I like the push notices of email to tell me that there is new information posted somewhere. But the last email telling me about Tim Sowell’s latest post was sad. He’s stopping his run of thought leadership (truly) pieces at Operations Evolution. Sowell is a Schneider Electric Fellow and VP of System Strategy at Schneider Electric in the Common Architecture team in R&D.
This post will be my final one in this blog, as forum does not seem to be working as it once did, and we exploring new approaches to getting thought leadership out. Thank you for your interest if you feel like we should continue in some form, please post a comment.
Here’s his lead paragraph. Discover the rest of his thinking on the site.
In today’s “flat world” of demand-driven supply, the need for agility is only going to move faster in the next 10 years. This is driving leading companies to transform their operational landscape in systems, assets and culture in a shift to “smart work.” Agility transforms their thinking from a process-centric to a product and production focus, which requires a dynamic, agile work environment between assets/machines, applications and people. Aligned decisions and actions across a multi-site product value/supply chain is crucial, and requires the ongoing push of a combination of automated (embedded) wisdom and augmented Intelligence (human wisdom).
Manufacturing / production companies have accumulated tremendous amounts of data over the past decades. Mostly they do nothing with that data. People like Sowell and Stan DeVries have been making sense of all the applications that can help customers succeed in this new technological reality of actually using the data well.
Media thoughts
It’s hard work maintaining a blog–especially when it’s not your main job. I know. I’ve done this for 13 years.
But the problem for thinkers and companies is–how do you get your information out?
It used to be you could use trade press. But shrinking ad budgets and demand for shorter pieces on the Web (at least that is current thinking in many places) have changed the way companies are relating to traditional publications. If you want to get out your whole message, you need to write it yourself. With the Web and search, you can write it and then try to get links.
I’ve linked to most of Sowell’s posts. Obviously not enough of you have clicked and gone to the site. On the other hand, I think there are inflated ideas of the amount of readers. A typical magazine Website in our industry may get upwards of 75,000 views a month. Or a couple may approach 100,000. Certainly not the millions that get publicized in the general technology press.
But if you drill down, a typical article may only get a few hundred views.
The way my site is constructed, when you visit you see several posts. I’m not really selling “eyeballs”. But depending upon the tool you consult, there are several thousand who at least see the headline if you don’t actually read it all. Since my site has few distractions–just a couple of ads and a few other pieces of information–the writing is emphasized.
So, I don’t know Sowell’s traffic (he’s on Blogspot, not the best platform) and I don’t know Schneider’s expectations. But the traffic was not sufficient.
The other company blogs I follow are informative, but they have changed over time to less blog and more PR-type writing. This one was different. I’ll miss the weekly read.
I personally couldn’t follow Tim’s blog posts and never made an effort to read them. They were garbled messes of writing.
I know it’s hard now to keep an audience engaged in writing. I hope someone figures out how to improve it. Medium has definitely worked for me in reading more broadly and frequently. Having your posts emailed to me has helped me stay reading your blog.
Don’t know what the overall answer is, but in regard to Tim’s blog…I would have been a more regular reader if it wasn’t so poorly edited.
I understand what you’re saying, Eliot. When I quoted him, I edited his prose. And sometimes his thinking is dense. However, he is an original thinker.