In the 1990s, it was all about transactions.  In the early 2000s, it was about catalogs and shopping carts.  Later, as teams tried to integrate the end-to-end supply chain, the focus was document management.  Today, with the introduction of F8 by Facebook it is about effective story telling and harnessing the Open Graph.  What is the "it"?  It is the ability to reach the customer: the heart of the supply chain.  The story is the same, but reversed in supplier interaction.  I firmly believe that the evolution of different data types can unlock new insights for supply chain leaders.

Today's supply chain needs to be able to sense and respond across ALL data types. For supply chain management it is the "it" in IT. Yes, we have entered the era of BIG DATA supply chains.  It is a world where the volume, type and the velocity of data has exploded.  While companies have successfully scaled to handle transactional volumes, other data types combined with enrichment data -content, weather, location, maps, voice, video, digital images-can enable new capabilities to sense and respond more intelligently.

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