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You Can Search, Search, Search … or Just Read SI!

In 2008, Google had indexed One Trillion Web Pages. And many, many more have been added since then. According to Rick Skrenta, co-founder of blekko, there are now more web pages than there are things in the world. And while it’s likely not the case yet, as there are probably 10.5 Sextillion bugs in the world (as it is estimated that there are 1.5 Billion Bugs per person, and there are close to 7 Billion people), and we could count each individual bug as a thing, at the rate the web is growing –especially when each post, each comment, and each tweet can be its own web page — it might not be long before this is true, especially since predictions put the size of the web at 600 quintillion web pages, or one for every 17.5 bugs, by 2020 (which puts us at one page per bug by about 2021).

With content proliferating faster than even the fastest computer virus, it’s getting almost impossible to find what you’re looking for through a web search. Good luck coming up with an initial query that returns less than 100,000 pages. I tried three random combinations of unlikely words in Google, and the best I got was 190,000 pages. (Dodo, apollo, elvis – 961K; Risk, canary, electricity – 1.43M; Poppins, Hamlet, vikings – 190K.) There’s a reason that Googlewhacking died a long, long time ago. There is no one result anymore.

And that’s why blogs, which have been proclaimed dead by the twits who think tweets are the future, are going to return to the glory days. You need someone to sift through the noise and find the useful content to get you through your day, because it’s now beyond the power of even the most powerful search engines to do most of the time. So keep reading SI, and you’ll have one fewer (time-consuming) search to do each day.

Five Long Years

Well I know you
Like your RSS feed
And you’re readin’ these posts each day
And they have grown on you

Well don’t worry
I don’t intend to make things strange
And there’s a reason that things change
There’s nothin’ you can do

And it’s been five long years
Since you’ve seen with weary eyes
Your mind has grown
And sees right through the market lies
the doctor still loves you
you know that’ll never change
Yes it’s been five long years
and now SI must feed the flame

When you read this
do you remember the days when
the wire was void of useful content;
the blog was new, time was on your side
you learned
from the knowledge
and you adhered to the lessons within
a light on the truth
when the space was dark, yeah

And it’s been five long years
Since you’ve seen with weary eyes
Your mind has grown
And sees right through the market lies
the doctor still loves you
you know that’ll never change
Yes it’s been five long years
and now SI must feed the flame

Oh, yeah
Five long years
Five long years

Five long years
Since you’ve seen with weary eyes
Your mind has grown
And sees right through the market lies

  and sees right through the market lies

the doctor still loves you
you know that’ll never change
Yes it’s been five long years
and now SI must feed the flame
Yes it’s been five long years
and now SI must feed the flame
Yes it’s been five long years
but now he must feed the flame

Oh yeah
Five long years
Five long years

Open Call for Demos and Thought Leadership

While Sourcing Innovation is always willing to consider unsolicited guest posts on any supply management topic, right now Sourcing Innovation is interested in the following subjects and looking for thought leadership on these important issues that are going to shape supply management in the years ahead.

  1. Next Generation Sourcing
    Whether you call it Value Focussed Supply (CAPS), Next Practices (The MPower Group), the Supply Chain Value Creation Framework (Tompkins Associates), High Definition Sourcing (Bravo Solution), or Next Level Supply Management (Greybeard Advisors), its clear that the practice of supply management must continue to advance if a supply management organization wants to obtain, and maintain, world class status.
  2. Supply Chain Education
    I’m convinced that, right now, Supply Chain Education is Broken and that a new model is needed to fix it. I’m looking for supporting and contradicting views on the issue. We need to establish a dialogue around this fact before its too late because most of your experienced top talent is going to retire and walk out the door in the next five years.
  3. Next Generation Supply Chain Platforms
    Right now, everyone is buzzing over cloud and social network platforms, even though the cloud does not yet offer any apparent advantages over true multi-tenant SaaS and most social networks don’t let you do anything more than waste time poking your friends. We need to figure out what a true next generation platform really is, not what the hype mongers tell us it should be. (Hint: It’s not Twitter.)

*SI has never refused an open demo request, and doesn’t plan to start now, so all requests will be accepted, but it can only guarantee a review and write-up by the end of May to the first seven respondents.

Think!

Atlantic Business recently ran an awesome article that got my attention on the first word and reeled me in with the first sentence. Entitled “Think!”, the author starts off by noting that he

worries [that] we seem to have forgotten or dismissed the value of careful and considered thought. Common sense seems to be in very short supply. Examples of this are everywhere. We send an email, one which is important (at least to the sender) and we expect a reply virtually instantly. Indeed, if one is not forthcoming within 15 minutes we begin to wonder if the recipient has died.

But more importantly, you have to:

think about this: assume that the question being asked is important. We must therefore want a careful and considered response, a response which has had the complete attention of the recipient. Is it reasonable to assume this could possibly have occurred within 15 minutes?

I have to agree. There’s no way you can construct a deep and thoughtful response to an important question in 15 minutes. Even if you have been thinking about the question for days, it still won’t be possible to create a well crafted response in a few minutes — especially if something else is on your mind. But yet, if the call isn’t returned promptly, you fear that the caller is unable to focus on anything else.

Similarly, it seems that if a journalist, or blogger, doesn’t cover a “breaking” story the minute it happens, he feels that he’ll miss the boat. It used to be a company would make a big announcement and the next day it would be a headline. Now, the release goes up on the website, and 5 minutes later there are half a dozen stories about the latest funding round, merger, or acquisition followed by additional thoughts a few hours later — all based on the release or some cookie cutter responses from PR people in an advance call.

How much “analysis” can one truly come up with in in a few minutes? What can you possibly say that goes beyond a seat-of-the-pants reaction or a gut feeling? If you’re a true expert in the space, then the chances that your seat-of-the-pants reaction or gut feeling will be accurate will be (much) greater than 50%, but it’s still just a gut feeling. True analysis takes time and thought. And even if it doesn’t change your viewpoint, I know I’d much rather read a viewpoint knowing that deep thought (over a sufficient time period) was put it into rather than an impromptu piece where there’s a chance that the author might change his mind in a day or two. If most of don’t have the time to read a story on the same announcement twice, we definitely don’t have the time to be confused — and that’s what will happen if we read a differing opinion from the same source a few days apart.

And while I really couldn’t put it in a word before, that, in a nutshell, is why SI doesn’t cover “breaking announcements” as they happen. Not only is an average press release packed full of PR BS, and not only does it generally not contain enough information to truly analyze what the announcement means from a product/service perspective (which is what this blog really cares about and why the Editor insists on demos as a goal of SI is to help you in your quest to be a better Supply Management professional), but there’s no way you’re going to get a decent analysis and a reasonable opinion on a press release with insufficient information in a few minutes (or even a few hours).

You can be sure that if something’s important, SI will cover it when we’ve gotten to the heart of the matter. But we’re not going to ask “how fast” just because some PR person decides its time for the media to run with a story. The Editor wants deep thought put into what he takes the time to read, and it would be unfair to expect that you would be satisfied with anything less.

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Why SI is Multimedia Free

It seems that the current craze in the blogsphere is to do podcasts and multimedia videos (posted on YouTube). Just about everyone’s doing it, so why isn’t SI?

Well, first of all, as my regular readers know, I’m not a lemming. I didn’t follow the spacers when they went la-la over MySpace. I didn’t follow the facers when they want stupid over Facebook. And I didn’t follow the twits when they went tweeters over Twitter. I’m not a mindless pitch-fork wielding zombie farmer who simply follows the loudest guy with the biggest burning stick. I’m capable of free thought and free expression and willing to make up my own damn mind.

But the real reason SI is multi-media free is this: I like being literate, and I assume that because you keep coming back, you do too. It’s bad enough that Twitter will make a twit out of you, demonstrated by the fact that it’s causing 30% of students to fail English competency, but if we move entirely to multimedia, it won’t be long before the majority of the population is unable to read at a high school level and becomes functionally illiterate. And that’s a fate I don’t want to share in. So I’ll stick to the written word. We’ll all be smarter for it.

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