Brian Zhang Larsen’s Blog

The Global Data Synchronization Network (GDSN) initiative is in my opinion the most (potential) exciting new thing in the IT world at the moment. And not just in the IT world, but it will have a major impact on close to every aspect of trading, which again means close to every aspect of … well everything. Since Søren and I finished our thesis last summer, I have been keeping an eye on the development in this area, and it seems like this great idea is in growth.

It is essentially about making master and transactional data, about any item or service, accessible to all partners in a supply chain, potentially including the consumers. By master data, is meant data that is “relatively consistent across time [...]”, like production date, expiration data and other Meta data. Transactional data is data about when and where. Like when did the wholesaler receive, it and when did it ship from here.

Off course transactional data, and production dates already exists, and is often shared between trading partners, but this initiative is not just about sharing of information. It is a globally defined standard, across businesses, 100% compliant with the identification standards defines by GS1 (EAN International and the Uniform Code Council). The goal is to make this technology easy accessible and understandable, so essentially everyone will adopt and take part in this network.

Ok, all this could sound a little sleep provoking, but it really is far from. Think off the consequences such an enormously wide collaboration could have on close to all businesses, and for curious minds. It would (help) ensure correct data through all the supply chain, it could provide leapfrogging supply chain visibility throughout virtually all its steps, and for tracking fetishists like me it would provide me the ability to see where this laptop I am writing on right now, has been,…when. Other more classical examples could be to see which cow the milks come from.

All this would probably require RFID as a prerequisite, as this would mean more precise real-time data. At least the latter examples would require unique identification codes. In the future a lot of the administrative task could be taking care of by ubiquitous computing in correspondence with the GDSN and RFID. Alex Renz from Microsoft gave us a very good example of this, at a “brain dump” session, to help with our thesis.

Imagine an empty supermarket shelf, with an RFID scanner. The shelf reads no more products, so a computer checks the stock, with the aim of alerting the personnel to fill the shelf up (we are not at a point where robots should do this ..yet, although something like this already happens at pharmacists here in Denmark.). Anyway, the computer sees that there is no more products in stock, and alerts the supplier and places an order. The supplier then checks it own stock, and if there is any, then the order could be processed as soon as possible, if not another order could be sent to their supplier, and so on. The even better scenario could be, for the supplier to first check if there already is any delivery of this product going on. If so, then prioritize the customers, and maybe so, a part of the order in delivery could be shipped to our supermarket, to decrease the out-of-stock time. The (still human) driver will then be alerted that he should take a turn to drop by our supermarket on the way. All this with only very little human intervention. The humans could instead spend their time drinking coffee and picking their noses.

Ahh, I would like to see the alternative ending to Battle start Galactica, where also Galactica is hit by a stray missile, and the rest of the episodes show the cylons building an optimal society.

With catch phrases including terms like “in the new economy” or “for the information age”, these books often appeal to the less geeky and more business curious side of me. Lately I have enjoyed a lot of these ever so popular semi academic books on network economy, which most of them proclaim to explain a new theory or set of rules which can be used to explain virtually anything in the modern economy. The truth is that these books are easily digested; often direct substitutes with fictional literature. The good thing about reading these on behalf of fiction is the lack of guild. While spending too much time on reading fiction, I often get a sense of bad consciousness because I should be spending my time more efficient, like reading competence building books, analyze something or study a new API for an interesting web service. This is the cause to the effect that I rarely read fiction (although I enjoyed Haruki Murakami’s A wild sheep chase last week). Network economy books, doesn’t give this element of guild, but the feeling of learning something new. The “newness” of these books is though often questionable, and usually to a higher extend just brings a new term in the field, for a long known viral effect or a neat marketing stunt. Of the small selection of network economic books in my array, I recommend the oldest the most. Information Rules by Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian, describes the key elements of this term excellent, with little need to supplement with the newer bestsellers on the subject.

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