It’s Procurement for the Damned
Our back’s against the wall
We turn into the light
We’re burning in the night

After our year-long series chronicling 101 Damnations and our warning that it will only get hotter, you know that, at least for the time being, Procurement is damned.

As we pointed out last year, the CPO is the Rodney Dangerfield of the C-Suite in the 9% of organizations lucky enough to have a CPO that sits at the table, and Procurement still don’t get no respect. But no respect is just the tip of the iceberg. When it comes to a day in your life, if no respect (and the perpetual kick-me sign taped to your back) was all you had to deal with, you’d have it easy. But from the time you get up in the morning until the time you pass out from exhaustion, it’s one emergency after another, one demand after another, and one impossible goal after another. You’re expected to perform eight miracles before breakfast, Monday morning. Demands get tougher after that.

And, in the interim, you have to deal with an amount of future sh!t being dumped on you that is greater than the truckload Biff Tannen had dumped upon his head in the original Back to the Future movie, way back in 1985. But, as SI has said before, echoing the great public defender Mr. Smith, all predictions will be wrong.

But the smug clouds that will be created by the futurists, and the vendors that will propagate their smug, will be smothering and when combined with the fires set upon you, you’ll hardly be able to breathe. And in the darkness you will find very little light, or help, as training budgets are still slashed, your platforms are still out of date, and your processes are still from the paper-age.

And that’s why SI is following it’s 101 Damnations series with it’s 100 Sustentations series that, for each damnation you are facing, gives you some tips and tricks to deal with the damnations thrust upon you. It won’t be perfect, but it will at least be something to help guide you through the darkness.