Thirty Years Ago Today

The Free Software Foundation, which launched the GNU General Public License, was founded by Richard Stallman, and the fee software movement, which started when he launched the GNU Project on 27 September 1983, began in earnest.

It took less than 15 years from the start of the movement, to the dismay of companies like IBM and Microsoft, for many open source projects, including Linux (1991), Apache (1995), MySQL (1995), and PHP (1995), to dominate the web.

And allow LOLCats everywhere to dominate the web. 😉

Seventy Three Years Ago Today

The space race begins with the launch of a V2/A4-rocket from Test Stand VII at Peenemunde, Germany which becomes the first man-made object to reach space.

Less than nineteen years later, Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space when he orbited the earth on 12 April 1961 in a Soviet Vostok spacecraft.

And a mere eight years later, unless conspiracy theorists are to be believed, the United States put the first man on the moon on 20 July 1969.

Less than two years after that, the Soviet Union launched the first space station, Salyut, and public-sector extra-planetary supply management began.

Speaking of the space race, the Space Shuttle Atlantis made its maiden flight thirty years ago today on 3 October 1985, forty two years after the space race began. Atlantis, the fourth operational space shuttle, flew thirty-three missions and orbited the earth a total of 4,848 times, travelling a distance that was more than 525 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Notable missions were it’s 4th, which deployed the Magellan probe bound for Venus, its 5th, which deployed the Galileo probe bound for Jupiter, its 14th, which represented the 100th US manned mission and the first shuttle docking with Mir, its 21st, which was its first docking with the International Space Station (ISS), and its 30th, which was the final Hubble Space Telescope Servicing Mission.

And eleven years ago, less a day, on 4 October 2004, SpaceShipOne won the $10 Million Ansari XPrize when it became the first-even private vehicle to carry a human being into space.

And this year, Space Exploration Techologies, SapceX, became the first company to ship private cargo to the ISS using its own rocket and ship, the Dragon.

And Virgin Galactic is working on a new SpaceShipTwo that could be ready to take commercial passengers into space as early as next year.

It won’t be long before someone puts up a private space station, and private sector extra-planetary supply management becomes a reality. (And when it does, and you need someone to optimize those supply models, you know who to call.)

Infrastructure Damnation 14: Roads


Roll on highway, roll on along
Roll on daddy till you get back home
Roll on family, roll on crew
Roll on momma like I asked you to do
And roll on eighteen-wheeler, roll on (roll on)
  David Loggins, 1984

When we think about transportation in Procurement, we typically think about Carriers and 3PL Firms, two of our provider damnations, but Carriers and 3PLs typically transport your goods using eighteen wheeler trucks, and eighteen wheeler trucks have to use roads. And they have to roll on — which they usually do, until they don’t.

Wait, what?

They roll on until they don’t. Roads deliver their own special type of universal damnation, which impacts Procurement more than most.

Road Hazards: Pot Holes, Sharp Debris, Liquid Tar

Your eighteen wheelers can’t roll on without those eighteen wheels. A pot hole, sharp debris (nails, industrial strength broken glass, etc.), and the asphalt itself (which can reach temperatures 50C or 100F higher than the ambient air temperature in the blazing hot sun) can cause tire blowouts on a regular basis due to the hard impacts, big holes, and the rubber melting temperatures they create. And your truck is grounded until the tires are replaced.

Road Conditions: Often Abysmal at the Best of Times

While the roads in most big cities and the roads that are designated as major highways are typically in pretty good condition in the USA, in some countries, your average highway is full of craters, and sometimes isn’t even paved. So while your goods may roll on at 110 km or 70 miles an hour in the USA, in some places in India, if you can get 30 km or 20 miles per hour, consider yourself lucky. The reality is that in some places, your goods aren’t moving any faster than if they were being transported by an old-fashioned horse-drawn carriage.

And sometimes more prosperous countries will attempt to improve the roads, and the you have construction. Instead of covering 30 km / hr, your driver will spend over half of his driving day sitting in a traffic jam and will watch the horses trot by.

And if the roads are good, and near a big city, everybody tries to use them and you get bumper to bumper traffic jams where traffic moves at about the same pace as a person who is speed walking.

In other words, truck transport is often slow, slow, slow.

Highwaymen

A lot of theft occurs on the open road. Sometimes your driver, on his own, is unlucky enough to be held up at gun point when he stops to investigate a hazard, heed the call of nature, gas up, or grab some hot food at a truck stop. Sometimes, he’s lucky enough to have his rig broken into, hot wired, and driven off when he’s heeding the call of nature in a restroom or eating in a roadside truck stop. Either way, his mode of transportation and your cargo is gone, gone, gone.

Confiscation

Sometimes the highwaymen won’t steal the truck, but will instead try to use it to transport illegal goods or aliens. The driver will pull over at a stop, the truck will be a few hundred kilos heavier than the paperwork says the truck should be, the truck will get searched by authorities, contraband will be found, and the whole truck and all of its contents will get seized. And if he’s unlucky, your driver will get arrested, and then, upon his release, immediately tell you where to stick the next driving assignment you try to push his way.

We may not want to think much about them, but roads are an eternal damnation of the Procurement professional as they are literally what the trucking industry rolls on. Sometimes it really is best to return to the rails.

Influential Damnation 98: Pundits / Futurists

Pundits and Futurists, who are one in the same, are the third influential damnation we are discussing, having already addressed consortiums and conferences. In order to see how these individuals are one in the same, we’ll start by reviewing standard definitions.

A pundit is defined as a person who offers to mass media their opinion or commentary on a particular subject area on which they appear to be knowledgeable.

A futurist is defined as a person who regularly makes predictions about the future, which is precisely what a pundit typically does when they offer their opinion and commentary to mass media!

Why are these individuals a damnation?

First of all, as clearly explained in Sourcing Innovation’s recent series on
The “Future” of Procurement: What’s Old is Still Old! and An Expose of Procurement “Future” Trends: Digging Deep to Reveal the Truth, most of what those bloody futurists are proclaiming as the grand future of Procurement is old news, ongoing blues, or remanufactured shoes. Most of what they have been preaching from the worn out pulpit the last few years is the exact same message that their futurist predecessor were preaching one or more decades (or even centuries) ago!

Secondly, like the purveyors of apps, mobile, big data, and cloud, most of their messages are based in fear. If you don’t prepare for this today, you will go out of business tomorrow. If you don’t get this platform today, you will be relegated to the third world tomorrow. If you don’t jump on this process today, you will bleed red tomorrow.

Thirdly, when they get tired of preaching their tired old messages, they jump on the first vendor that gets a bad rap in the gossip chain as a result of an implementation that didn’t go perfectly, typically before figuring out why and who is really to blame. While it’s usually the case that the vendor didn’t do as good of a job managing the project as they should have done, it’s often the case that the customer didn’t heed the advice of the vendor and tried to rush ahead or do something themselves that was difficult without getting proper training and guidance. Enterprise technology, and especially enterprise technology that relies on a lot of integrations, data, advanced analytics, or sophisticated models, is always more involved and difficult to implement, integrate, and configure than you think it is and trying to do it yourself without an understanding of the nuances and gotchas is just asking for trouble. And while it is true that some vendors charge a lot for this service, it was the customer’s choice to select that vendor in the first place so the blame typically rests as much on the customer as on the vendor. And a pundit that just jumps all over the vendor without getting a full picture of what went wrong and how it could have been prevented doesn’t help anyone. We need to identify failings, their root causes, and solutions so that everyone can learn and move forward. Not encourage Perez Hiltons’ to invade our space.

Anyway, they’re a damnation and that’s why if the doctor is anything, he’s an anti-futurist.

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.