Category Archives: Technology

The Strategic Sourceror’s (Supply Chain) Anti-Trends

The Strategic Sourceror was first to the plate with a trio of home-run anti-trends for 2009.

  • Strategic Sourcing Outsourcing Finally Gets a Good Rap
    The Sourceror notes that even though the list of anti-outsourced strategic sourcing excuses (just like the list of excuses for why we don’t need no consultants) goes on and on and on, this is the year that people who just made a big investment in (e-)sourcing software realize that software alone is not enough and you need to balance the tools with the human expert techniques.
  • Networking Costs You That Job
    Every time the economy takes a bath in the crapper, every person and his dog comes out of the woodwork with a list of techniques for landing that next job, and networking is always at the top of the list. And this time, the media has outdone themselves and convinced people that “networking” means getting in touch with every single person you have ever heard of in your life and bombarding them with your resume and story … every single day. Now, while you should contact everyone who you honestly think could, and would try to, help you, and while you should be persistent in your job hunt … there’s persistence, and then there’s good old fashioned harassment. Go overboard, and you might just find that you’re the first person blackballed next time something opens up.
  • Hasta la Vista to the Fat Cats
    This post is just too good to every try to summarize.

NBR’s Top 30 Innovations From The Last 30 Years

To celebrate their three decades on the air, PBS’ Nightly Business Report teamed up with Knowledge@Wharton to select the 30 most important innovations from the last 30 years, which can be found on the PBS Site. Without giving everything away, the top 10 were:

10. Non-invasive laser/robotic surgery
  9. Office Software
  8. Fiber Optics
  7. Microprocessors
  6. Magnetic Resonance Imaging
  5. DNA Testing
  4. e-Mail
  3. Mobile Phones
  2. PCs
  1. The Internet

And while #20, social networking via the internet, to borrow a phrase, really grinds my gears, I have to say that the top 10 are dead on.

Cross Blog Challenge: (Supply Chain) Anti-Trends for 2009

A week and a half ago I alerted you to Vince Kellen’s Technology Duds for 2009 which highlighted five “anti-trends” for 2009 that stand out as a brilliant counterpoint to the rose-colored predictions of the laissez-fair wannabe analysts that tend to dominate the technology landscape.

After writing the post I started thinking about how great it would be if there were more voices like Vince’s that spoke the truth and opened our eyes to reality and not marketing fantasy. Thus, I have decided to make anti-trends the focus of the next Sourcing Innovation Cross-Blog series, which I will kick-off with this post.

My first two and a half trends echo Vince Kellen’s. My last two and a half diverge into the space.

1. Social Networking Will Unravel
As Kellen says, “at the risk of offending Web 2.0 enthusiasts, most firms, especially those hardest hit in this recession, consider social networking speculative and in some cases frivolous. And as I said in my last post, there’s a reason why “facebooked” has become an urban slang slam, “myspaced” has become a synonym for a late-night booty call, and why the blogger elite (including the doctor and Loren Feldman of 1938 Media) slam Twitter on a regular basis (as the only thing you can do with it is say nothing in only 140 characters). There’s no real value in these technologies, and no commercial value to a productive business. Businesses will drop these efforts to focus on projects with value.

2. Web 2.0 will soon be Web 2.Done
Similarly, mash-ups, fancy portals, and other web 2.0 projects are going to be axed because speculative ROIs or projects not directly assisting with significant savings are going to be difficult for IT leaders to advance. While mashups can be a useful component of B2B 3.0 platforms if they focus on enhancing content, community, and connectivity, on their own they are just useless eye-candy.

3. Traditional “Spend Analysis” will Lose Luster
Although a sound spend analytics package (you know the one) in the hands of a true expert (you know who they are) will find you limitless savings opportunities, the reality is that most of the offerings on the market are just static data warehouses with static reports in the hands of recent grads with little real-world experience and almost no training. As a result, as early adopters come to the end of their maintenance agreements, which came with six figure (plus) maintenance fees, you’ll see a lot of movement towards modern low-cost B2B 3.0 data analysis packages or spend analysis as-a service offerings.

4. Home Country Sourcing finally comes back in vogue
Regular readers will know that I’ve been pushing not just for best-cost, but home-cost country sourcing for a while now. Giving the skyrocketing transportation costs from mid 2007 to mid 2008, the repeated product safety scandals with imported products, the current recessionary environment, the low dollar, and fears of protectionism with the new US administration, more companies will finally start looking for strategic sourcing opportunities close to home — which will also come with more predictable costs, and savings, over the long term.

5. Sustainable green catches on, despite the recessionary environment
Although green initiatives that cost more than they return will be scrapped faster than unburied copper cable, as my fellow bloggers on Supply Excellence and 2 Sustain are pointing out, more and more companies will be looking at sustainable initiatives to save them money, and those green initiatives that save money as well as improve the corporate social responsibility image will catch on.

Now it’s time for my fellow bloggers to join in with their anti-trends in and help you understand where supply and spend management is headed.

Tools To Help You Tame the Wild Web

Google’s good, but when you search for terms like sourcing and purchasing, chances are that in addition to a few relevant hits, you’ll also get a few million, mostly irrelevant hits, in response to your query. There’s got to be a better way to find what you’re looking for, right? Most likely, and a number of companies are endeavoring to build the next Web 2.0 tool that will help you in your quest. In addition to PurchSearch, the following Web 2.0 tools are vying for your attention and hoping they will make your quest to tame the wild web just a little bit easier.

FiltrBox

A new market intelligence offering, Filtrbox is an advanced search tool that constantly monitors online media and delivers to you the most relevant, credible mentions of the critical things you need to track.
It allows you to track multiple searches at once through a single interface, embeds constant monitoring technology that is like a real-time version of Google alerts, and maintains a history that allows you to see what the most relevant result was at any instant in time. Finally, you can create custom RSS fees that combine only the most relevant posts from all the feeds that you monitor.

FeedScrub

Feedscrub is an intelligent RSS aggregation and content filtering tool that dynamically learns your preferences as you “save” posts you like and “scrub” posts that you don’t. It supports NetVibes, import and export via OPML, and Google Reader.

Krawler[x]

Krawler[x] is a desktop application that lets you manage your online and offline content with tags that can be used for quick search and retrieval. It also lets you share content, create communities, manage your RSS feeds, and interact with a peer-to-peer social network. It also supports version management, desktop-based collaboration, and supports multiple protocols that combine to create a seamless tool that serves as content creator, content publisher, content sharer and distributed content search engine.

In short, if you’re suffering from a content shortage despite the information overload clogging your RSS feeds and Google Searches, there are tools to help. And while they’re not perfect, despite their relative lack of value to the enterprise, Web 2.0 technologies are showing promise in the consumer world and just might make your on-line travels a little easier.

Vince Kellen’s Technology Duds for 2009

Industry Week recently made my day when they published Vince Kellen’s (Senior Consultant of Cutter Consortium) five “anti-trends” for 2009 which stand out as a brilliant counterpoint to the rose-colored predictions of the laissez-faire wannabe analysts that tend to dominate the technology landscape. Probably because they echo my own sentiments and a few of the messages I’ve been trying to get across for quite some time now. So what were they?

  1. Social Networking will Unravel
    Kellen says “at the risk of offending Web 2.0 enthusiasts, most firms, especially those hardest hit in this recession, consider social networking speculative and in some cases frivolous“. Hear, Hear! There’s a reason why “facebooked” has become an urban slang slam, “myspaced” has become a synonym for a late-night booty call, and why the blogger elite (including the doctor and Loren Feldman of 1938 Media) slam Twitter on a regular basis (as the only thing you can do with it is say nothing in only 140 characters). There’s no real value in these technologies, and certainly no commercial value to a productive business.
  2. Mashups will get Peeled Back
    Speculative ROIs or projects not directly assisting with significant savings are going to be difficult for IT leaders to advance, and since the only “Web 2.0” technology that has less ROI and more speculation than a Mashup is social networking, these projects will be axed too. While mashups can be a useful component of B2B 3.0 platforms if they focus on enhancing content, community, and connectivity, on their own they are just useless eye-candy.
  3. Large-Scale VoIP and Unified Communication Implementations Will Be Muted.
    Although such projects promise long-term savings, unfortunately, at least in North America, they represent high up-front investment costs with a long-term payback period due to our still ridiculously high-costs for high-bandwidth access with service SLAs. As a result, these projects will be back-burnered until the economy hits another high-point and executives again don (or is that dawn) their rose-colored glasses.
  4. Analytics and Business Intelligence (BI) Will Lose Luster
    Although a sound data analytics package (you know the one) in the hands of a true expert (you know who they are) will find you limitless savings opportunities, the reality is that most of the offerings on the market are just static data warehouses with static reports in the hands of recent grads with little real-world experience and almost no training. As a result, the majority of solution providers have been over-promising and under-delivering for years, and the market, understandably, has become fed up. As a result, even though these are the times when a real data analysis solution is needed most, many projects will be scrapped and only the true innovators (which are a small minority of the market) will undertake projects to identify and acquire sound BI solutions.
  5. Aged Infrastructure Will Stay in Service Longer
    “More companies with way-past-their-prime architectures will attempt to coax them along for another year“. And this is unfortunate. While I applaud the inevitable push-back on social networking and useless Web 2.0 technologies, and understand the delay on VOIP and BI (as the value just isn’t there in some cases), I am saddened by the truth of this prediction. You see, technology infrastructure improvement offers companies a great opportunity to reduce cost and go green at the same time, thanks to new virtualization, thin-client, and innovative cooling technologies. Not only do green solutions generally offer payback starting in year two, but they last twice as long, effectively reducing your Total Cost of Ownership between 50% and 90% over a five to six year time-frame. And with cash-flush companies like IBM (who had a record profit year in 2008, and predict another one in 2009) able to offer low-cost financing if you can’t afford the up-front purchase and implementation costs, it just doesn’t make sense to delay this investment. (See my posts on greening your data centers, greening your desktops, and calculating your savings for more information.)