A Beautifully Designed Lobby
    In 2011, a marginal dollar invested in a lobbying campaign may yield far greater returns than a dollar invested in a brave new technology innovation.

All-in-all, it’s depressing.

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CSA 2010 – Yet Another Act to Increase Your Logistics Costs

Not that long ago, I warned you that black boxes are coming for logistics carriers and that while they are unlikely to make a significant impact on safety, they are going to make a significant impact on your logistics carriers’ operational costs and your logistics costs. Now I’m going to warn you about the “Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010” (FMCSA CSA 2010) which is also more likely to increase your costs than your supply chain safety.

The initiative, designed to achieve a greater reduction in large truck and bus crashes, injuries, and fatalities contains four elements:

  1. measurement,
  2. intervention,
  3. safety evaluation and information technology, and
  4. COMPASS.

COMPASS is a comprehensive overhaul of the way FMCSA and its partners collect, manage, and convey safety information which requires a major overhaul of the IT infrastructure and the implementation of a portal, database, data warehouse, mobile interface, and data exchange.

But the costly step is intervention. If the measurement system indicates that the FMCSA needs to intervene with a logistics carrier, the FMCSA, depending on severity, can:

  • issue a warning letter,
  • perform a targeted roadside inspection,
  • do an off-site investigation, and/or
  • do an on-site investigation.

And if an issue is discovered, the FMCSA can issue a comprehensive notice of claim/settlement to the carrier, and increase their costs, which increases yours.

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Who’s Going to Upset the Market in 2011?

The best predictor of a paradigm shift’s success long-term is how upset it makes people.
Stephen Wolfram, Interview with Christopher Meyer

I just realized something. A whole year has gone by and there has been nothing upsetting in the space. It’s been (well) over a year since I’ve seen anything that made me say “this is going to change things”. Sure, a lot of platforms have gotten better this year. For example, a number of e-Procurement and Supplier Relationship Management platforms have improved greatly in term of features, usability, or both, but there’s nothing fundamentally new on the market. And while a couple of platforms have embraced mobile computing, the functionality offered is minimal and not much beyond the information that can be sent in e-mail alerts (or approvals).

I shouldn’t be surprised, because many companies cranked back on R&D, or put it on hold, when the recession hit full swing. As a result, many companies haven’t been doing much R&D. However, some companies were smart enough to realize that a recession is an opportunity to be great, and kept going full steam ahead, but when you look at what they did, they just improved upon what they had. I really haven’t seen any new ideas in almost two years. As a result, there’s not much for me to be excited about, or much for the market to get upset about.

Now that the recovery, albeit a jobless one, is in full swing, hopefully things will turn around. But we also have to contend with the reality that some companies released great products and platforms in 2008/2009 that still haven’t reached their potential because many companies just stopped buying. In fact, in a few cases, at the current rate of market adoption, these companies are still about five years ahead. While I know a few of them will keep improving and keep innovating, what incentive do they have to release something entirely new if the market still hasn’t understood and adopted the powerful solutions they still have? One area where this is the case is decision optimization. Many companies still have not even tried this technology, even though it’s one of only two technologies repeatedly found to deliver double-digit percentage returns (with the other being spend analysis). And many companies who have are still not using it at its full potential. This is probably why, of the six true providers of strategic-sourcing decision optimization, only three appear to be moving forward with the technology, and, in my view, only two appear to be making real progress. What’s the incentive to move forward if the market won’t keep up with you?

But if 2011 doesn’t bring some new offerings that upset the market, I fear that the market will start to languish. And considering only half of CPOs have a seat at the table, we can’t afford this. So who’s going to upset the market in 2011?

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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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