Category Archives: rants

I Still Can’t Find My Marbles … But I’m Sure I Know Who Hid Them!

Twitter Bird A few years ago:

Follow Me! Follow Me!
Who are you?
I’m the Twitter Bird!
What’s a Twitter Bird?
It doesn’t matter. Follow me! Follow me!
Whatever. Have a nice day.

A couple of years ago:

Follow Me! Follow Me!
Back again little bird?
Follow Me! Follow Me!
You’re persistent, aren’t you. But I’m not much of a ornithologist.
Who cares? Follow Me! Follow me! Everyone else is!
I find it hard to believe everyone is following a little thrush. You’re cute, but not worth much more than a passing glance.
Follow me! Follow me! Join millions of people around the world.
Millions of people? I think you flew into a patio glass door a little too hard.
Celebrities. Scientists. CEOs. They all follow me. Twitter.com Follow me! Follow me!
Okay, I’ll check you out.

…

Let’s see. A centralized website for sending 140-character blurbs to hundreds, and even thousands, of friends and “followers”. Mass SMS, or, for those of us who are UNIX, a web-based write command that has been around in UNIX operating systems in one form or another since at least 1969! Potentially useful for getting quick messages out, but so is e-mail and SMS. Possibly useful for consumer goods companies wanting to send quick product announcements or, more likely, quick “special of the day” announcements to consumers (if they will actually follow the company) and for gossip-mongers. (I can’t wait for Perez Hilton to tell me what Lady Gaga is thinking right this second! I need to know now!) But for the rest of us? Those of us in the enterprise market? Those of us who don’t give a damn about celebrity rantings? Those of us who actually want to have a real conversation? Doubtful.

Sorry little bird. You’re not my style.
You will follow me! Everyone will follow me! I’m the Twitter Bird! And even the fail whale can’t stop me!
Maybe you should see a veterinarian. Obviously you never quite recovered from that encounter with the patio door. Goodbye

A few months ago:

Follow me! Follow me!
Back again little Twitter bird? You certainly are persistent.
Time to Follow me! Time to Follow me! Four score and twenty million users sending more tweets per day than there are people in the U.S.A can’t be wrong!
That’s a lot of followers. Not Facebook level, but a lot of followers.
So follow me! Follow me! Popularity awaits!
I’m about knowledge. Knowledge isn’t about popularity. It’s about truth. And those who seek shall find.
They’ll find it faster if you follow me! Follow me!
Knowledge isn’t a destination, it’s a journey. And journeys take time, like the acquisition of knowledge.
Follow me! Follow me! I’ll lead you down the yellow brick road!
I’m not looking for courage, a heart, or a brain, as I already possess all three, and I don’t believe in a magical wizard who will solve all my problems. I think I’ll keep going down the road I’m on. I’m joined by thousands of readers making well over a hundred thousand visits per month in their mutual quest for knowledge.
But it’s not millions! Follow me! Follow me!
I’m writing about Supply Management. You could count every practitioner on the planet and you wouldn’t reach a million. And if only 1.5% of people on the planet are on your network, that’s not many more readers for me.
They will follow me! You’ll see. Follow me! Follow me!
You never did see that veterinarian, did you?
Follow me! Follow me!
I’ve tried to be patient and polite with you, little bird, but enough is enough. I swear that as long as I have my marbles, I’ll never follow you!
See you in a few months! Then you’ll follow me! Follow me too!

About a week and a half ago.

My marbles! Where are my marbles! I’ve lost my marbles! I don’t know what to do! How can I make sense of this crazy world without my marbles?

This is an automated e-mail message from the Facebook borg. Resistance is futile. You will join us. You cannot resist.

I … cannot … resist. Friend me.

Look at all the pretty pin boards you can make! Web works of art. It will change the way you bookmark.

I have no idea what a pinboard is or how to make one. But the borg say I can’t resist. So why not? Pin with me.

I’m back! Now you will follow me! Follow me!
I know I shouldn’t. I really, really shouldn’t. But without my marbles to connect my logic centre to my action centre, I can’t stop myself. I … must … follow … you! Follow me!.

And, while you’re at it, don’t forget to:
Card Me,
Circle Me, and
Link With Me*.

Damn you! Damn you to hell Twitter Bird!
I know you hid my marbles. I don’t know how you got them, but I know it was you! Someday I’ll get you for this! Someday!

*Assuming I know who you are. Otherwise, Friend Me first. I believe in keeping my LinkedIn Network limited to those people I have actually interacted with at some point.

Why Gas Prices Are Too Damn High!

OnlineBachelorDegreePrograms.com recently created an interesting infographic that, after breaking down the cost, demonstrated that the underlying reason was global instability and how it affects the price of crude oil which accounts for about 75.5% of the cost of gas in the US. The second biggest cost component was, expectedly, taxes, which account for about 12.25%. A reduction in taxes would help, but even if taxes were chopped in half, you’d still only save $2.44 on a 10-gallon fill-up.

The problem in the US is that Wall Street has changed the formula in the U.S. for pricing gasoline. Until last April, gas prices hinged on the price of U.S. crude oil, set daily in a small town in Cushing, Oklahoma which hosts the largest oil-storage hub in the country. Today, gasoline prices instead track the price of a type of oil found in the North Sea called Brent crude which, today, happens to trade at a premium to U.S. oil by around $20 a barrel. Good for the US oil exporters adding Billions to their bottom lines, but bad for the average U.S. consumer. (Remember, just because a company drills in the U.S. doesn’t mean it has to sell in the U.S. So if you’re a protectionist, maybe you should be fighting for more wildlife preservations. It’s not like you’re going to get cheaper gas anytime soon.) [For more information, see this Fortune article on “If the U.S. is now an oil exporter, why $4 gas?”]

So, unless OPEC decides to try and regulate prices, or the US produces more oil and passes laws mandating that such oil is kept it on its own soil for domestic use and reduces the cost of acquisition for domestic use (possibly by legislating how oil is to be priced in the U.S.), it looks like gas prices are going to be too damn high for a while.

Click the image below to see the full graphic.



Created by: Online Bachelor Degree Programs (.com)

Can You Detect Greenwashing?

Can you detect when a supplier is Greenwashing their product or service? Are you sure? Did you take part in Earth Hour? You did? Guess what! You probably can’t detect greenwashing!

Earth Hour, another stupid marketing gimmick supposedly designed to get the message out about responsible energy usage, actually encourages the exact opposite by telling everyone to stop using power — at the same time — for one hour. Then, at the end of the hour, everyone — at the same time — turns their lights, tvs, and washing machines back on. This is the kind of action that can bring down a power grid, and, guess what, cost more energy then is saved in some cases. (Very little energy is actually saved, by the way. Less than an hour’s worth of lights or TV. You know why? When the hour is over, people are still going to do their laundry. They are still going to cook in their ovens. And they are still going to use whatever power hungry toys they have in their house.)

If you were a power engineer, you’d know that grids are designed to work where energy requirements are at rather constant levels. Basically, in laymen’s terms, whatever is put on to the grid has to be taken off, or the grid will blow. Similarly, if too much energy is taken off too fast, the grid can blow too. If power usage all of a sudden drops 50%, sometimes entire plants have to be rapidly taken off-line. (Which can be a problem if you have a nuclear plant in the mix. You just can’t shut one of those down on a whim!) This wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t for the fact that it takes a lot of time and energy to start up certain types of power plants. Water may turn turbines on its own when they are placed in a waterfall thanks to gravity, but sometimes a kick is needed to start a wind turbine. And coal burning plants don’t start up at the flick of a switch. It takes thousands of households turning off tvs and lights to equal the power required to start a small power plant. Imagine the power wasted shutting down and starting up a large power plant in one hour.

But I digress. As per the Sins of Greenwashing, maintained by TerraChoice, only 4.5% of products in 2010 were sin-free. Only 4.5%! The average claim is stretched so far from the truth that it’s only basis in reality is that the words used to describe it are part of the English language (most of the time). This is important to keep in mind with Earth Day coming up in two weeks and marketing folks getting ever more keen to tap into all the hoop-la that it entails. (Not that Earth Day is bad — just the marketers who try to sell non-green products and services as green.)

So how do you detect greenwashing? Familiarize yourself with the “10 Signs of Greenwash” developed by Futera and documented in this guide on Understanding and Preventing Greenwash co-developed with BSR. In brief, they are:

  1. Fluffy Language
  2. “Dirty Company”
  3. Suggestive Pictures
  4. Irrelevant Claims
  5. Best in Class
  6. Just Not Credible
  7. Jargon
  8. “Imaginary Friends”
  9. No Proof
  10. Out-Right Lying

There’s No Such Thing As BIG Data in Business

I’m getting sick of all this talk about “BIG Data” which is nothing but Bullshit In Guise. The marketing mania has gotten more ludicrous than Ludacris so I’m not sure where to begin at this point, but let’s start with the basics.

  1. Data has always been big
    We’ve always had more data than we can process in real-time, or even in the time window that we want it processed. ALWAYS. Since we’ve always been able to store more data in physical / external storage than we can store in memory, we’ve always had more data than we can process in “real” time. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
  2. In Business, Big has always been meaningless.
    We’re not doing protein folding, climate modelling, nuclear simulations, supercollider data interpolation, cosmological computations, or even trying to beat Deep Blue at Chess. We don’t need Deep Thought, HAL, or even The Architect to solve an average business problem which can probably be solved on the iPad 3 most of you are now carrying around.
    The reality is that even though you may have 100 Million transactions in your ERP, you don’t need to analyze them all at once. Analyzing all of your spend at once is akin to comparing your DVD Player to the kitchen sink to an apple. Does that make any sense? (It doesn’t. And if it does to you, please seek professional help.) Real insight comes from analyzing heterogeneous and related data, possibly through federation, and not from throwing everything into a number cruncher to see what comes out. You wouldn’t ask for the average temperature on earth over the course of a year would you? (And that’s exactly what you’re asking for when you ask for the average transaction size across your business which will include a $4.99 ream of paper to refill the printer to a $200,000,000 acquisition of a new steel plant.)
  3. If you’re smart about your technology acquisition,
    you can already analyze and drill-down into tens of millions of transactions in real time on an average quad-core laptop with 8GB of memory. You will have to get a product coded in C/C++ to take full advantage of the 128 Billion Instructions per second you can get on an Intel Core i7 2600K (as something programmed in an interpretive language like Ruby on Rails will go through so many layers of translation that you’ll be lucky to get 128 Million Instructions per second dedicated to your computations), but the reality is that we now have way more speed than most platforms can take advantage of because, in our quest to not only build cross-platform apps, but teach people to code as quickly as possible, we’ve lost the art of lower-level coding and optimizing an analytics engine to be as fast as possible.

There are “big” data problems, but they don’t exist in business. They exist in some of the areas I mentioned earlier, and that’s why we’re working on exa-flop super-computers, but not in business. Furthermore, your data problems scale in comparison to the data problems coming down the pipe with DOME, a collaboration between IBM and Astron to build a next generation radio telescope, known as the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), that will collect more data in a day than currently exists across the entire internet, factoring in the massive amounts of adult entertainment and multi-media content hosted by public file-share servers. You don’t have big data problems, and if some analyst, consulting, or technology firm tries to tell you that you do, they are talking out of their donkey.

And just so you know, if you have data problems, the cloud, which is NOT a magic mirror (but still full of sweet fluffy dreams for those who choose to join Coleridge in Xanadu), is NOT going to solve your problem. Pushing your data out to random servers on the internet with no IO, no bandwidth, and no computational guarantees is only going to exacerbate your situation. (The Cloud is cheap because most of the servers have less power than the iPad 3 and most of the low-cost providers give you no performance guarantees. If you want performance, power, and pipe – be prepared to pay three to thirty times as much [relative to a server’s useful life] as just buying a high-end server and sticking it in the janitor’s closet where you just happen to have a fiber feed. [A surpising number of small and mid-size non-technical business have their network feeds going into what should be the janitor’s closet because they think it’s a fit place for a server. Why, I don’t know. But they do!])

Customer Service Is Going to Hell — What Should Supply Management Learn?

At Home Depot, employees can’t even be bothered to check their systems to find out if they carry an item one aisle away on the shelf. (See SI’s recent series on Home Depot’s snafus that could be the beginning of their end in five parts: One, Two, Three, Four, and Five.) At Best Buy, if you want a manager, you have to get him or her yourself (Part One) and if you want your problem to be solved in a timely manner, forget it as it will take at least three customer service agents a minimum of a half hour to do so (Part II). Unless you want wi-fi porn on the big screen (Storefront Backtalk), you’re out of luck (as there is no best buy experience). And United, not content with breaking guitars, has decided to go all out and mange their switchover of their ticketing, web, upgraded, and related systems so poorly that “United Airlines Should Be Ashamed” (SpendMatters, March 16, — read it!).

In a nutshell, customer service is going to hell across the board, and it’s doing so almost every single time a company places too much emphasis on technology to “automate” and “streamline” customer interactions. Organizations seem to have forgotten that unless you truly are one of The New Technology Elite, technology can never replace talent, systems can never deliver the service a real person can, and any attempt to implement such big data systems in one fell swoop will almost always result in an implosion that rivals the Big Crunch that some physicists predict will occur at the end of the universe (which immediately precedes the Big Bang, as we all know from the late Douglas Adams who told us all about what you see when you go to Milliways, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe).

We should take a lesson from this, as those who do not study the lessons of (very recent) history will be doomed to repeat them. So what should we learn? First, as Jason Busch points out in The Comments to his post on how United Airlines Should Be Ashamed, we should note that:

  • Flex Capacity Matters
    When the technology inevitably fails, real people will be required to handle the situation.
  • Hard-Wired Integration Outside the Cloud Will Always Be a Nightmare
    And this nightmare will become a reality when trying to add new nodes or change out the guts.
  • Communications Matter!
    Upstream with suppliers and downstream with suppliers. Over-communicate and invest the time to keep everyone in the loop! Finger-pointing helps no one.

In addition, we should note that:

  • Big Bang Upgrades Only Result in Big Crunch Failures
    We should have learned our lessons from the FoxMeyer and Nike ERP disasters which caused the bankruptcy of the first and hundreds of millions in losses for the second. If we didn’t, these recent fiascos should show us just what Big Bang upgrades do!
  • Thorough Testing is a Must
    When you have to port hundreds of thousands or millions of data elements from one system to another, test thoroughly. Anything that can go wrong will, and anything you don’t test for will go wrong.
  • A Rollback Option Must Be Available
    There’s a reason relational databases have rollback capabilities. In case of failure, you can always go back to a previous state. In the United instance, the old system should have been left online, and transactions duplicated across the new and old system for at least a few days, until it was clear the new system worked sufficiently well to run on its own. At the first sign of massive failure, the entire new system should have been taken offline and all transactions directed to the old system.
  • The Disaster Recovery Plan Should Be Ready to Go
    And should be communicated up and down the chain well before any transition occurs. Be prepared for failure. You’ll minimize disruption and recover much faster if you do.

What else can we learn?