I walk among the Facebook generation, all these people around me
nodes in a big social network.

This was the beginning of a poem that occurred to me last night as I walked through the Northeastern University campus, where I gave a guest lecture on “Technologies that Tomorrow’s Industry Leaders Are Investing in Today” (a topic that I’ll write about in a future post).  Even though I’m still relatively young, nothing says to me “you’re getting older” than walking through a college campus.

I joined Facebook this summer after hearing many of my friends talk about it.  I registered, set up a basic profile, and walked away.  A few weeks later, someone that lived in my college dorm “friended” me.  I accepted him as a friend, and a few days later someone else reached out to me, and then another, and then I started reaching out to friends (both new and old), and before I knew it, I found myself connected to a bunch of people.  I now understand the power of social networking.

And this got me thinking: is there a role for Facebook (or something like it) in the business world?  Can it be another tool for managing supply chain processes?

I remember when the Web first came to Motorola.  It was sometime around 1996, when I worked there as a product development engineer.  Only a few employees, from a select number of groups, were given access to “The World Wide Web.”  I was not among the chosen, but my friend Ralph was, and I would visit his cubicle after work to surf the Web.  Motorola wanted to phase in Web access because they were concerned about its impact on productivity.  Specifically, they worried that every engineer in the company (most of them male) would spend their days visiting porn sites.  A reasonable concern at the time, I suppose, but when I look around and see how the Web has transformed the way we live and work, I can’t help but laugh at the shortsightedness of it all.

And here we are again, at another inflection point. 

I didn’t include “social networking tools” in the presentation I gave last night, but I’m going to add it today.  If I fast forward ten years and interview the industry leaders of 2018, I believe many of them will be using Facebook-like solutions to manage their supply chain processes.  Instead of finding and connecting with friends, we’ll be finding and connecting with suppliers, customers, carriers, logistics service providers, distributors, and others involved in our daily work lives.  And when I say connect, I don’t mean in an EDI sort of way, where one computer sends digitized information to another computer; I’m talking about human connections, where one person establishes and maintains a relationship with another person.  With so much technology around us, enabling “lights out” and “hands free” processing, it’s easy to forget that human relationships remain the life and blood of any business.

I remember talking to the CEO of a logistics service provider a couple of years ago, and he was saddened and frustrated by how the industry was changing.  “This business used to be about relationships,” he said to me, “I knew the people at my customers by name, and they knew me too.  But now I’m just viewed as a supplier, just another company to include in the RFP process, and relationship is less important than being the lowest-cost provider.”  Maybe the pendulum needs to swing back towards valuing relationships again.  Facebook and similar tools will never replace the effectiveness of shaking hands with a person, or listening to their voice on the telephone, but it can put a face and a name and a personality to all of those lifeless and error-filled EDI transactions flowing through the cloud.