Category Archives: Knowledge Management

Have You Mastered the 4th T of Tracery?

Regular readers will know that the time of PPT — People, Process, Technology — has long passed. In today’s fast paced world where product life-cycles are sometimes over as soon as they hit the market, and where your competitors are constantly striving to outpace you in both sales and supply management, you can’t live on processes anymore — they go stale almost as soon as you’ve got them figured out. And in a knowledge economy, just having a butt in a seat or a worker at an assembly line isn’t enough to succeed — you need a worker who, at the very least, is smarter than the average worker and, preferably, smarter than the worker employed by your competitor. And your technology cannot get out of date.

That’s why SI has been promoting the 3 T’s for years — Technology, Talent, and Transition. You need a solid, regularly updated, technology foundation upon which to build your modern Supply Management Organization. You need talent to put together good operating procedures, properly use the technology, and to constantly identify new opportunities for cost reduction or value generation. And you need great transition management as even best six sigma process today won’t cut it tomorrow when you need to upgrade your product offering, switch suppliers, change distribution methods, and make sure your product is Designed for Recycling from the get-go as new regulations are forcing you to take back your product at end of life and recycle it as you are using chemicals and / or rare earth minerals that are heavily regulated.

But while these are necessary conditions for Supply Management success, they are not necessarily sufficient. While it is true you will not succeed without a mastery of technology, talent, and transition management, as per our first post on Project Assurance, organizational success also depends on selecting a superior strategy and seeing it through until the desired results are achieved (or the organization changes its strategy, which hopefully wasn’t done arbitrarily on the whim of a CXO after talking to a buddy on the golf course). However, in order to properly implement a strategy, you have to not only see it through from start to finish, but you have to make sure all of the process streams necessary for success are both completed and properly synched. Just like the key to a good weave, as one might find in Egyptian Cotton, is a skillful interleaving of the thread, the key to a good strategy, is a skillful interleaving of the process strands into an effective transition plan from where you are to where you need to be.

And this, dear readers, is Tracery — the “delicate, interlacing, work of lines as in an embroidery”, or, more modernly, “a network” — the glue that not only binds the Technology, Talent, and Transition Management that your Supply Management organization needs to succeed, but that interleaves these threads in a way that causes each of them to reinforce each other and make a stronger whole.

Supply Managers are the Rock Stars of the Coming Resource Revolution … But

… the reality is that, in the majority of organizations, Supply Managers are still zeroes, not heroes, even though Professor Sheffi is taking the glass half full view in his article on “how a profession went from zero to hero” on SupplyChainMIT.com.

Supply Managers are only heroes in those leading organizations that were forwarding looking enough to let Purchasers gain influence in both the inbound and outbound supply chain and raise the profile of the organization in the eyes of both customers and suppliers. Their new practices, global view, and risk mitigation not only raised their profile, but also the profile of the organization as a whole. They were given more respect and authority, and soon after were the heroes of their organization.

But not every organization had the foresight of these leading organizations and, as a result, it is still only a select group of leaders that have truly embraced Supply Management and leaped the pond. Most organizations are still effectively in the dark ages and haven’t even embraced RFx or basic e-Invoice technology. While a considerable (but not necessarily a majority) of Fortune 500 / Global 2000 organizations have embraced Supply Management to some degree and some Procurement or Sourcing Technology, as you work your way down to mid-size and smaller organizations, the percentage of organizations that have embraced Supply Management and associated technology decreases dramatically.

Furtheremore, not only is there a huge number of organizations that have not adopted Supply Management, there is a huge gap between the enlightened and the ignorant. And the gap could mean the difference between uninhibited success and eventual bankruptcy.

So how do we spread the message to the masses and usher in the resource revolution?

Looking Behind the Knowledge Network Curtains (Repost)

This post originally ran on November 19, 2010. However, it is still as relevant today as it was then and, for those of you who did read it before, not too much of a distraction to you as we approach the World Cup Final 😉

Today’s guest post is from John Shaw, the Director of Education Services for Supply Management at BravoSolution.

In a recent post, the doctor asked, “Where is the Knowledge Network?” and “What is an aspiring supply management professional to do?”

Our industry is offering a growing list of online resources and supply management organizations. We can use these resources to augment the knowledge we gain through our professional activities and personal networks. As the doctor stated, each of these resources takes time and effort to build, so naturally, the goals and objectives of these networks are aligned with those individuals who invest in building each network in the first place.

Our challenge as supply management professionals is to navigate this forest of information in a way that maximizes our personal development. To do so, we need to understand where our personal objectives align with those of a knowledge network. The better we understand how each network’s objectives align with our own, the more value we will receive out of the limited time we have to invest in them.

So as both a consumer of these networks and a developer of some (see discloser below) I’d like to offer some questions for you to ask when trying to determine if participating in a particular knowledge network would be valuable to you:

  • Does the intent of the network align with the needs of the membership?
    The Network Guidelines should clearly state the audience, and the types of information exchange the network facilitates. If they are not stated, or they do not align with what your current development needs, your time may be better invested elsewhere.
  • Who are the thunder lizards?
    Look to see who the most active participants are. The most active people in a community will steer its direction. If these people are your peers, or better, if they are in roles that you aspire to, look further into participating.
  • Who is in charge?
    Successful communities are driven by the membership. If enough thunder lizards march in the same direction a community will move and take a life of its own. The builder can find him/herself in the passenger seat. In the best scenario, you’ll find that the thunder lizards are your peers, and they are in charge!

So what are we to do? Unfortunately there isn’t a simple answer. Whether we are learning about supply management, following politics or trying to get the best advice online for fixing a leaking pipe, we need to look behind the curtains to understand our information sources

Thanks, John!

The USIS was Established 80 Years Ago Today

On November 17, 1933 Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6433-A and created the National Emergency Council (NEC), sing an appropriation authorized by Section 220 of the National Industrial Recovery Act of June 16, 1933, in response to the declaration by the Congress of the United States of the existence of an acute national economic emergency which affects the national public interest and welfare.

The NEC was deemed created for the purpose of coordinating and making more efficient and productive the work of the numerous field agencies of the Government established under, and for the purpose of carrying into, effect, the provisions of the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and the Federal Emergency Relief Act that were all signed into law in 1933 in response to the Great Depression.

Six months later, Clara M. Edmunds, head librarian of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s public information service, opened the U.S. Information Services library, which was designed to be the comprehensive collection of relevant government documents, updated regularly to record every development in the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the government. This library, which centralized information about federal rules, regulations, and administrative orders for the public, was the first one-stop-shop for government information until 1948. In 1945, Truman, who had no interest in funding it, took office. In 1946, the USIS was put under the state department and had its funding reduced. And in 1948, the Smith-Mundt Act, which focussed on the creation of an information service to disseminate information abroad about the United States (instead of to its own citizens) put the final nail in the USIS coffin. (One account of the United States Information Service Libraries can be found in the online archive of the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library Science. Information can also be found in A Timeline of Events in the History of Libraries.)

It may have only lasted 15 years, but it was a revolution in government information management and deserves to be remembered.

The Infinite Monkey Theorem

The Infinite Monkey Theorem, which states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare, is 100 years old this year. The theorem first appeared in Emile Borel‘s 1913 article “Mecanique Statistique et Irreversibilite which was published in J. Phys. 5e serie, vol 3, pp. 189-196. And thus began The Parable of the Monkeys.

But since you have the doctor, you don’t have to wait an infinite amount of time for your supply management blog posts, which will resume on regular schedule after the holiday weekend!

typing monkey