A recent article in Supply & Demand Chain Executive on What’s on Your CIO’s Mind noted that leveraging analytics to gain a competitive advantage and improve business decision-making is now the top priority for CIOs, according to a new study of more than 2,500 CIOs by IBM.
This is good news for sourcing and procurement professionals if you need a modern spend analysis system, because real spend analysis, which should start every sourcing process and end every procurement process, is just a subset of real data analysis. That means your chances of getting the system you need doubles if you join force with your CIO who could also use a good data analysis system to sift through the vast amounts of data she has to deal with.
Now, you may argue that the needs of the CPO, who needs insight into spend data, and the CIO, who needs insight into energy and application utilization (for example), are very different, but they’re really not. For starters, both have to categorize the data on the relevant dimensions (department and category for spend data, data centre and server for energy utilization, and department and application for utilization), both have to create summary reports (total spend, total energy utilization, and total number of users by application), and both have to create comparisons (year-over-year, department by department, etc.). A real data analysis system will do that and be powerful enough to serve the analytics needs of the CPO and the CIO.
And once you join forces on analysis, you can also join forces on risk management and compliance, which are also big needs for CIO as well. That’s going to be really hard for the C-Suite to ignore when two departments are proclaiming the need for these much-needed applications. Don’t believe me? Try it!