John Gottman’s research on predicting interpersonal relationship failure should resonate with vendor managers. Gottman’s team, profiled in the Australian Financial Review and Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, has identified four traits that, if present, indicate that the relationship has an 85% chance of failure. The odds of failure increase to 97.5% if one party's attempts to repair [...]
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I’m at home this morning looking after my 2 year old daughter who’s too ill to go to child care. My wife will be spelling me off this afternoon whilst I go see a client.
Inspired by Justin Sullivan’s article on benchmarking diapers (Thanks for pointer, Jason), I’ve decided to share the Blue Ocean Strategy [...]
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Some of you may have noticed a new facade to E-Sourcing Forum on Friday. Please, join me on a brief tour of your new surroundings with updated amenities abound. Some of the highlights include:
New Presentation: The last design was fine and worked, but honestly, the pink hue that existed on some monitors always [...]
Optimization can not only be used to reduce cost, but it can also be used to reduce risk. In this post I’m going to overview how you can effectively support seven common risk mitigation strategies in a proper strategic sourcing decision optimization solution (including the solution offered by Iasta, if you’re wondering).
Capacity Assurance
You [...]
Last month, Global Services Media ran an article titled Sourcing: From Art to Science that noted that not only do today’s approaches to managing global sourcing rely primarily on antiquated methods for project scoping, but that they also fail to put into place real-time metrics to assess productivity. The article also notes that nearly [...]
Today, I would like to welcome a guest post from a practitioner in management at a F500 company. It is this person’s first attempt at blogging and I welcome this opportunity to get reactions from people that have seen many situations from front row. Right now, I have made an account for this [...]
A recent article popped up in Network World about another vendor in the industry extolling the virtues of “utility computing”.
Perfect Commerce, much to the chagrin of its remaining internal IT staff, is outsourcing all of its datacenter operations to Savvis in a $5 million 3-year contract. When I first read this I was shocked [...]
Author’s note: This is a joint effort with Michael Lamoureux.
A lot of vendors these days are claiming to offer SaaS, because that’s the buzzword of the day and people are realizing that unless they are an IT company with their own high reliability, fault-tolerant, data center with redundant Internet connectivity and power providers, it’s usually [...]
Free Trade Zones, Foreign Trade Zones, Special Economic Zones, and Sectoral Promotion Programs may all sound like the same entity, but, depending on the country, they can be vastly different. Where global trade is concerned, they can be a great advantage, if understood and used properly, or a relative disadvantage if not well understood.
In [...]