Category Archives: rants

In ProcureTech, Stop Caring What Gartner, Forrester, or IDC Thinks!

I shouldn’t have to address this again, but every year multiple vendors reach out and ask how to get on these vendors maps because they believe it’s the only way to get more market visibility and/or be selected by certain customers, including you. It’s not the only way to get visibility and if a vendor can’t convince a potential customer from thinking that only map companies are good, I’ll tell them this right now — that’s not a customer they want (because that vendor will be out on the renewal with whatever vendor overtakes them in the map when the CPO changes in 3 years, because companies without vision to look beyond a meaningless map don’t keep real talent, and only real talent will identify and select the best solution and ensure that solution is kept over time).

But I digress — this post is about you, the potential customer, and why you need to STOP caring what Gartner, Forrester, or IDC thinks.

First of all, we’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: It’s NOT the Analyst Firm. It’s the Analyst!.

In addition to all of the skillsets and education that an analyst needs to have to get it right, which we covered in detail in that post, the analyst needs a lot of relevant experience, and history in the ProcureTech space, to make sense of the ProcureTech world today. Ask yourself: how many of the analysts with the right education have at least 10 years in our space? The answer is very few. How many have 20 years in (independent) analyst roles? You can count them on your fingers. I know of myself, Jon Hansen, Pierre Mitchell, and Chris Sawchuk with 20 years of (independent) analyst experience in our space and a deep technical (STEM) education. Everyone else who started covering this space day in, day out two decades ago has moved on or retired. Now, of these analysts, how many have also built actual solutions in the ProcureTech space, connecting the dots between the education, theory, and practice? Two of us — myself and Jon Hansen. (But we should note that Pierre and Chris spent part of their careers on solution advisory consulting and implementation guidance, and have deep knowledge about the implementation and integration requirements, which is also very unique and useful in technology selection.)

Now remember the second point: Vendors Have Lured Big Analyst Firms Astray and that you’re not getting a map of the best solutions, but the best solutions from the analyst firm’s pool of vendor sponsors and research subscribers, where the reality is that only the big, established, cash-rich companies can afford the high-priced subscriptions that keep them in front of the overworked analysts who have to spend over half of their time taking inquiries or keeping high paying subscription customers happy. (Whereas analysts at smaller firms or independents get to focus on studying and understanding the solutions, not general inquiries or whether or not the contract [or pricing model] is good.)

This means that these big firm analysts are not spending a lot of time, if any, looking at the up-and-coming mid-sized companies that have not only been around long enough to develop mature enterprise solutions, but solutions that are more modern, more powerful, more usable, and more intelligent (with embedded analytics, RPA, and the right AI for the task at hand), and possibly (much) better for you. Moreover, if the enterprise is a mid-market company, or able to go with a best-of-breed as a bolt-on to their enterprise ProcureTech platform, they’ll never know about the majority of these solutions (as only the overfunded startups will have the money to get the big analyst firm attention, and these vendors often have more financial stability problems than the smaller vendors who are bootstrapping or taking minimal funding and actually have stable, happy, paying customers keeping them afloat).

Third, and most important, it’s not the best rated solution, it’s the best solution for your organization. Not only is it the case that this solution is very likely not on a map of only 20 companies (when there might be 100 companies that offer that solution), but it might also be the case that it is the lowest ranked solution on those maps — especially when these maps tend to rate solutions on a lot of subjective factors that match what the analyst thinks are the most relevant for an average organization, whereas you are a specific organization which has a specific set of relevant factors that you care about, with specific requirements for those factors. The more divergence between your factors and the analysts’, and your scale and theirs, the worse the map is for your needs, and the worse the solution you select will be.

The only maps you should care about are those that rank solutions solely on the tech capabilities and/or the customer rankings. But only so far as potential solution identification, not selection. Maps that concentrate on pure tech (like Spend Matters Solution Map) allow you to identify vendors that have the tech foundations, giving you a starting pool, but don’t allow you to identify vendors that have a solution — because a solution is tech and appropriate process support and integration capability and support and culture and whatever else transforms another piece of potential shelfware into a solution that will be used daily by your employees.

Note that we used the word “potential” for a reason. No map (including Spend Matters) is complete, so you will need to look at multiple sources (like ProcurementSoftware.site and the upcoming Art of Procurement ProcureTech 100) to put together a complete list of vendors to consider. Then you will have to cross reference with real analyst vendor write-ups (which can include the hundreds of write-ups here on this site if one or more of your potential finalists are included) to whittle down that list to the best starting set for your best practice technology RFP (of which we have a lot of advice on how to write that on this site as well).

At the end of the day, it’s about what solution will work for you, not about which solution is on which map!

Your RFPs, That Go To the Wrong Vendors, Suck Because CONTEXT MATTERS!

We briefly covered this in our post on how There are No Simple Answers Because CONTEXT MATTERS, but we feel we have to call it out and cover it again in its own post because, over the past few weeks, the doctor has

  • been asked multiple times for a list of the best vendors for X that just need to do A, B, C
  • been told that Gen-AI can help a client write better RFPs (and that he would like to see the new Gen-AI capabilities in the sourcing/procurement/services/contract management application, which, FYI, he wouldn’t)

when the reality is that:

  • there is no way he can give a short list of relevance without understanding at least the
    • company size, geography, and industry
    • existing S2P/ERP ecosystem and maturity
    • primary pain points

    because

    • company size can dictate minimum vendor size; geography presence, language, or cultural skills; and industry key capabilities that a platform will need
    • unless it’s a rip and replace project, the new module/solution will have to play in the existing ecosystem
    • and nothing defines what is needed more than the pain (not a random list of features that the buyer doesn’t really understand and just assumes will solve their problem)
  • as we have repeatedly explained, there is no Artificial Intelligence, Gen-AI is as dumb as a doorknob, and it doesn’t write better RFPs (although it may write better English) — not even close

Now, we really want to dive into this second point.

You can NOT write a good RFP if you don’t know:

  • what your pain points are
  • why you have them (i.e. process, system, and/or data issues)
  • where gaps need to be filled in your current system landscape (and what that landscape is)
  • how advanced your employees are in their TQ (Technical Quotient) and Procurement maturity
  • who will be using it and for what
  • when it is used in workflow-based processes

And, guess what, Gen-AI doesn’t know that, and doesn’t even know how to elicit that. For an RFP builder to be useful, it has to help you gather this. Which means experts need to encode it with methodologies and questions to elicit all this. Only then can Gen-AI LLMs be used to actually construct an RFP in natural language. So if all the vendor has is a nice shiny LLM wrapper, they have nothing useful. Remember that.

AI Employees Aren’t Real! Don’t Believe The Lunacy!

This should be so obvious that it shouldn’t need to be said, but with multiple companies still promising to (soon) deliver “AI Employees”, it apparently needs to be said.

First of all, why it should be obvious:

  1. There is no Artificial Intelligence. The tools are as dumb as a doorknob. The best you can get is Augmented Intelligence, which, by the way, is what you really need because it can provide almost instantaneous insights that would take a traditional analyst with traditional tools days to weeks (or months) to discover.
  2. An employee is a person. A PERSON! Not a piece of software.
    (As we don’t have AI, we don’t have autonomous robots, so we can’t even have the theoretical argument about whether or not a robot should be recognized as a person for legal means.)

Secondly, we’ve already seen how autonomous software agents don’t work (because they are not intelligent or people). Klarna, one of the first companies to fire the majority of its customer support team with the false claim AI can do that, quickly found it it really can’t and now has to hire back hundreds of support agents because what AI was really doing was the work of 700 really bad agents! And their customers didn’t want to talk to these bots (essentially because of how dumb and useless they were).

Thirdly, there have been no, and nor will there be with existing algorithms, stacks, and technologies, any magical emergence that will suddenly allow these “AI agents” to become intelligent and be able to perform their tasks autonomously. Because

  1. if Neural Networks were the right models, today’s models (constrained to commercial compute capacity) would put them on par with a pond snail, maybe a sea slug;
  2. compute power doesn’t double year over year anymore; Moore’s law is quickly becoming a historical footnote due to quantum limits; and
  3. there’s no more data to train them on — the big AI tech plays have already illegally stolen all of the copyrighted data on the internet, and that’s still not enough (and AI generated data just worsens performance because it’s not real, or good, data).

Moreover, we don’t need AI Employees. What we need are more productive employees! Employees that don’t waste up to 80% (or more) of their time doing more-or-less nothing but data wrangling trying to turn data into knowledge and knowledge into the insights needed to make a decision. Tasks that are purely tactical calculations and conversions that are precisely what computers were built for. Computers can do trillions of calculations a second error free, while we can only do a few, and not necessarily error free.

Which means what we really need are Augmented Intelligent Agent Assistants that do the computational tasks we need done and either

  1. automate processing that we would do almost thoughtlessly if we determined that the appropriate conditions were met or
  2. present us with the data, knowledge, and insights we need to make a decision and take action, including suggestions for that action if there are standard response patterns

Because, when the 80% time wasting tactical data processing is taken off of our plates, we will be at least 5 times as effective with these Automated Intelligent Agent Assistants, and that is what will propel organizations forward. Not dumb tech, and definitely not false promises of fake AI Employees that do not, and fundamentally cannot, exist.

There are NO Simple Answers Because CONTEXT MATTERS!

If you’ve been following along, over the past few months we’ve had to complain about:

While these may seem like completely different situations that have to be (continually) (re)addressed on their own merits, they really aren’t. They are all interconnected (and taken together they help to define the 88%+ technical project failure rate in our ProcureTech space) and all have the one of the same issues at the core. They all try to oversimplify, which is something you cannot do in any field of technology because CONTEXT MATTERS!

Analyst Firm and Influencer Maps and flashy graphical comparisons on a few randomly selected “data points” are useless because context matters. You can’t create a shortlist of potential solutions without understanding, at a minimum:

  • who the company is and what the department does
  • the platform and skill topography
  • the problems that the existing topography is not solving

Because sourcing is not sourcing is not sourcing, procurement is not procurement is not procurement, and analytics is not analytics is not analytics. Indirect Finished Goods vs Direct Materials vs Services are sourced differently; catalogs vs. one-time buys vs. on-contract inventory replenishments are handled completely differently; and there’s reports vs drill down cubes vs data federation, and each brings different insights. APIs, interface, and integration requirements differ on platforms, core vs. nice to have shift based upon what’s in the ERP, AP, and SCP systems. And the maturity level has a great impact on what will, vs. will not, be used.

It’s NOT SIMPLE! And anytime someone says “keep it simple, just give them a list”, it means they don’t understand the reality of the situation and that, while it is not complex, not hard (and yes, Procurement can be really easy), it’s NOT simple. Context is needed to make the right recommendations and right decisions.

There is NO Autonomous AI Agent and anyone peddling one is selling the new silicon snake oil. (First of all, remember that there’s no such thing as Artificial Intelligence, and it’s still the case that since a computer can’t take responsibility for a critical decision, it should NOT make one.) For an agent to be autonomous, it would need to have, or be able to retrieve, all the data it needs, connect with all relevant internal and external systems, get information not on the web through traditional means (ask people), verify truth from lies, have the ability to adapt to any situation, and the intelligence to know when a decision can be made and when it can’t. Not only does it not have the intelligence, but no software agent in existence meets the rest of these requirements either. (The best that can be created is a support agent that can do all of the data processing, standard analysis, workflow automation, and decision suggestion using Augmented Intelligence that allows it to act as a useful personal assistant that multiplies your productivity. But ONLY if the Agent has the right context — and guess what, YOU have to work with a partner to custom build that agent with YOUR context. It won’t be delivered out of the box and magically trained just by feeding it your data. The myth of emergence has already been debunked. Please stop falling for it.)

There is no Best-In-Class process or methodology guaranteed to work for you. Unless you are lifting it from a company in the same business buying and selling the same products for the same consumer base that is structured the same way and more-or-less does the same thing as you, that best-in-class process or methodology may not even be close to what you need (and no amount of adaptation will get you there). Best-in-Class always works within a context (which includes your maturity level as an organization), and until that is understood, no consultant or analyst can make the right recommendations for where you are today.

So next time someone says it’s simple, and that their map, chart, or infographic will solve all your problems — delete it, because unless they also take the time to qualify the context in which that map, chart, or infographic applies, it is worse than useless for you (and doubly so if it presents a dangerous and dysfunctional dashboard) and may even cause organizational damage if blindly followed.

Finally, just remember, just because it ain’t simple, that doesn’t mean it ain’t easy. It just requires a bit of brainpower and effort to get it right, and, moreover, an amount thereof that is well within our capability!