Category Archives: Technology

Technological Damnation 79: Big Data / “Data” Scientists

About the only technological damnations that grind the doctor‘s gears more than “Big Data” are Mobile, Apps, or The Cloud (which may be the worst damnation of them all).

So why is this a damnation? Besides the facts that “big data” is not new and the term “data scientist” is bullish!t? Let’s list a few reasons:

  • it’s unnecessary confusion for the sole purpose of
  • fear marketing and
  • labour cost inflation.

Let’s take each of these one by one.

Big Data is NOT new

We’ve always had more data than we could fit in memory, or even on a hard disk. When the doctor was getting his degrees back in the early 90’s, he was focussing on (multi-dimensional) data structures, algorithms, and computational geometry (which are the fundamental computer science and mathematics theories that underlie databases, analytics, and optimization) and when he was designing structures and algorithms to process this data efficiently and effectively, and studying their ability to scale, he regularly ran into the problem of not having enough memory to fit all of the data in memory that he wanted (to study large scale applications) or not enough disk space to store everything he wanted (and support swap files). Physicists, (GIS) engineers, operations researchers, etc. always had (access to) more data than they could work with at any one time or even fit on a single machine. Nothing has changed. Yes it is true that we can collect data faster than ever with so many devices with microprocessors and onboard memory collecting data every second, but it’s also true that hard drives and memory have scaled. Back in the day, the doctor‘s first PC had a 10 GB hard drive and 1 MB of RAM (and that was a lot). Now, the doctor‘s three-year old mid-end laptop has 8 GB of RAM and a 500 GB hard drive (and the average server has 256 GB, or more, of RAM and a few terabytes of hard drive space).

“Data” Scientist is a bullsh!t term

Pardon my language, but what the hell is a “data” scientist. Don’t you understand that every scientist is a “data” scientist. All scientists collect data, analyze data, interpolate data, make hypotheses on data, and collect more data to test those hypotheses. All scientists do this, no exceptions. Some, such as statisticians or computer scientists, focus more on data analysis and interpretation than others, but they are not a “data” scientist. They are a statistician or a computer scientist.

Unnecessary Confusion

Pretty much everyone who uses “big data” or “data scientist” is using it in such a way as to do their best to confuse you to the point where you feel stupid and ask them for help. Help which will cost a small fortune.

Fear Marketing

Most utilization of the terms is designed to not only confuse you, but instill as much fear as possible because it is designed to make you feel like you don’t understand it, but your competitors do and, moreover, if you don’t figure it out fast, your competitors are going to use their understanding to derive insights that these competitors will then use to steal your customers and your marketshare — so you better pay a big fistful of cash to take a ride on the “big data” bandwagon fast, or risk being stranded on the side of a desert road with no horse, no water, and no map.

Labour Cost Inflation

Because the providers who are driving the “big data” bandwagons are driving unnecessary demand for their analysts (which they are calling “data scientists”) through their confusion-based fear marketing, and rapidly reducing availability of those resources (beyond normal utilization of those resources) when they are successful, they are able to unrealistically inflate prices because of the perceived lack of resource supply. Net effect, you pay more for resources you may not even need!

In short, not only is “big data” an eternal damnation (and one that children of the 80’s would proclaim originated on Eternia), but it is a damnation that will be in your face day-in and day-out until the providers find a new fear-driven bandwagon to thrust upon you.

Technological Damnation 85: Apps

Of all the technological damnations, this is probably one of the most annoying. Procurement is B2B, not B2C, and there is not an app for that. The only app we need in Procurement is an app for getting each and every person who says there’s an app for that diagnosed as mentally insane and committed. Because, when it comes to Enterprise Procurement, there is no app for that!

In order to make this crystal clear, let’s define exactly what an app is:

An app is a piece of software designed to run in a browser or on a mobile deice

So why isn’t this enterprise procurement? Again, let’s start with a definition.

Enterprise Procurement is the act of buying raw materials, components, goods, services, works, or other consumables from an external source to support the needs of the business and its consumers. This act involves a process that starts with (strategic sourcing), moves on to contract negotiation and management, involves supplier performance and relationship management, generates requisitions and purchase orders, that are followed by invoices and goods receipts, matches, payments, and inventory management.

You really think there is an app for that? Really?

Let’s be clear.

  • Approving a requisition is not an enterprise procurement application.
  • Viewing a report is not an enterprise procurement application.
  • Checking the status of a shipment is not an enterprise procurement application.
  • Placing an order is not an enterprise procurement application.
  • And every other tinky-dink feature you can do in a browser is not an enterprise procurement application.

When it comes to enterprise Procurement, there are only platforms. Anything less is a waste of time, money, and bits. But the app bullsh!t is increasing by the day. It’s a damnation. See it for what it is.

Twenty Years Ago Today …

… the following words were simultaneously published in both the Washington Post and The New York Times.

1. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected
human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological
suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have
inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued
development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly
subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage
on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social
disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased
physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.

2. The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break
down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of
physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a
long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of
permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy.

3. If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very
painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the
results of its breakdown will be …

These were scary words then, and they are scary words now.

They were scary words then because they were the first three paragraphs of the Unabomber‘s manifesto — a former mathematician and Professor who engaged in a nationwide bombing campaign against people involved with modern technology where he planted or mailed numerous homemade bombs that were encased in or disguised as wood as to fool people as to the package’s contents.

And they are scary words now because while much of the manifesto is arguable, these paragraphs have an unnervingly truthful ring to them (which fades as the reader works further into the manifesto, but is there in the beginning).

1. While the industrial revolution has been a great boon for the first world countries, the third world countries have suffered. Consider our recent post on Societal Damnation 48: Worker’s Rights which exemplified the (sometimes abysmally) poor working conditions overseas that often lead to suicide and death on a regular basis. It’s bad enough that people in these poor countries still have to contend with yellow fever and malaria, two pandemics that annually kill hundreds of thousands of people, but they sometimes have to risk their lives everyday just to put food in their mouths and the mouths of their children.

2. Global Warming is increasing. And the occurrence of natural disasters due to the resulting changes in weather patterns is increasing as well. Droughts. Fires. Hurricanes. Tsunamis. They are getting worse and more frequent.

3. Continued development and utilization of technology in an uncontrolled*1 manner will worsen the situation as it has always done.

4. The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. We’ve seen rumblings of failure on a massive scale with recent failures of big automative companies that required big bailouts to prevent what was projected to be even bigger failures. With the return of inflation and a slowdown in global growth, we can see a breaking point. That doesn’t mean we’ll ever hit the breaking point, but it does mean that our system is not perfect.

5. If the system breaks down, the fallout will be severe and painful in first and third world countries. And the bigger a system gets before it fails, the worse the consequences.

As tempted as we are to push aside and forget the ramblings of a serial killer and a terrorist, we have to remember that despite his very misguided views, he was still a very smart man with an IQ of 167 who saw some of the harsh realities of the world for what they were. (Unfortunately, he did not see the right way of addressing them.)

I. Technology on its own is not good (or bad). It is only how it is used that determines whether it is good or bad, so we have to use it wisely.

II. If we do not replace what we take from nature, we will continue to deplete the environment, possibly to a point where it can no longer sustain us.

III. If we continue to harm the environment, it will harm us back. Nature is a delicate balance, and the more we disrupt it, the more it will disrupt us with natural disasters of unprecedented levels.

IV. If we continue to march forward like there is no limit to economic growth, we may push the system over the edge. If population growth is 1% per year, it is foolish to expect that economies can continue to grow at 4%, 6%, 8% or more per year. Simply foolish. And trying to force the system to grow at an unsustainable rate could break it.

V. If the system breaks, we go from being damned to being dead.

We don’t have the answers here at SI, but we do know that the problems will never be solved if they are ignored. And we do know that:

a. We can do our best to make sure that each application of technology is for a greater good (and not just implemented for technology’s sake).

b. We can continue to research and invest in renewable resources and product designs that use renewable resources.

c. We can build factories that use cleaner production processes, trap particulates, and filter wastewater for dangerous contaminants before such water is pumped back into streams and rivers.

d. We can create realistic growth projections and be happy when we reach them, rather than create unrealistic projections that force us to manipulate the books, steal marketshare by any means necessary, or use a supply chain likely powered by slave labour to make the numbers.

e. We can design a sustainable system rather than one with a limited lifespan.

And if we take it one step at a time, there’s no reason that the overall global situation can’t improve over time, leaving future generations to wonder how there could ever have existed a world like the one described by Mr. Kaczynski which pushed him, and other eco-terrorists, over the edge.

*1 This is one thing Mr. Kaczynski got wrong. Not all technology is bad. Most technology is neither good nor bad, it’s whether it is used or abused. Hence his claim that the continued development of technology will worsen the situation is wrong in its unqualified form.

Why You Should Not Build Your Own Contract Management System

A couple of months ago, SI ran a short series on Why You Should Not Build Your Own e-Sourcing System, which also included pieces on Why You Should Not Build Your Own Spend Analysis, Why You Should Not Build Your Own e-Negotiation Platform, and Why You Should Not Build Your Own Decision Optimization because he heard that a
few public sector organizations have this crazy idea that they can build their own and that it can, somehow, compete with best-of-breed solutions on the market today.

As per that series, this is not the case.

And even though SI has said in the past not to put too much emphasis on traditional, first generation, contract management solutions compared to analysis and optimization when the organization is seeking efficiency and cost savings, because most first generation contract management solutions looked like they were built by a high school student in Microsoft Access (and offered no more functionality than such a solution would contain), this doesn’t mean you should build your own either.

First of all, newer contract management systems go beyond simple document management functionality, and, thus, contain significant functionality that cannot be built by a high school student with Microsoft Access.

Second, most users want a Microsoft Word experience for authoring or versioning, regardless of whether or not there is a better way, so you will have to spend countless hours on a seamless Word integration, and Microsoft integration is no piece of cake.

Third, you will be wasting a lot of time and money re-inventing the wheel that has already been reinvented about a dozen time. Talk about a big waste of (public) money!

Consider the core absolutes of contract management that everyone can agree on.

1. Authoring & Versioning

As we just said, everyone, and especially everyone in Legal, wants Microsoft Word authoring & versioning, so no matter what you do, this integration will be essential. And most CM vendors have this, so why reinvent the wheel?

2. e-Signature

Most people think this is a core part of contract management, and while it is not, since not all jurisdictions recognize e-Signatures and not all companies will allow them, but if they are jurisdictionally accepted, or even mandated, this is core. However, implementing a secure e-Signature (which is not the same as a digital signature by the way, see this piece on “e-signatures and digital signatures in procurement definitions and considerations” over on Spend Matters that was co-authored by the doctor for clarification) is not easy, and will require some serious development chops on your staff. Plus, how will you get it adopted and proved when there are about 40 global providers (even though the top 4 dominate most of the market)?

3. Document Management, Search & Discovery

There might be a few dozen free open-source content management systems, but that doesn’t mean you can re-purpose them as good contract management systems. First of all, contract management requires the management of contracts, amendments, schedules, work orders and related insurance certificates, regulatory approvals, and documentary deliverables. These all have to be related, indexed, cross-correlated, and chronologically ordered when a user is looking for current prices, terms, or schedules or prices, terms, or schedules when a work order was submitted. Secondly, meta-data will never be complete so full text search on various document, and image, formats will also be required along with seamless integration with meta data search. This is a fair amount of coding, which has already been perfected in a number of contract management systems.

4. Alerts & Reporting

Contract Management requires the accomplishment of necessary tasks on a scheduled basis, which often only happens when people are reminded. That’s why alerts are necessary. And status updates across contracts often require reports, as well as updates on all active contracts against a supplier, spend against a contract, etc. Across the organization, dozens of different reports will probably be required. Do you really want to waste countless hours developing dozens of reports with dozens of variations to please everyone when a number of packages not only contain a full library to start from and a report builder to alter existing and create new reports? Hopefully not!

Plus, today’s next generation contract management solutions, which do a lot more than initial contract management solutions did last decade, often cost less than their predecessors? So why waste what could amount to millions rebuilding a shoddier version of the wheel?

For more information on what next generation contract management systems can do, please refer to the ongoing series on CLM by the doctor, the maverick, and the prophet over on Spend Matters Pro (membership required):

  • Part I: An Introduction
  • Part II: Understanding the Platform Model
  • Part III: Mapping the Upstream and Downstream Contract Phases
  • Part IV: Traditional Solutions
  • Part V: The Core Platform
  • Part VI: The Standard Platform
  • Part VII: The Extended Platform

Technological Damnation 91: Proprietary Madness

It’s bad enough that we have to deal with IP & Patent Madness, as chronicled in our post on the 89th (Technology) Damnation, but proprietary madness is likely to drive us all mad (and may someday push the doctor over the edge, into the land of the crackpot, where at least one blogger in the space is already dwelling).

Just what is proprietary madness? It’s mega-corporations, especially in software and electronics, taking the rights of ownership to extreme. Started, and continued, by the current and former Technology heavyweights, including the likes of IBM, Microsoft, and SAP, it’s not only the creation of company specific standards for software and hardware interfaces, its the restriction of the specification of those interfaces to approved partners and suppliers, limiting the supply of support services and related products to a handful of vendors. This not only drives up the price of those products and services to well above the market average price for support services for software and products with open and published specifications, but can make it difficult, if not impossible, to get support when demand is high or related products if one of the few vendors who can produce products shuts down.

Those of you with SAP know exactly what we’re talking about. Unlike Oracle, which publishes its core schema, and does not change it between minor versions, SAP does not publish its score schema, does not guarantee any stability between bug updates between minor versions, such as between 4.7.1 and 4.7.2, instead requiring you to go through its proprietary NetWeaver interface, which you will, of course, have to acquire to actually support any customizations (and likely build applications in the Portal). And learning the portal is no easy task. One of the most complete books on it is 700 pages alone! Then you need to find the documentation on the data stored in each R3 module you are interested in and how to get it out. There’s a reason that not every shop does SAP support — and that’s because, even though SAP now has a lot of documentation on their website, you need weeks of expensive training just to learn the basics of Portal Development, R3 interface, and the core data types and record types used to pull the data you need out of R3 and push modified data back in. Getting to the point where you are effective at developing and integrating custom supply chain applications requires months of training and mentoring and years of experience. As a result, it’s typically only SAP partners who can provide this support. In contrast, with an open Schema, as found in Oracle and MySQL, all you need is SQL experience and the interface library for whatever language you are using (whereas NetWeaver limits you to Java) — which makes it much easier (and cheaper) to not only find support resources, but vendors with best of breed software modules and platforms that can plug and play with Oracle right out of the box!

But it’s not just software vendors that create proprietary technologies, it’s hardware vendors too. Dell, IBM, HP, etc. all have custom control and administrative solutions for their server platforms. Want a third party virtualization platform to work out of the box on a new server configuration and take full advantage of the capabilities? forget it! You’ll probably have to wait six months to a year or more before third parties, like VMWare, are optimized and configured for those platforms (assuming that the full specifications are published upon technology release and licenses for custom drivers aren’t required), making their administrative software a must if you want to upgrade to the latest technology, and not upgrade to technology that was outdated a year ago.

But it’s not just IT companies that have proprietary technologies and interfaces. Big electronics companies do this too for most of their consumer (and even enterprise) electronics, including companies like Samsung (and its new Mobile AP core) and Sony (and its new ultra high definition TV technology).

And while there is nothing wrong with proprietary technology, as a company needs some assets in order to survive, the lengths at which some companies go to keep it secret and protect it, in a world where data needs to be shared and products need to be utilized with other products makes development (and the supply chains that rely on that development), a nightmare.

We need open standards and open interfaces. The sheer existence of IE alone should make that clear. (There’s a reason that many new IT start ups simply won’t support it anymore, and that’s because they can write stuff that runs almost flawlessly in Chrome, Firefox, and a dozen of other browsers or that runs almost flawlessly in a single version of IE on Windows platforms only, but not both. Since Chrome and Firefox and similar clone browsers run on all major platforms, and IE doesn’t, and since Chrome and Firefox almost fully support the open standards, whereas IE supports the Microsoft standards and those portions of the open standards it feels like, and, to top it off, [older versions of] IE allows case insensitive JavaScript!) Restrictive proprietary standards and interfaces just make life unnecessarily difficult.

But too many companies are too big and powerful, so it’s not going to happen and we’ll be forever wasting countless hours checking interface requirements, versions, and support availability instead of focusing on whether or not the technology meets our needs and will help us get our work done. It’s more daily damnation for all of us.