This post is inspired by THE REVELATOR‘s inquiry where he asked Do You Really Want a Successful ProcureTech Initiative?

For the vast majority of you, the answer is a clear and resounding “YES” (with the possible exception of those of you who have been treated badly by your employer and want to use your last official act to stick them with an application that will make them as miserable as you are, but as far as I can tell, you are a very small minority — you didn’t get into Procurement expecting it to be easy, or to be a way to make friends).

However, you are only one cog in the ecosystem. Let’s look at the other cogs:

Vendor: as long as you keep renewing the SaaS subscription, the C-Suite at the vendor doesn’t care if they sold you a Ferrari (at a Ferrari price tag) but delivered a 2004 Mazda RX-8 …

Analyst Firm: as long as the big research subscriptions keep rolling in from the big vendors (who always feature at the top / upper right / frontal wave of their maps), the analyst firm doesn’t care if you succeed or not, and will not only happily push the hype the vendors want pushed, but happily blame you for not doing your research and not selecting the appropriate technology when you and your counterparts take their advice en-masse and then contribute to the all-time high project failure rates of 88% (two and a half decades of project failure)

Implementor: not really, because if you don’t swap out the solution at renewal time, where is their future revenue going to come from???

Big X who pushed the platform: Hell No! … they need to sell you projects to find bolt ons, do custom additions, and tweak the process for years as they need to keep their bench empty! (And some of these shops have over 100K junior consultants they have to keep busy. Moreover, they don’t make money training them on AI, they make money deploying them as your external support force. (Remember, many of these shops are effectively the new Manpower, except they have to pay their consultants on the bench, whereas job placement agencies just had to place people to keep their government grants or get their placement fee!)

And since YOU don’t take the time to do your research and figure this out (including the fact that the Big X pushed the worst fit solution from their stable on you to keep their Gold/Platinum/Sycophant status with the solution provider), that’s why YOU keep failing. Even if the salesperson honestly wanted to sell you a win (and many don’t, and the doctor can say that confidently with over 25 years in Enterprise Software and he’s sure THE REVELATOR has some stories to tell here), that’s far from a guarantee that a win will happen.

If you truly want success, YOU have to define your processes, define your problem, find the right vendor, make the vendor contractually responsible for implementation success (whether they do it or use a third party) with delayed payment (where you don’t pay for a module until it is working and passes predefined tests) and early termination clauses, identify the gaps, identify the right niche consultancy (who doesn’t have a stadium of junior consultants) to help you identify add ons and processes to fill them, and define early out clauses in case of non-delivery! You have to do all the work the vendors, analysts, and consultants claim they do for you … because they don’t (or at least don’t do it in your best interest). And while the good ones (which may take you a while to find) will help you, YOU still have to take the lead!

And the doctor knows you don’t always have the time to do it all, which is why he keeps pushing Project Assurance where you hire a niche specialist to help you, one who is not a part of the big COGs that need never-ending projects from you to stay solvent, and only cares about helping you get everything in order for success. (After all, there are so few of these experts it is literally a case of too many companies, too little time. These people or small niche consultancies don’t have to worry about running out of work, and by the time they made it through all the current companies they could handle, it would be time for their initial clients to upgrade to next generation systems anyway — and the only way they’d be available for a future project is to ensure client success with every client they take on.)

As we indicated, in our last two rants, you can no longer afford to be led by the Clueless vendors. It’s time you take your Procurement destiny into your own hands. It’s time for the Revenge of the Nerds!