Google does it again. This week's TED video on What We Learned From 5 Million Books introduces the Google Labs NGram Viewer, which searches for any phrase of up to four words across the five million books already digitized. It's Big Data meets the cultural genome: the new 'science' of culturomics. Fascinating and open to all. I could easily have wasted the whole afternoon...
Looking at the number of mentions since 1980 for some common terms in this neck of the business world, it's astonishing how closely the data fits the reality as I've seen it. Lean has grown consistently every year since 1992, though you have to wonder if it won't soon go the way of Quality Management, which peaked in 1996, and Six Sigma which has been in decline since 2004. BPM and Business Process Management show modest but steady growth since 1999.
It seems odd that Outsourcing has been mentioned so much more frequently than Shared Services. Satisfying naturally to see how Business Process has tracked so closely the growth of Sourcing ;-).
Great fun and, one day, an incredible cultural resource - it's at http://ngrams.googlelabs.com
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