We have all read a lot about how exciting sourcing and procurement profession is.  And there are definitely many concurrent reasons for that.  Dawn Evans wrote about it in her SIG blog deal in a very interesting manner.  Even this Business insider article on The 20 Best Jobs of the Future lists the umbrella career of Operations management as the second most sought after career in the coming times.

That aside, I feel, it is the number science that makes it exciting, the most.  We are living in a world of excesses and there is just too much information from infinite sources, with infiniter implications and even more infinite opportunities.  The connectivity, the access, the recordability and the consumability of data is adding to this phenomenon.  What we are entering is not so much the world of digital, as we are, the world of digits!  The digital, hence, would do much more than be a storeroom of sorts.  It will be our super calculator, a site of experiments that helps us look before we take that leap.

Data science, I like to believe, is the phase ahead.  It will begin with numbers, and will consume even the non-numerical, transforming everything into a predictable and measurable, yes or no, a binary of possibilities.  Leaders who are able to see it coming, I assume, have already started preparing themselves for it.  And this preparation begins with the quality of the given data.  Those who have been investing in whipping their data into meaningful shapes, will be able to make the most of this future.  For sourcing and purchasing professionals, this would mean having a clean, normalized, standardized, digitized and updated instance of all that they deal with, day in and day out.  No holds barred.