the doctor is certainly sick of the terminology. Not a day goes by that some backwoods yahoo doesn’t think this makes the perfect headline, twenty years after we were introduced to specialized Procurement tools, almost thirty years after the introduction of the ERP, and more than forty years since specialized MRP systems were introduced to the market. The “digital transformation” is now new and hasn’t been since the internet evolved to the world wide web and every software company started transitioning to the cloud (which, by the way, is just someone else’s computer!).

the doctor is also sick of all the article stating that the digital transformation will not displace (real) Procurement professionals because that’s obvious. Besides the fact that we are nowhere close to real AI systems, most of Procurement today is not number crunching. It’s fire-fights. Stakeholder-pleasing. Countering disruption blights. Supplier appeasing. It’s a lot of relationship management, which is something a piece of software just can’t do. (There are a few good SRM platforms that enable SRM, but they do not accomplish SRM — that is accomplished by the expert relationship managers that astutely use the system.)

the doctor is also sick of the futurists who are stuck in the past and still predicting a great digital renaissance to come. Our collective IQ has dropped since the renaissance started; Twitter is making us dumber than goldfish (and you wonder why the doctor despises Twitter); the more we trust the machine, the more blind we become to the risks involved; it’s creating an unparalleled digital divide worse than anything William Gibson and his Neuromancer mind can come up with; and Ready, Player One might be the best possible future if we continue down the current road (assuming a certain dictator-want-to-be doesn’t start World War III first).

For better or for worse (and its for worse if we don’t stabilize our power grids and shield the hard drives that contain all of the data that drives our economy, as a natural EMP could wipe out economies in a second), we’re going to keep moving down the digital highway at ever increasing speeds, which means pending something drastic, the next twenty years are going to the be the same as the last twenty and all this hullaballoo about digital transformation, at this point, is just unnecessary noise.