• Regular readers know about my preoccupation with duct tape. I am happy to say that I am not alone.
• Dilbert’s view of pandemic contingency planning. I wish.
• I recently have become a member of the International Association of Public Health Logisticians (IAPHL). Highly recommended for the very interesting discussions going on in their (closed) forums.
• Emerald will start publishing the Journal of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management next year. The blurb looks highly promising. The editors have issued a call for papers.
• Analytics Magazine published a short article with ten recommendations to improve humanitarian logistics. Sadly, they are so thin on how to implement their recommendations that they could just as well have given only one: ‘improve humanitarian logistics’.
• A guide to NGOs for the military. I wonder how many NGOs for the military need a guide. (H/T Chris Albon.)
• An interesting application of standard logistics risk management on very large systems – like whole societies. (H/T Chris Watkins a.k.a. @chriswaterguy – there seems to be a Chris-thing going on here).
• FAILfare: learning from failure. A great idea – anybody in to organise something similar for health/aid logistics? (H/T Suzanne Rainey)
• Stop Stockouts seemed a great idea, but is now totally abandoned. Too bad.
• WHO finally published a procurement guideline for antimalarials. Let’s hope they will do something similar for other health commodities.
• After my earlier negativity on gifts in kind, now a story about an organisation that seems to do it right. Any reader who has first-hand experience with this outfit?
• I have been on Twitter for some time now (you can follow @Michael_Keizer for regular updates), but more recently I started a Facebook page. It’s a great place for discussions with like-minded people and allows for a bit more two-way communication than the blog.
• I have also been working on a bibliography on logistics for global health and aid, using a Zotero group. The bibliography is open for everyone, but Zotero users can import and use it directly into their own libraries. I would appreciate any additions: it is a living document and suggestions for additions and improvements are more than welcome.

[Image: Liquid Links by Desirae; some rights reserved.]

Related posts:

1. Humourless links for May 8, 2010
2. Humourless Links for June 13, 2010
3. Humourless links for January 3, 2010

If you have followed this blog, you will know that I am very much in favour of more academic input into our logistics efforts. As you can imagine, I was tickled pink when I saw the ads for a new book about humanitarian logistics, written by respected INSEAD academics Rolando Tomasini and Luk Van Wassenhove.

Let me not mince words here: I am disappointed. Expectations are high when a prestigious university like INSEAD releases a book under its own impressum, but those expectations are not met – not even closely. The reason actually is made clear in the first paragraph of the book. The authors describe their experience in humanitarian logistics on which they base the book: case studies they did for WFP/UNJLC, the IFRC, and FUNDESUMA. In other words, they base a book about humanitarian logistics in general on limited experience with three organisations that are very unrepresentative of the sector as a whole. This has clear effects throughout the book: although they do make some valid observations (especially when they talk about partnering with the private sector, which is clearly their focus), much of what they describe is over-simplified, or even dead wrong.

All three of the organisations they worked with (especially the IFRC and FUNDESUMA) have a focus on disaster aid, which obviously skewed their view severely. It leads to occasionally ridiculous assertions; a good example is that, according to Tomasini and Van Wassenhove, in humanitarian supply chains “… time cycles are very short [and] new and unprecedented demands occur frequently …” (p. 8). Definitely true in some types of humanitarian response – specifically disaster response – but totally untrue of many other types. When the authors describe the characteristics of a humanitarian supply line (ch. 1), they very clearly have a specific type of humanitarian response in mind; a type of response that in reality makes up a minority of humanitarian work.

Chapter 5, which is devoted to information management (which people who know me will immediately recognise as one of my personal hobby horses), goes as far as basically describing the SUMA model (with a bit of info about UNJLC’s website thrown in for good measure) as the paradigm to follow, without recognising that it is totally inappropriate for a majority of humanitarian aid work. A bit of scrutiny of e.g. humanitarian.info would have been useful to inform this chapter.

The book comes into its own in chapter 7, about partnerships between humanitarian and corporate organisations. It is very obvious that this is what the authors are experts in, and it is the most useful and well-written chapter of the book. Sadly, that is not enough to justify its rather inflated price.

All in all, this is a missed chance. Gentlemen, I just know you can do better: get to it.

Related posts:

1. Ethicalcargo.org: database on humanitarian transport and (illegal) arms movements