Technological Damnation 90: Open Source

When it comes to software, proprietary madness (Part I and Part II) is one damnation — but open source, the other side of the coin, is another.

This is another damnation that is probably making you huh?, because it seems that open source, which not only give us free software, but some of the best software out there, should be a great thing, and it is, but from a Procurement point of view, it’s a damnation. Why?

How do you cost it?

There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and where open source is concerned, this is a free lunch at the Bawabet Dimashq Restaurant where you have to wash the dishes — for the entire floor (that contains 6,014 seats) all by yourself! Unlike most proprietary software which comes with a warranty, a maintenance plan, and support, open source simply comes with a license that says you have to right to use it if you see fit, but you waive all warranties and liabilities while doing so. If it is broken, you can ask the community for help fixing it, but you might have to fix it. You have to maintain and update it. You have to install it. And in some cases, you have to even compile it! That takes development manpower — and sometimes lots of it. Whereas all you might need for vendor provided software is an admin to create and maintain accounts, you might need a dev team backing up the open source.

How do you protect it?

Chances are you will find something that doesn’t quite do what you need, or that needs to be fixed, and will have to fix, and augment it. Under the terms of most open source agreements, any modifications you make must also be open source and released, so if you want to do any custom upgrades, you better be prepared to give them away for free. At least with proprietary technology, you can always negotiate with a provider for custom developed technology exclusive to you.

How do you defend your investment against it?

Maybe the best choice today is that proprietary enterprise software license that costs you high six or low seven figures for enterprise wide deployment — but which should net you a nice return based upon the value you expect to get from it under the assumption that the vendor’s promises will materialize. However, you will only get the advantage you expect in the market if your competitor cannot get a solution for any less. What if an open source with equivalent, or better, capability hits the market next year and the only cost is the cost of training or a few consultants to implement it plus an ongoing system admin after that? If your competition can get equivalent software for a fraction of the cost in a year, will you net your return? And will you be giving up a greater return by locking into proprietary software now when the open source that could materialize in the near future might even allow your organization to take an accelerated path to savings?

Just like proprietary madness, open source is also a technology damnation. When it comes to technology, it’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

Economic Damnation 04: Gen X, Gen Y, and Gen Z

Why are:

  • Generation X, the generation born between the early 1960s and the early 1980s,
  • Generation Y, the generation born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s, and the
  • Generation Z, the generation born between the early 2000s and the present day

An economic damnation? As will be discussed in detail in societal damnation 50 on talent, talent is required to keep your supply chains moving. People are required to enter the data to keep the information chain moving, to move the money to keep the financial chain moving, and to move the goods that keep the physical chain moving.

The majority of this talent is a workforce between the ages of 20 and 55, who will have been born between 1960 and 1995, and will thus be primarily composed of Generation X and the Generation Y Millennials, and as Generation X begins to retire en-masse, Generation Z will begin to enter the workforce in a few more years.

As a result, not only is talent a damnation, but it’s a damnation that comes in three different flavours.

Generation X

Generation X wants stability. They are at least half way through their career, if not nearing the end, and they are looking for their last (long-term) full-time gig that will give them fair pay, a great pension / 401 K / RRSP, flexible hours to help manage their children’s, or grandchildren’s, schedules, time-off to help good causes and volunteer in the community, good healthcare and wellness programs (as they aren’t getting any younger), and career development — as they have been out of school for (quite) a while and need help keeping up with new skills and work requirements.

Generation Y

They are looking for unique opportunities (such as overseas assignments, travel-intensive positions, or opportunities to work with cutting edge technology or developments, even if they might not succeed), work-life balance (as they are very active), social responsibility (as they care about working for an employer that cares about the environment and humanity beyond their local community more than previous generations), modern technology (as they grew up with technology), and mentoring (as they want to learn how to succeed and thrive in the real-world).

Generation Z

The beginnings of generation Z are just beginning high-school. And whereas Generation Y grew up in the information age, where technology was becoming more ubiquitous by the day, Generation Z grew up in the communication age where not only was technology becoming ubiquitous, but communication technology was becoming ubiquitous and just about every Gen Z is growing up with a smartphone where they can call, text, and e-mail 24/7. While we don’t know what they will want from a job perspective, we do know that they will want to be connected to their friends and colleagues 24/7 so any company that has not entered the communication age will not be able to recruit this coming generation.

In other words, every generation wants something different from the workplace and gone are the days when all it took to get an employee was job security, a fair pay check and some health benefits. Today, that’s the entrance fee to join the employer’s club. If you want talent, that costs more. Much more.

Shortlist.co Should Be On Your ShortList for Agency & Services Management

In our last post, we noted that most Sourcing and (e-) Procurement platforms are not appropriate for Marketing and Services Management. We gave a number of reasons for this, but the big ones can be summarized as:

  • lack of a creative, digital, or advertising suppliers in a supplier network
  • lack of an appropriate project definition for marketing projects
  • lack of an appropriate workflow for marketing or services projects
  • lack of appropriate collaboration for internal and external partners

Marketing, unlike Procurement, needs to be as focussed on the relationship and the creative as Procurement needs to be focussed on the cost and the deliverable. It’s all about the message, the delivery, and the brand. That’s more than just a DVD with 30 seconds of a TV spot, a zipped download of a new website, or a document outlining a new brand building campaign.

That’s why marketing needs a solution that allows it to:

  • identify new suppliers it would not find otherwise that might be able to serve its creative, digital, or advertising needs to help it increase returns while keeping costs in line
  • define marketing projects in a way that allows for meaningful RFPs, evaluations, and workflows
  • allow Marketing to collaborate with Procurement, Engineering, and other internal stakeholders in a manner that is conscious of organizational strategy and budgets
  • allows Marketing to collaborate with suppliers and track progress, deliverables, milestone, and overall supplier relationship with marketing suppliers

Shortlist.co, which will be doing a major North American launch early next year, is a new web-based platform that will allow a Marketing organization to do all of this. This platform has three major elements:

Vetted, Indexed, Supplier Network

The platform contains thousands of global suppliers in the advertising, creative, and digital space that are vetted by Shortlist.co as real and capable of performing the advertised service offerings. They are indexed by location (from region down to city level), size, and offering.

Services Project Management

Everything in the platform revolves around a project. Project creation is quite simple, as all a user has to do is enter a name (which can be changed later), and optionally assign it to a campaign (which can be done later) and a category for budgetary purposes (which can be done later and changed later as well). Once a project is created, a user provides a description, creates and / or attaches an RFX, selects suppliers to distribute the request to, defines a response due date, and the project is launched. Alternatively, if this is a project that is undertaken on a regular basis, the user might just select a template, make a few alterations, update the supplier list, define the response dates, and launch. Then, the user defines a review team, sends out the review invitations, and when the responses come back, the review team can independently and collectively review and comment on the proposals. Once one has been accepted, the budget can be revised and recategorized, and at all times the team can see how much of the budget has been allocated year to date and how it breaks down into campaigns and categories (such as UX design, web site development, tv spots, internet video, social media campaigns, etc.).

Collaborative RFX Capability

While RFX is not unique to the platform, it is extremely well integrated into the project and has all of the functionality one would expect in the creation of a detailed RFX for services. In addition, the tool supports side by side comparison of multiple responses to make evaluation by each team member easy, and can aggregate the scorings from multiple team members to allow for organizational ranking, allowing each team member’s input to be taken into account during agency selection. Furthermore, the weighting adjusts to the actual number of reviewers who have commented on an item, so that if only one of three reviewers has an opinion, a 9 (out of 10) does not become a weighted 3.

Reporting

The insights capability is still being built out, but right now the platform also supports an initial set of project and partner comparison reports that allow an organization to answer, at a minimum:

  • how award allocations compare to budgets
  • how spend breaks down by category and campaign
  • which suppliers have the most projects
  • which suppliers have the most spend (by category)
  • the success rate of each supplier

The platform, which is being designed to be the marketing and service award, management, and collaboration tool between stakeholders and suppliers, fills a big need in many mid-size organizations today which have nothing to appropriately manage marketing and service spend, and even less that Marketing and Service Management can use. As a 100% multi-tenant SaaS solution, this allows a marketing organization to start immediately with no IT, or Procurement, support but yet involve IT and Procurement in all of their projects. Shortlist.co is definitely a solution that should be on your organization’s shortlist for agency & services management

Does Your Organization Have What It Needs for Agency & Services Management?

SI might be focussed primarily on (Strategic) Sourcing and (e-) Procurement and associated solutions for spend reduction, cost control, and value generation, but every now and again likes to focus on solutions for Marketing, Contingent Labour & Outsourced Services, Legal, and other departments who believe their spend categories are sacred cows that will not be treated with the reverence they deserve by Procurement (and, as such, refuse to hand over control of those categories to a Procurement professional).

Marketing is one of the departments that needs a solution for cost control, and not just because it won’t turn over it’s sacred cow spend, but because the nature of the spend requires good, collaborative, services management. Traditional (e-) Procurement does not address the particular needs of an indirect services category like marketing where:

  • agency identification requires a vetted, indexed, database
  • agency selection requires stakeholder engagement and agreement
  • budget management requires award tracking by project and category
  • project management requires agency involvement
  • issue resolution requires real-time online collaboration

These needs can only be served by a platform that provides:

  • a supplier network of creative, digital, and advertising agencies
  • an online collaboration portal with survey capability and multi-user ranking and aggregate weighting
  • the ability to capture award amounts by project and work category (creative, digital, equipment rentals, etc.)
  • an online project management portal to track progress, milestones, and deliverables
  • an online collaboration portal where stakeholders can connect in real-time

But if you consider these needs, you find that:

  • few e-Procurement platforms have networks, and fewer still have any creative, digital, or advertising agencies as they tend to focus on direct material providers
  • the vast majority of e-Procurement and Sourcing platforms have RFX, most allow multi-user aggregate rankings, but most are not configured for users outside of Procurement
  • most e-Procurement platforms with CLM support allow for detailed project definitions and costing by line item, but the built in categorizations are not designed for marketing
  • most e-Procurement platforms have Procurement driven workflows, not agency project management workflows
  • online collaboration is generally only well supported in SRM (Supplier Relationship Management) platforms

As a result, as has been discussed on SI in the past, most Sourcing and (e-) Procurement platforms are not appropriate for Marketing and Services Management. Other solutions are needed.

Three Hundred and Fifty Years Ago Today

The (London) Gazette, the oldest surviving journal (which is one of the official journals of record of the British Government), was founded. Considering that many publication these days don’t even survive three point five years, the fact that a journal has survived in continuous publication for three and a half centuries is astounding. It’s longevity is probably aided by the fact that certain statutory notices in the UK are required to be published in official journals, but one has to be honest here — if it were to disappear, the notices would just shift to other journals.

Imagine the pride that Henry Muddiman, a name not even well known by many of today’s journalist students would have felt to know that a publication he began is still thriving three-hundred and fifty years later. With the web came the ability for just about anyone to start a new media publication, but how many of the new media publications started twenty years ago, a mere five years after Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first internet-based hypertext system, are still around today? Very few. The easier publishing gets, the more fleeting it seems to become, and even traditional newspapers are now going the way of the dodo.

Will today’s Supply Management publications stand the test of time? Even Purchasing Magazine, the longest running magazine that chronicled the world’s second oldest (or is it the third oldest) profession ceased publication five years ago. Will Sourcing Innovation and Spend Matters survive beyond the doctor and the prophet, the driving forces behind them? Only time will tell. But it really makes you stop and think about the long history that led up to the print revolution the internet launched.

To aid with your contemplations, here is the link to Another Day by November 7.