Virtual Logistics' Ecommerce Data Integration Blog

In this morning's Globe and Mail, Business section, front page, is an article on the dismal state of Canada's productivity ! Numbers from Stats Canada once again show how poorly we are doing and how the productivity gap is affecting our recovery and rebound from the recent recession. This gap is all the more pronounced now that the dollar is close to or at par with the USD.

I was reminded today of the age-old battle that we have seen since the beginning of integration time. Do I buy or do I build. Its amazing the number of companies, mostly SMBs that feel that its cheaper to take the plunge and build their own integration middleware platform. In the old days it was building your own EDI solution, today its morphed into some thing bigger and the issues are of course larger. So what happens? The IT guy convinces the boss that he can do it all and much cheaper than the sales guy from the software vendor says they can sell off the shelf software for. Boss is tempted!

Forrester Research in March of this year released a very interesting study on B2B trends. Despite what we all think and hear EDI is not dead and actually still has legs, but what is growing however is the use of spreadsheets and other file technologies to transfer business data. Think about it for a moment. People are using Excel spreadsheets, text files, flat files, and pdfs to send and receive orders, pricelists, inventory updates, customs documents etc. You name it gets created in a spreadsheet, text or flat file. If you look at your own organizations you all do it, I would bet money on it.

On one of the LinkedIn EDI groups there is a debate raging over whether EDI is a business function or an IT function. This is an interesting question that impacts any company that does EDI.

We all know how big Walmart is but do we really know the numbers behind Walmart's operations. I bet most of us don't. Guy Kawasaki has an interesting post on his blog under the Holy Kaw section. I follow him on Twitter and he comes up with some interesting stuff.

Last week Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, the Canadian equivalent of the US Federal Reserve, our central bank, made a very interesting speech in St. John's Newfoundland. In the speech he went over the past recession with the usual collection of numbers that bankers love. The interesting point however, was left to the end of the speech.

Back in the summer of 2005 I wrote the following in our now defunct paper newsletter.