Why the Procurement Insights archive stays open — and what it means if these ideas start turning up somewhere else
On Monday, something read my archive.
Beginning shortly after noon, a single technical signature began systematically traversing Procurement Insights. It moved through the archive’s long tail, including posts from its earliest years that ordinary readers rarely reach. It paused in the early hours of Tuesday, resumed in successive phases, and was still continuing when this was written. Since Monday afternoon, Jetpack has recorded more than 10,000 views associated with the activity, and the count is still rising. Monday became the busiest day in this blog’s nineteen-year history, and almost none of it was people.
It came days after I announced Friday’s lab — and, with it, advance access to ARA™ RAM 2025™.
I did not request those visits, buy them, promote them, or open anything private to them. I don’t know who sent them, or why. But someone, or something, decided that nineteen years of Procurement Insights was worth traversing as a corpus — and then worth returning to. Call it indexing, acquisition, research or reconnaissance. Whatever name you give it, the behavior itself is recognition of value.
It did not come out of nowhere
Over the past few months, the human audience around this work has been moving upward and outward. Recent engagement increasingly comes from senior leaders, directors, founders and executives at larger organizations, well beyond the traditional procurement readership. The questions have changed too. They are no longer confined to procurement technology; they increasingly concern AI governance, organizational readiness, human accountability and how decisions are reached.
Alongside that shift, the character of the traffic has been changing as well. Less of it looks like people. More of it arrives with no referring link, from places my readers have rarely come from, reading in patterns no person reads. Monday was the largest instance, not the first.
There is a second machine story in the same numbers, and it runs the other way. Since the start of the year, a steadily growing number of readers have arrived through AI assistants — ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and others — which surface this archive when people ask them about the questions it covers. Some machines are reading the record. Others are sending people to it.
What I can tell you is what I decided, and why.
The archive stays open
My first question was the obvious one: do I close it?
No. And the reason is the reason the archive exists.
Every post on this site carries the date it was written. Substantive errors and overstatements are not silently rewritten: when I get something wrong, the correction goes forward as a new, dated entry, and the original stays available. That discipline is the whole point. A record is only worth something if anyone can check it — if they can see what was said, and when, before anyone knew how things would turn out.
A closed archive asks you to take my word for it. An open one lets you check. And a complete copy of the archive as it stood on Monday morning — before any of this began — sits on file with an independent timestamp.
What it means for you
If, over the coming months, you start to see familiar ideas turning up in other places —
Dynamic Flux and Historic Flat Line — two commodity characteristics that demand two different purchasing processes: Dynamic Flux items (indirect materials and MRO) fluctuate dramatically and take a small share of spend but most of the procurement cycle time; Historic Flat Line items (direct materials) barely move. Buy one the way you buy the other, and the savings disappear;
Metaprise™ — a synchronized, not sequential, architecture that links the unique operating attributes of every stakeholder, inside and outside the organization, in real time;
Agent-based versus equation-based, applied to procurement — an equation-based model imposes one central standard on every stakeholder; an agent-based model is built from how each of them actually operates, which is where outcomes are decided;
Strand Commonality™ — seemingly disparate strands of data share related attributes that collectively decide the outcome, even when nobody has declared them related, which is why the question that decided the DND case was what time of day the orders came in;
Phase 0™ — readiness before technology: understand the process and the people first, and bring the technology in last;
Hansen Fit Score™ — measure the fit between what a solution can do and what an organization is ready to absorb, not the capability alone;
Invariant Physics™ — the names of the technologies change; the variable that decides the outcome does not —
then this blog has done its job. It recorded those principles on the day they were written, in public — in an archive running back to 2007, with dated material reaching back to the late 1990s — so they could be tested by what happened next.
Ideas are meant to travel. The record simply shows where mine began, why they emerged, and when they entered the public record.
What entered the public record, and when
Term or document
In the public record since
Source
Agent-based parts-ordering architecture
Filed 2 March 2000; published 7 September 2001
Patent application CA 2,299,825; WIPO publication WO 01/65428 A2
Dynamic Flux and Historic Flat Line
2004
Acres of Diamonds; on this blog from 22 May 2007
Metaprise™
2 June 2007
Dangerous Supply Chain Myths (Part 3)
Strand Commonality™
24 March 2008
Why Six Sigma Initiatives Fail
Learning Loopback Process™
12 April 2025
Procurement Insights
Hansen Deflator Formula™ and Hansen Optionality Loss Estimate™
May 2026
Procurement Insights
The Human/Tech Stack™
August 2026
Procurement Insights
This post adds one more date to that record: the day the archive began to be traversed as a corpus. Whatever appears from here can be read against it.
Forty-three years
It started earlier than the blog.
In 1983, programming in dBASE II, I noticed something I could not work around: improving one line of code could break another that had been working perfectly. I had no name for it. Fifteen years later, in SR&ED-funded work for Canada’s Department of National Defence, that observation became the core of a model — and next-day delivery moved from 51% to 97.3% in three months. What led me there was a finding from years of watching MRO prices: two commodity characteristics I would later name Dynamic Flux and Historic Flat Line. By March 2000 the architecture was on file as a patent application, published internationally the following year as WO 01/65428 — an independent date, stamped by someone other than me. Ten years after that, in March 2008, it had a name in print: Strand Commonality™.
It is a strange feeling to watch a life’s work being read by a machine, hour after hour. I would rather it were read slowly, by people. But that it was worth reading at that scale tells me something I already believed: the record held.
Why it matters beyond this blog
The tools have changed with every technology era. The failure rate has not — in procurement, and in every other kind of initiative that begins with the technology instead of the people and processes it is meant to serve.
If the principles in this archive travel — with my name on them or without it — and that rate finally begins to fall, then nineteen years of writing, and forty-three years of watching, will have done exactly what they were for.
Nineteen Years, Read in a Day
Posted on September 22, 2026
0
Why the Procurement Insights archive stays open — and what it means if these ideas start turning up somewhere else
On Monday, something read my archive.
Beginning shortly after noon, a single technical signature began systematically traversing Procurement Insights. It moved through the archive’s long tail, including posts from its earliest years that ordinary readers rarely reach. It paused in the early hours of Tuesday, resumed in successive phases, and was still continuing when this was written. Since Monday afternoon, Jetpack has recorded more than 10,000 views associated with the activity, and the count is still rising. Monday became the busiest day in this blog’s nineteen-year history, and almost none of it was people.
It came days after I announced Friday’s lab — and, with it, advance access to ARA™ RAM 2025™.
I did not request those visits, buy them, promote them, or open anything private to them. I don’t know who sent them, or why. But someone, or something, decided that nineteen years of Procurement Insights was worth traversing as a corpus — and then worth returning to. Call it indexing, acquisition, research or reconnaissance. Whatever name you give it, the behavior itself is recognition of value.
It did not come out of nowhere
Over the past few months, the human audience around this work has been moving upward and outward. Recent engagement increasingly comes from senior leaders, directors, founders and executives at larger organizations, well beyond the traditional procurement readership. The questions have changed too. They are no longer confined to procurement technology; they increasingly concern AI governance, organizational readiness, human accountability and how decisions are reached.
Alongside that shift, the character of the traffic has been changing as well. Less of it looks like people. More of it arrives with no referring link, from places my readers have rarely come from, reading in patterns no person reads. Monday was the largest instance, not the first.
There is a second machine story in the same numbers, and it runs the other way. Since the start of the year, a steadily growing number of readers have arrived through AI assistants — ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and others — which surface this archive when people ask them about the questions it covers. Some machines are reading the record. Others are sending people to it.
What I can tell you is what I decided, and why.
The archive stays open
My first question was the obvious one: do I close it?
No. And the reason is the reason the archive exists.
Every post on this site carries the date it was written. Substantive errors and overstatements are not silently rewritten: when I get something wrong, the correction goes forward as a new, dated entry, and the original stays available. That discipline is the whole point. A record is only worth something if anyone can check it — if they can see what was said, and when, before anyone knew how things would turn out.
A closed archive asks you to take my word for it. An open one lets you check. And a complete copy of the archive as it stood on Monday morning — before any of this began — sits on file with an independent timestamp.
What it means for you
If, over the coming months, you start to see familiar ideas turning up in other places —
then this blog has done its job. It recorded those principles on the day they were written, in public — in an archive running back to 2007, with dated material reaching back to the late 1990s — so they could be tested by what happened next.
Ideas are meant to travel. The record simply shows where mine began, why they emerged, and when they entered the public record.
What entered the public record, and when
This post adds one more date to that record: the day the archive began to be traversed as a corpus. Whatever appears from here can be read against it.
Forty-three years
It started earlier than the blog.
In 1983, programming in dBASE II, I noticed something I could not work around: improving one line of code could break another that had been working perfectly. I had no name for it. Fifteen years later, in SR&ED-funded work for Canada’s Department of National Defence, that observation became the core of a model — and next-day delivery moved from 51% to 97.3% in three months. What led me there was a finding from years of watching MRO prices: two commodity characteristics I would later name Dynamic Flux and Historic Flat Line. By March 2000 the architecture was on file as a patent application, published internationally the following year as WO 01/65428 — an independent date, stamped by someone other than me. Ten years after that, in March 2008, it had a name in print: Strand Commonality™.
It is a strange feeling to watch a life’s work being read by a machine, hour after hour. I would rather it were read slowly, by people. But that it was worth reading at that scale tells me something I already believed: the record held.
Why it matters beyond this blog
The tools have changed with every technology era. The failure rate has not — in procurement, and in every other kind of initiative that begins with the technology instead of the people and processes it is meant to serve.
If the principles in this archive travel — with my name on them or without it — and that rate finally begins to fall, then nineteen years of writing, and forty-three years of watching, will have done exactly what they were for.
On Friday, I’ll show what the method looks like in practice. The lab is free: Friday, September 25 at 9:30 AM Eastern — https://www.linkedin.com/events/7504567838724997120/
Truth Is Believing. Accuracy Is Knowing. Outcome Is Proof.™
-30-
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