Procurement & Career Guidance
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that IBM is looking to potentially sell the Watson Health Platform (consisting of AI and companies like Merge, Truven, Explorys, and Phytel).
Why did something so promising end up becoming a failure for the company?
This video explores the ups and downs of Watson Health:
1. Take responsibility for what happened. Don’t pawn it off on other people.
2. Explain why it happened as gracefully as you can. People find comfort in the “why” of things.
3. Don’t make it a bigger deal than it is. Your reaction can make it more embarrassing than it already is.
http://lifehacker.com/how-to-keep-kids-pets-and-other-interruptions-from-de-1793177092
I know many visitors on the site listen to the podcast right in the browser, but if you want to take SourceCast with you on the go, and listen to other, much better content, use Pocket Casts – this is the Podcast app I personally use to keep up with the multitude of podcasts I follow.
http://lifehacker.com/how-to-use-pocket-casts-to-wrangle-your-horrible-podcas-1793102283
Many companies operate, for example, on an established safety stock or production level because that’s the way it has always been done. When it comes to contracting with suppliers and external manufacturers, changes in scale must be justified… a lack of data makes that process difficult.
The case study suggests Merck & Co. realized this was a problem, and sought to integrate its systems into a single platform capable of both supply and demand planning. The change allowed the company global visibility for all of its finished goods, and segmentation of goods to better determine when exceptions are necessary, for example.
Antonio Centeno of Real Men Real Style grew up in a trailer park, and that experience made him realize just how a person’s clothes can determine your expectations for them. You’d be more wary of trusting a doctor wearing a tye-dye shirt than one wearing a lab coat, and you’d be less likely to answer the door for a cable repair man who didn’t wear a uniform.
https://www.entrepreneur.com/video/290171
The host is somewhat annoying, but interesting information…
Many supply chain professionals report that their organizations have increased their investment in analytics over the last three years, according to a recent APQC survey. This survey looked at the analytics practices of organizations, as well as the structure of these efforts. APQC surveyed supply chain professionals from a variety of organization sizes and regions and from 36 industries. APQC’s analysis found that organizations have several areas of focus for their supply chain analytics efforts, and that most organizations have a formal analytics structure. However, the payoff of these efforts may not be at the level organizations would expect.
http://www.scmr.com/article/maturity_is_the_key_to_effective_analytics#When:15:16:00Z
Photo: Caroline Hernandez
Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy doesn’t talk much about the competition, but he made rare comments about that competition during a recorded chat with a college professor.
On IBM and Oracle:
“I think there’s a second category of large technology companies that just took an ungodly long time to get there. These are companies like Oracle and IBM, some of those folks. I think for them the model that we were pursuing, in the cloud, was so disruptive to their core businesses. The margin structures are radically different. The pricing structures are dramatically different. The delivery model is radically different. The way you take care of customers is radically different. So different that I think you have that dilemma at a lot of large companies: do you really want to try and accelerate the cannibalization of an existing … I think that they fought as long and hard as they could. They pooh-poohed it and they said, first no one will use it, then maybe only startups will use it, and they won’t use it for anything real, then enterprises will never use it, then enterprises will never use it for anything mission-critical. Companies and developers voted with their workloads, and so now they’re in this spot of trying to spin something up. It’s six, seven years late.”
Photo: Jaromír Kavan