After all, with over 666 solution providers out there, I should be in solution utopia, right?

In Part I, we said there are three big big reasons for this, they are people-centric, and they all start with F!

1. Founders
2. Financiers
3. Fashionistas

We also discussed Founders in Part I and Financiers in Part II. Today we will discuss the Fashionistas.

Now the doctor knows what you’re saying: “Wait, What“? What do Fashionistas have to do with ProcureTech? And the answer is, well, just about everything unfortunately.

You see, a fashionista is a designer of haute couture, and, today, haute couture is not restricted to clothes … it also breeds into tech, and while one might think it should be restricted to wearable tech, it isn’t. It’s any tech-du-jour that the fashionistas find cool. And, right now, they find FinTech cool. That’s why you see an over-focus on FinTech, of which ProcureTech is fast becoming the leading category, from (some of) the analyst firms and the influencers. Especially if that ProcureTech embraces the current haute couture hype of Gen-AI, whether or not the Gen-AI adds any value whatsoever. (After all, functionally, there is no difference between a $2K designer sundress and a $20 Walmart/Marks & Spencer sundress of the same size and thickness from a functional coverage/cooling perspective.)

Now the doctor knows that you’re probably saying: “so what, you don’t have to listen to them“. And that’s true. But the problem is, it’s mind boggling how many people do, especially at bigger companies. For example, if the ProcureTech player isn’t on a Gartner, Forrester, or IDC map, good luck even getting permission to invite the vendor for an RFI for a core system. We may have made it past the days of “you never got fired for IBM” but we still haven’t made it past the days of “you never got fired for buying the Gartner/Forrester/IDC” recommendation.

These big analyst firms, which feature the same big suites year after year after year with little to no change (because one of them will not include any vendor who is not a paying customer, another will go out of its way to redefine the inclusion criteria each update to what is absolutely minimal to allow for inclusion of all paying customers who want to be in the map [and, in the process, exclude as many non-customers as possible], and the third defines very restrictive criteria to keep the map size, and workload, down, and ends up with a client heavy map). A big company exec following these maps would think the space hasn’t changed in over a decade, even though the biggest change is that most of the companies in the map haven’t done any major innovation in a decade, and don’t appear to be focussed on it either (see the doctor‘s Sailing the Seven Seas Sans a Sextant? piece).

But this isn’t the extent of the problem these analyst firms pose. The real extent, as per our last piece where we noted that the financiers who over-invest and need to make their return pursue the increased pricing strategy (with no increase in underlying functionality or value) do so by ensuring that you are hit with a constant onslaught across all channels, making sure that their investment is hyped up by the big analyst firms and echoed by the Platinum/Diamond/Rhodium consulting and implementation partners. This means that the first thing these PE firms do is have their investment sign a six figure deal with one of these big analyst firms, pay that invoice promptly, make a vague promise to sign more in the future, and get the analyst firm to hype them up like mad. All of a sudden there’s a new Cool Vendor, a new Tech Sub-Category, or something where their investment gets hyped a lot even if it can’t yet make the major map (due to annual revenue, missing baseline functionality, etc.). They also ensure that their the lead influencer consultants at their Platinum+ Partners get these messages and reprints to echo and distribute.

And then, of course, there are the ever present influencers, who are often the biggest fashionistas of the space, with the large-ish followings who will have their newsletters sponsored by these firms, paid speaking engagements at upcoming customer events or conferences these firms sponsor, and other benefits in addition to first access to the firm’s messaging and content for redistribution. This will be especially true if the influencer doesn’t really know the ProcureTech landscape and how valuable a technology like Gen-AI really is to the product being promoted. This is because the less in-depth the influencer’s space and technology knowledge actually is, the greater the chance they will happily echo the firm’s marketing, meaningful or not, because, as one of the more astute readers commented on the doctor‘s Top 10 Ways to be a Procurement Influencer on LinkedIn!, they will happily self-censor their thoughts even without the marketers having to censor for them because they don’t want to cut the branch they sit on. (Or, for you Americans, they’ll happily parrot the message without question because they don’t want to bite the hand that feeds.)

And this is the third reason your ProcureTech solution doesn’t solve your problem, and that’s because the only solutions you hear about are the ones being over-marketed which may not even solve a basic problem for the majority of the customer base the advertising and marketing is (incorrectly) targeting.

In Conclusion

Any one of these F’s will result in a poor fitting solution for you, two of these F’s will result in a struggle to get a return that equals what you paid, and all three F’s will likely result in a disaster. And with over 666 companies, the sad reality is that it is a statistical guarantee there are way more companies that fall victim to all three Fs than you think, at least from your particular point of view.

Remember, even if a company has a good solution that works for the set of problems it was initially designed for (and received an unbiased write-up from an independent analyst), that still doesn’t mean it is right for you. As we have continuously pointed out in prior and forthcoming articles and LinkedIn Comments, YOU still need to make sure your problem aligns, the implementation option aligns, the integration with your systems is possible, the necessary data is available (or at least will be made available by IT), and that you have an independent project assurance expert who’s goal aligns with yours. Otherwise, you’re still falling for the fashionista’s fashion du jour, and failure is waiting around the corner.

Post Script

Please don’t interpret this series to imply that all founders or financiers are bad or that all influencers have evil in their hearts. There are some very good founders (who happily admit their shortcomings, seek out help, and step back at the right time). There are also some great PE firms that make it a point to avoid bidding wars and limit the multiple they pay to what they expect to make back without raising prices to unsustainable levels and then actually help the firm do better at selling. And some influencers honestly think the substance free content they push out is helpful. (It’s not, but they didn’t start to screw you over with bad recommendations, just to get famous and make their fortune off of being a famous influencer.)

However, as you have probably guessed by now, both sides of the coin exist. And the coin is definitely NOT weighted to come up heads anymore. It’s such a shame, shame shame.