Starting a business, writing a book and launching a new business model is a tall order. It has been 2 ½ months, and I am happy to report that we are making progress against our goals. We are committed to redefining the analyst model one step at a time. Our Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs) are in front of us and we are focused on making them real:
- Launch the Supply Chain Index. 2012 is the 30th anniversary of supply chain management, but we still do not know what defines supply chain excellence. To help, we are busy collecting twenty years of industry financial data. Over the summer, through the use of summer interns, we will be mining the data. Over time, we will be connecting industry financial data to the quantitative studies that we are doing. We want to make the cause and effect of supply chain management practices better understood. (If you have a project before we launch the full service, and need some data just shoot as an email.)
- Return the power to the user. Gartner has the Magic Quadrant. Forrester has the Wave. Supply Chain Insights will have the Voice. This will be an evaluative framework to help buyers of technology make better decisions on the purchase of supply chain software and consulting services. It will not be based solely on analyst input: analysts sitting around the table in a conference room or doing briefings on phones. Instead, it will be based on user-based content from our community. It will reflect the VOICE of real users telling it like it is based on actual experience. This will take us a year to build. The community launch is our first step.
With quantitative research support, I now feel like I am back in the research business. We are now a team of five, and we are slowly making progress against our immediate goals of:
- Building real supply chain research. We have put four surveys into the field and completed one. An additional survey will be complete in May and two more will be completed in June. Due to the strong research, the content of the www.supplychainshaman.com blog is getting stronger and next week, we will publish our first reports. It has taken us a couple of weeks to “nail down our templates.” We have an aggressive schedule, and lots of energy to push real supply chain reports back into the market. These reports will be published under the “open research” model. They can be “cited” using our citation policy outlined on this site. We will be pushing them to the market through slideshare and twitter. Please sign up to follow our progress at http://www.slideshare.net/loracecere/. We also have a YouTube channel for video and built a Supply Chain Insights Wiki.
- Finishing the book Bricks Matter. The book manuscript is 90% complete and in its review cycles. It can be pre-ordered and is set for a fall publication. We appreciate the help of all the supply chain pioneers in helping us with the interviews and the approval cycles. Writing a book is much harder than it sounds.
- Building the community. We have licensed a JIVE software platform to build the Supply Chain Insights Community and we have actively begun the design. Our learning curve on community design has been steep. We are committed to launching this community in the summer of 2012 and would love to go through the design with you.
To all our customers, we say “thanks” for making this possible.
Lora Cecere, Founder of Supply Chain Insights