See No Evil

Modern supply chains are amazing in their effectiveness, but transparency inside them is not a design objective.

We call them “supply chains,” but that image is misleading. They really look more like a network of waterways, with thousands of tiny tributaries made up of sub-suppliers trickling into larger rivers of assembly, production, and distribution.

The parallels between supply-chain design and service oriented architecture are surprising. Modularity, interchangeability, limited dependencies. Supply-chains are in many ways a physical manifestation of that type of architecture.