Supply Chain Social Networks: Useful Resource or Productivity Killer?

In full disclosure, maybe I'm not the most neutral individual to be writing this post, as you already know my views on social networks and my intent to stay faceless and spaceless, but the invites to the new kids on the supply chain block, specifically, the Ning based SCM Professionals and iProcurement.org, have started to come fast and furious, as well as request to comment on them and their functionality. So, for better or for worse, here's my take on the new "communities".

In an effort to be optimistic, we'll start with the positives.

  • They both have blog capabilities, and not only are blogs great sources of information, but there's a few blogs out there that are better than most, if not all, of the publications in the space.
  • They both have news headlines from in-bound RSS feeds, however, the fact that they don't list the article source or time is very annoying - and productivity draining. If you know a source consistently has poor articles or poor information - do you really want to waste time clicking through to it? And if you regularly click through to articles from poor sources, you're going to quickly give upon the feature and deem it worthless.
  • They allow you share relevant presentation materials, as photos, and instructional videos from other sites. Of course, the search feature is only on the free-form video description text, which, if not carefully constructed by the uploader, can be pretty useless.
  • They allow for the constructions of "groups" within the community, so that like minded individuals can easily find each other, and with appropriate e-mail settings, geographically local groups can easily organize events and keep each other informed. Of course, the lack of a digest feature (or at least the lack of a locatable one) could lead to a very annoying amount of e-mail to the point where you feel like you are being spammed, turn off all e-mail, and negate most of the benefits the groups were designed to provide.
  • One of the sites has an expanded news amalgamation service with headlines, source, time, and the first 100 words - but the box organization that is used wastes so much real estate that you get three articles on the sidebar, which takes up a third of the screen. Not useful.

And that's the good stuff, as not-so-good as it is. Now on to the negatives.

  • Latest activity tracker - with the exception of big brother (with his dreams come true at the sheer amount of personal data available on today's social networks), who the hell cares who the last 10 people to log on were, or what they looked at, or when they signed out, etc.
  • Comment wall - graffiti for the virtual world. Need I say more?
  • Photo free for all - upload anything, any time, with any description, or lack thereof; how are you supposed to find anything useful?
  • Video free for all - anything, anytime, any header; think the latest Bugs Bunny cartoon has a good supply chain lesson? upload it ... watch it randomly make the "featured videos" selection. Real professional.
  • "Featured" - members, groups, etc. - unless these are personally selected by real experts who have personally confirmed solid content, I don't care; right now, most social networks are set up so that everyone gets an equal, random, shot at the rotation
  • "New" - members, groups, etc. - if a network is successful, you'll have thousands of new members, photos, etc. a day - who has time to wade through all that? Plus, I don't know about you, but a bunch of empty grey heads doesn't look that attractive to me. Most new members, groups, etc. don't have / upload pictures / logos right away. The selection logic should at least be intelligent enough not to select those profiles without images when trying to make an image montage. A single "if" statement. Junior high programming skill. Or at least I thought it was!
  • Very amateur look and layout - I'm sorry, but I don't want to scroll down an average of four screens on the average page to see what's going on, a header doesn't need to take up over a third of the screen, thumbnails don't need to be three times the average size, and an "Uncle Sam Wants You" ad-campaign rip-off isn't going to inspire professionals from around the world to sign up. I could go on, but you get the point.

The verdict? Given the relative lack of useful content, the difficulty of identifying the sources and / or finding the content, and the over-abundance of purely social network features, for the time being, I'm definitely classifying these in the "Productivity Killer" category. When it comes to finding the relatively small amount of fresh, new, useful, and innovative content out there that is actually worth reading, I don't see them being of any help in their current form, and actually see them as being more trouble than they're worth. Connecting with people? Conferences, e-mail, and the good old fashioned telephone work just fine!

Maybe it's just me, but I have no interest in ending up like the jacked in, strange talking cyberteens in love in Dowler's bleak picture of the future or the on-liners in the "Net Worth" Sliders episode where they can't talk to each other without going through a computer. And I guess that's just where I see today's social networks taking us if we continue on this road.

In summary, supply chain community: good. Social network: bad. And maybe the two should never meet.

Posted by the doctor at 4/14/2008 7:00 AM
Categories: Technology,Blogologue
 

What did you think of this article?




Trackbacks
Trackback specific URL for this entry
  • Trackbacks are closed for this entry.
Comments
Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

  • 4/14/2008 8:41 AM Alan Buxton wrote:
    Hi Doc

    So I've just signed up for iprocurement.org to see what it's all about. Apparently "iProcurement.org is a tool that will allow you to collaborate and tap into the wisdom of the procurement community." Not clear on how it will achieve this, though.

    The trouble with social networks is that one the one hand you need a certain critical mass of members to make the network worthwhile. On the other hand, once you have too many people the network degenerates into noise.

    To me the groups you mention look faddish. But I don't want to write them off ever - just that they'll take some more tweaking to get useful for professionals.

    What are your views on something like LinkedIn that isn't procurement focussed at all? Or on the other hand, would an existing, vendor-agnostic go-to location like SourcingInnovation or SpendMatters be a natural place for the development of a "community" that adds some value to its members?
    1. 4/14/2008 9:36 AM the doctor wrote:
      I didn't say the groups would be permanently useless, just that I find them useless as is.  We'll have to see if they become useful or not.

      Linked-In: does what it says it does (allows you to maintain a group of connections on-line) and has essentially no productivity killing features, so I'd say it's more useful than useless.

      As to SI & SM becoming the hub of a "community", I guess you'll have to keep watching!

  • 4/14/2008 9:44 AM Ryan wrote:
    Hi Doc
    Very interesting article- I am a recent Grad, who landed into the procurement industry extremely green (pun intend). I have found great uses for facebook, linkedin and recently www.iprocurement.org to help me network in this small but exciting industry. Due to the amount of Baby Boomers running around this profession, I believe this your reason for lack of new content and daily bloggers.

    From a Personal stand point; I have created a mentoring program with some of the greatest CPO’s in the industry (from all over the world). My friends and family often wonder why I am receiving personal calls from executives (from fortune 500 companies), helping me during an issue at work. (Just last night I was on Skpy with a mentor, who was showing me a cool software program)

    Sometimes I wounded how people networked 20 years ago? Call me “NEW SCHOOL”, but I see only opportunity for online social networking.

    My Father was quoted at our dinner table saying “who you know will get you an interview; but what you know will get you the job” Mr. Spinner

    I believe Web 2.0 is merely a stepping stone in creating new relationships- like anything, its you do with your opportunities.
  • 4/14/2008 12:27 PM Jason Busch wrote:
    I don't know whether to laugh or cry because I agree with a lot about what the good doctor has to say, but I still hold out hope for the power of social networking in our sector of the corporate universe. Some great examples already exist: IACCM's networks and MFG.com's supplier rating/feedback (which I count as a type of social network) to name a few. I've even used and read Linked-in questions as well and found them helpful (the type you use to survey or ask your network a question). One recent question was on China trade, for example. Another social networking site I like for business is DOPPLR. Check it out and catch up with old friends/colleagues when you're on the road.
    1. 4/14/2008 2:34 PM the doctor wrote:
      Cry.  Hope, but cry in the interim.  

      The sad fact is that, as our fellow blogger Vinnie Mirchandani will attest to, is that there is way too much focus on the random web-surfer and not enough on the enterprise.  As such, there is a lack of useful features for professionals trying to be productive on these social networks, and it's likely to stay that way as dozens of social networks put all their focus on competing for the attention of the random web-surfer.

      MFG.com is not what I would call a "social network".  Social networks were designed for people to stay connected and enjoy themselves online (in an effort to take that rudimentary first step in creating either Gibson's or Dowler's or Renshaw's (etc.) vision of the future). MFG.com was designed to make enterprise buyers and suppliers productive.  It may include some of the best features of social networking, but they are embedded in a useful enterprise process, not a useless random one.  IACCM isn't a social network, it's an old-school forum - organized to be useful to its members.  Dopplr bills itself as "an online tool for frequent business travelers" and attempts to solve the problem I tried to solve years ago with shared google calendars (but essentially no one would buy in, as it took some effort to make it work).  LinkedIn is a business network, and one, at least last I checked, relatively free of productivity-draining time-killing un"cool" features.  As none of these meet the true definition of today's social networks, they have merit when properly used.  I've yet to see a useful example of a true social network, and don't expect I will for some time.

      That isn't to say that you shouldn't hold out hope, just that you should feel free to have a good cry in the interim.


  • 4/16/2008 3:18 AM Alan Buxton wrote:
    JP Rangaswami over at Confused of Calcutta has written a lot of stuff worth reading about the use of Facebook (and other Web 2.0 technologies) in the enterprise. e.g. see today's post: http://confusedofcalcutta.com/2008/04/14/thinking-more-about-facebook-and-social-networks-and-e-mail/
Leave a comment

Comments are closed.