Category Archives: Market Intelligence

Breaking Down The Barriers: The Talent Gap

We’re continuing our foray into the top barriers to success that we outlined in our top barriers post that chronicles the barriers that keep coming up over and over again in every Procurement survey in our effort to ensure that you don’t have to read another state of procurement study for the next 5 years. Today’s topic: the talent gap!

A Brief History …

As we have previously noted in our discussion of category and market complexity, with each successive innovation, business, and process improvement, processes and tasks became more complex and required more education and experience to perform. As a result, with each successive innovation, the available talent pool shrinks. When you consider that traditional post-secondary programs haven’t kept up with the pace of innovation in business in decades, there’s a lack of formal training programs, mentorship programs disappeared decades ago (and every time there’s a workforce reduction, the older generation is the first to be let go or be bought out), and most businesses haven’t invested properly in training in decades, you can see that, for many traditional complex tasks, the talent pool is shrinking quickly.

But the lack of talent in traditional areas is just one side of the coin. The other side is that technology is progressing faster than even technology professionals can keep up. Combine this with the recent SaaS explosion in most corporations, with some large corporations using over 1,000 different SaaS applications, and the increasing complexity of “AI”-X applications, and the talent gap is expanding in tech as well.

The Problem

The problem here, as we expounded upon in our brief history, is multi-fold. There’s not enough talent in many domains, and in domains where there is talent, the rapid pace of development and innovation is still leaving top talent behind.

The Necessary Realization

In theory, the multi-fold solution is easy, but in practice, it will take a lot of human effort to realize, just like execution support can’t be solved overnight.

1) Bring Back Training

Stop trying to hire someone with all the skills and knowledge they need to do the job that is at least somewhat customized to your operation and start training again. Formal programs. Ensure all the materials are accessible online all the time so the parts your employees tend to forget (because they don’t perform the tasks regularly) are quickly and easily accessible.

2) Mentorship and Shadowing

Don’t wait until someone leaves to start looking for a replacement. Start training a replacement for a key position within three months of someone new taking the role via shadowing and mentorship. Make sure there is no task that relies on one person (even if always done by one person as it’s not demanding enough to require more than one employee) and that there is always a backup person. Stop trying to replace teams with agentic software and start trying to empower small teams with augmented intelligence so they can do the work of teams three, five, and ten times their size but still ensure the knowledge remains in the organization.

3) KMS: Knowledge Management System

Despite being introduced in the late 2000s, these never caught on and this is, honestly, one of the biggest reasons we have a talent gap today. Not only do most organizations not do enough planning around succession for those that perform key functions (it’s not just the C-Suite you need a plan for), but they don’t capture the key knowledge built up by long time employees who know how to run certain functions efficiently and effectively. That’s why performance degrades over time as people leave and new people are hired because the days when you’d join a company and stay for five, ten, twenty years or life disappeared with the last millennium. When organizations failed to properly capture this knowledge when the first round of massive layoffs hit in the dot com crash of 2000, and then never learned from it (and we saw the same mass exodus of senior, knowledgeable, people in the financial crisis of ’08), we ended up with massive increases in the “talent gap” as the knowledge required to forge talent suitable for your organization was lost. (On top of the fact that knowledge was increasingly leaking to China with the global outsourcing system.)

The reality is that unless the knowledge needed to run your business is captured, you’ll never have the talent you need, real or virtual (as these new-age AI-based agentic systems that will, according to the marketing, solve all your problems won’t work at all unless properly trained, and they can’t be properly trained unless the right data, processes, and organizational knowledge are appropriately captured — that’s a big reason these efforts continually fail and will continue to fail).

4) Augmented Intelligence Systems

For well-defined tasks for which mature (pre Gen-AI) agentic workflows exist that can be appropriately defined, controlled, and tailored, implement such systems to ease the burden on new employees as they attempt to learn the role and be productive and strategic.

The Technological Requirements

The technological requirements, especially for the KMS and the Augmented Intelligence Systems, are considerable and require supply chain aware sourcing and sourcing aware supply chain and expertise from source to sink and back again on both sides.

A continuing reminder that if you want guidance in the short term, hope that your favourite provider reaches out to Bob Ferrari of Supply Chain Matters or the doctor and enables us to focus on writing the series (or in-depth e-book) explaining what modern Procurement and Supply Chain Tech needs to look like (and how it needs to be implemented) to address the challenges, reduce the risks, and address the priorities versus just dripping out tidbits as free time permits.

Successful Vendor Selection – The Series

Even in a House of Lies there is Truth!

From 2012 to 2016, Showtime ran a series called House of Lies, which was a comedy drama where a charming management consultant and his crack team used every dirty trick in the book to woo powerful CEOs and close huge deals.

And, unlike many consultancy teams, they were quite successful. There were TWO reasons for this.

  1. When they worked together, they brought the A-Team.
    • The Face, Marty, played by Don Cheadle, who was not only charming, manipulative, and opportunistic, but skilled enough in business to nail the spin brought by
    • The Brains, Clyde, played by Ben Schwartz, who specialized in marketing and spin doctoring and could craft just the right messages for Marty to deliver (and, like the Marketing Mad Men, partied a bit too hard and struggled with addiction), and who would have his plans backed up by
    • The Techie, Doug, played by Josh Lawson, who was a genius in numerical analysis and statistics and could find the right numbers to spin any tale The Brains and/or The Face need to weave to make the sale, and this was all brought together by
    • The Toughie, Jeannie, played by Kristen Bell, who managed the engagements, supported the team, and made sure the clients were reeled in hook, line, and sinker. (Without her, the team probably would have fallen apart, especially given the egos that had to be managed on the team. Don’t overlook the importance of The Toughie!)
  2. They came together, and even after falling outs, stayed together.

The third point is probably the most important.

A team is NOT assembled by a sales manager assembling four random consultants with “the right backgrounds” and throwing them on your project. Four random consultants who

  • might not even speak the language when it comes to your problem domain,
  • could be missing critical skills,
  • have entirely different work styles, and
  • are misaligned on what the right outcomes of a successful engagement for the client actually are!

An A-Team

  • speaks the same language,
  • have all the required skills between them,
  • work well together and have already succeeded doing so, and
  • are aligned on a successful outcome for the client.

In response to my LinkedIn summary on why you need The A-Team for Proper Selection Advice, someone asked how do you identify the right persons? The answer is, YOU DON’T!

The A-Team is already working together, delivering success. And in the case of the House of Lies, they succeed as a team by using their history together to effectively work together to sell the client a shared vision, even if the vision was one big lie. (So imagine the results you would get if you hired an A-Team to work for you, and not a consultancy that’s also an implementor that wants to maximize billable hours.)

True Orchestration Platforms Are A Lot Rarer Than You Think. How do you find one?

In our last article we told you that you need a modern orchestration platform in order to deal with the application sprawl not just in an average organization but in your own department. However, the majority of today’s platforms are not orchestration platforms but ORCestration platforms, integrating your applications in a manner that is forceful, ugly, and impure, to say the least.

So how do you find a real platform? Well, for starters you can use the checklists in our first two part where Part I gave you the red flags to look out for and Part II gives you key features to identify.

But if you’re techie enough, or savvy enough, here’s a starting list of technical requirements that you look for. (There are more, especially if you’re looking ahead to 2035 and beyond, but let’s face it, you’re lucky if you’re running 2015 technology anywhere in your organization. So if you make it to 2025, that would be a quantum leap for you.)

Technical Requirements

  • Micro-Service Building Blocks that can be assembled together to support all existing and emerging internet an communication protocols
  • Transactional Blocks that encompass standard data-centric operations in the business back office around the information and finance supply chains
  • Blockchain Support for immutable records that capture data, ownership, and processing that has transpired
  • Context Aware as it’s not just data, it’s metadata of what it represents, who’s data it is, where it was obtained, when it was obtained created, and how it was accessed, why it was valid (and who validated it) in a secure, immutable, block
  • Policy Definition Support that can recognize the security and compliance policies of the integrated applications and ensure they are checked and adhered to before processing any request
  • Dynamic Routing that can ensure messages are re-routed when issues are detected to maintain (guaranteed) response times
  • Resiliency via decentralization and multiple service instances to ensure that one failure doesn’t prevent critical functions and processes from being completed
  • Adaptive when human intervention is required, it is recorded and new rules, and workflows, are generated to prevent a human from having to intervene again for the same problem
  • Secure as modern security protocols and requirements are built in at the core, not around the edges as an afterthought
  • Trustworthy full support immutable data objects, policies, and security independent of what systems are connected to the orchestration platform

Savvy Requirements

The whole point of Procurement is supposed to support the business, a business which must buy and sell to survive, and do so profitably. (That’s why Procurement is so focussed on cost, to keep expenses down, and supply assurance, to keep sales flowing.) This means that the business also requires Sales (who sells) and Supply Chain (who ultimately supplies) and that all of these units must work in harmony. However, fundamentally, without inputs, which depend on suppliers, there are no outputs, which means that the Supply Chain, and the support for the Supply Chain Ecosystem, is fundamental.

This means that the best orchestration solution will be one that is built to support the supply chain department’s integration requirements within the organization and with external partners, not just Procurement. After all, if you read the series Bob and I authored on Legacy Sourcing and Planning Solutions, you can’t divorce Direct Sourcing from Supply Chain and expect success.

So if you want a great orchestration solution, find one that was originally built for supply chain where the vendor has layered on out-of-the-box support for Procurement. This maximizes your chance for success as you will already know supply chain integration support has been taken care of.

Wondering where to start? Maybe start by taking a look at something like HubX12 built as a decentralized distributed network for next-gen supply chains. With its built-in support for modern and emerging internet and communication protocols, advanced chains of custody, and compliance, it could serve as the transaction backbone that you need to integrate existing systems and build custom capabilities both within your organization and your supply chain.