The supply chain you did not commission

In October 2017, Kobe Steel admitted that it had falsified inspection certificates for aluminium, copper and steel products. The falsification had been running for years, by some accounts far longer, and roughly five hundred customers were affected. The list included carmakers, aerospace manufacturers and a high speed rail operator.

The detail that matters for this chapter is not the fraud. Fraud is ordinary and every industry has some. The detail that matters is what the buyers had been doing all along, correctly, and to standard.

They had been performing incoming inspection. They had been checking the material against the certificate that accompanied it. The certificate said the aluminium met the specified tensile strength, and the buyer's procedure was to confirm that the certificate said so, that it was signed, that it referenced the correct lot, and that the lot matched the delivery. Every one of those checks passed, every time, for years, because every one of them was a check on the paperwork rather than on the metal.

This is the characteristic failure of a mature supply chain, and it has almost nothing in common with the failure described in chapter three. There, the material was in the organisation's own warehouse and nobody had specified it. Here the material has a specification, the specification is correct, the supplier has attested to it, the buyer has verified the attestation, and the thing in the box is still not what anyone believes it to be.

Chapter three argued that data is a material rather than an asset, and that the disciplines of provenance, grade, shelf life and fitness for a named purpose are literal rather than metaphorical. That chapter dealt with material the organisation already holds. This one deals with the harder half. Most of the material now entering a production AI system was not commissioned by the organisation running it, cannot be inspected by the organisation running it, and arrives with an attestation rather than a sample.