Clifford Hallam Healthcare (CH2) CIO, Ged Halstead, has been with the healthcare logistics company for about six years. The company has undertaken a 10-year plan to improve its supply chain and warehouse initiatives to overcome data and traceability issues in the medical and pharmaceutical wholesale industry.

Tracking market share on a weekly or monthly basis, as many product managers do in the IT industry, is a guaranteed first class ticket to the Loon Lounge. You need to ride the helicopter occasionally, take a look through the wide angle lens. Breathe in for seven seconds. Hold for five seconds. Breathe out for seven seconds. Much better. Now panic — iPhone 4S sales may be tanking.

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter's approach.

One critical shortage in the supply chain right now has nothing to do with Apple iPhones, Nintendo Wiis or Zhu Zhu Pets being out of stock for the holidays: It's the people who manage companies' supply chains.

Best Practices: It's an often overused term that can apply to literally any decision-making process: parenting quandaries, personal finance questions, buying a house, getting a job, or selecting a puppy breed.

As if data quality and stockouts weren’t enough of a day-today worry for CIOs, added pressure to serve demanding online customers and keep up with changing legislation are creating new challenges. With several retail giants lumbering online and the looming introduction of the government’s new carbon tax, CIOs need to be working with procurement, financial and other business leaders to ensure supply-chain systems are up to today’s new challenges.

If supply chain experts can spend so much time and effort improving efficiency and still have more work to do, how are smaller companies meant to get their supply chains right? It’s not as if they have been standing still: CIOs at FMCG organisations and other companies of all sizes have long focused on using high-end supply chain management solutions to trim fat from their company supply chains. Many embarked upon massive enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations a decade ago as they stared down the end-of-life of existing systems and the spectre of the Y2K bug. Yet while their intentions were good, the same can’t be said for the methods of resolution.

It all started, as these things sometimes do, with a chicken.

How will people work 10 years from now? Gartner thinks it has a pretty good idea, predicting 10 major changes that will occur during the next 10 years.

In late 2008, Monsanto licensed a seed coating that helps corn, soybean and other seeds fight insects and disease during the tricky germination stage. By early 2009, company scientists had finished work on that cocktail of fungicides and insecticides, dubbed Acceleron, and the company wanted to get the coating to market in time for the 2010 planting season. "We were going after that opportunity very aggressively. If we don't hit season, that opportunity is another 12 months away," says CIO Shirley Cunningham.