Category Archives: Technology

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.

Stop Buying ORCestration. You need Orchestration!

In our last article we told you that the majority of today’s platforms attempting to unify the Procurement application space for you are not Orchestration platforms but ORCestration platforms, integrating your applications in a manner that is forceful, ugly, and impure, to say the least. Definitely not what you need in a modern orchestration platform.

A real Orchestration platform is:

–> Light

They aren’t adding another bulky SaaS platform with its own deep stack requirements, vendor maintenance requirements, data store requirements, and rules engine which must not only be maintained separately, but replicate data and rules across the apps it connects. It’s a truly next gen platform, built up from only the (micro) services necessary to connect the apps and accomplish the tasks. It’s a composable container community, not a 100 room palace with no option in between.

–> Cheap

Next generation platforms, built on modern distributed architectures, and built to work behind the scenes (not in front) to allow the users to access the ecosystems they need to access through the applications they are comfortable with, won’t be million dollar applications. They’ll be a fraction of that as the organizations will be buying just a configurable framework, that they can configure themselves as needed, and not a full, heavy, SaaS application with all of the required support infrastructure just to keep it operational (regardless of whether it integrates any applications or not).

–> Flexible

Workflow can be built up, torn down, and put back together on the fly, as required to support evolving processes. Intake, UI, and integration can all be defined, and redefined, as processes evolve, new applications enter the landscape, and old applications leave. The organization is not restricted to a fixed intake screens with limited configuration, predefined workflows, or limited data formats.

–> Open

Built on composable micro-services, that are fully documented and compatible with modern stacks, they allow anyone to build the necessary integrations, workflows, and data manipulations necessary for true process orchestration. They also support the definition of contexts that allow them to be natively compatible with the data structures of the applications they are integrating. And one definitional mistake won’t bring down the whole platform because it’s not a monolithic megalith built on a house of data cards.

–> Real-Time

Not only are data pushes and pulls accomplished in real time, but the orchestration platform will automatically propagate data updates to all apps that maintain a copy of the data. Moreover, when an input the orchestration platform is an initiator of a process, the entire process will be executed without explicit instructions as each output will trigger the next step and serve as the input for that step.

–> Execution

Real orchestration platforms don’t connect apps in workflows, they execute workflows, and they do so dynamically based upon the inputs and outputs of each step. They adapt, and when transactions occur that cause exceptions that require human intervention, they learn from those interventions and dynamically construct new exception workflows on the fly, ensuring that no specific exception ever has to be manually dealt with twice.

–> Blockchain

It will support blockchain at the core, allowing not only for the integration and processing of arbitrary data records, but for immutable data objects to be input, created, and output — with a full history of what app did which change when. That’s a lot more than you can say about today’s ORCestration platforms.

–> Multi-Protocol

Not only will the orchestration platform be composable from the core up, but the building blocks will be designed in such a way that they can be composed to support all of the standard, obscure, and emerging protocols that might need to be supported. As a result, the platform will be able to integrate not only current apps, but emerging apps as well.

–> Organizational

A true orchestration platform is designed to support organizational processes and applications, not just Procurement, allowing the input (signal) data to come from any organizational system and be pushed to any other organizational system, bridging the gap between sales orders, POS demand signals, and demand planning and supply chain (re)order and logistics systems. True orchestration finally tears down the technology walls holding Procurement back, vs. today’s ORCestration platforms which just strengthen their foundations.

–> Secure

Not only are these platforms built on security at the core, recognizing both security standards AND security policies, including the security policy of each application that is orchestrated by the platform. This means that when a user initiates an action, it only executes if they have the appropriate (data) access in all of the applications on the orchestration platform that are needed to complete the action. No hoping, or praying, that the ORCestration platform encoded the right security checks in its native workflow.

–> Policy (Aware)

As per our last point, modern orchestration platforms will understand the concept of policy at the core, and not just for security — for compliance as well! The orchestration platform will integrate with all of the applications that contain encodings of the organizational compliance requirements, understand those compliance requirements in their native contexts, and ensure that all processes are completed in a compliant process.

–> Collaborative

The core of the orchestration backbone is designed to not only support application collaboration, but user collaboration across the organization, and even with connected parties in the supply chain, through the native support of internet communication protocols as well as all standard application messaging protocols. Collaboration will never be easier than with a true orchestration platform.

–> Resilient

Since it’s not just another megalithic SaaS app, but instead a (micro-)service platform built up from building blocks, one failed integration and even one failed block will not bring down the whole platform, the rest of the platform and apps will still work.

–> Process (Focussed)

Modern orchestration platforms are designed to support organizational enterprise processes end-to-end, not departmental functions end-to-end. They can integrate and orchestrate any application in the organization’s software ecosystem (all 1,000+ in a large enterprise) as well as any partner systems the organization has access to.

–> Exception (Orientation)

Modern orchestration is designed to quickly identify exceptions, invoke exception processes, and ensure humans are only involved for a here-to-forth unforeseen exception. Moreover, it will allow for the human instructions and guided process to be automatically captured and encoded to make sure that humans never have to teach the system twice.

Unlike yesterday’s ORCestration platforms, today’s (and tomorrow’s) true orchestration platforms are built on modern technology stacks, and future-proofed for tomorrow’s applications, not just yesterday’s.