Category Archives: Analyst

Top 10 Ways to Be a Procurement Influencer on LinkedIn! Part II

As per part I, the votes have been counted and apparently everyone wants … an Influencer!

Not a consultant. Not a practitioner. Not an educator. And definitely not a leader!

So now you too want to be an Influencer! Hell yeah!

So how do you become the Preeminent Procurement Influencer! Either ask THE PROPHET, the OG Influencer, or just follow this top 10 list and you’re virtually guaranteed to succeed!

05. Krazy KPI Kompulsion

We all know you can’t manage what you can’t measure, and what’s better than a metric? A Key Performance Indicator metric. And what’s better than a Key Performance Indicator? A whole page of Key Performance Indicators organized into super cool looking (but inherently unusable) dashboards that are the perfect eye candy! Remember to pump one of these out at least once a month, and every quarter replace a metric or two and explain how the metric you replaced was outdated and not outcome focussed, because we’re all about outcomes, right?

And again, if it’s not overwhelming, it’s not done right!


Using ProjectManagement.com so as not to embarrass any Procurement Application.

04. Shape Supplier Superstars

Remember to remind those Procurement professionals weekly that their failures are not their fault! It’s their suppliers who are not performing up to par. All they have to do to improve their performance is ensure that their suppliers step up their performance because, then, good things will magically happen! On top of that, given them a checklist of relationship management things to do, mention a platform or two, one or two metrics and … abracadabra … things are going to magically get better. (Ignore the fact that there is no supplier improvement unless someone puts in a lot of work and that many Procurement professionals don’t have the time or the knowledge to put together the detailed operational improvement plans needed to improve supplier performance.) And don’t forget #08 when you do it. The best way to inspire collaboration is motivation, right?


03. Procurement Maturity Models

Create a matrix, preferably Five By Five, because that is the best signal strength with the best clarity after all (even though you’re not an engineer and don’t understand what that means). Plus, it’s the golden ratio for Maturity Models (it’s not, but you’re not a mathematician, because, if you were, you’d use Eight by Five for the Nine to Fives as that’s closer to the golden aspect ratio). So just pump it out, don’t worry about how accurate it is, or, more likely, how useful it is, and just keep on listening to your Ella Mae Morse.

02. Logo Maps

Just slap 100+ logos on a page, divide them up, make up some labels, get bonus points if you can do Venn Diagrams, and look like you are a super Guru of ProcureTech. Ignore the fact you have little to no formal technical background, can’t differentiate SIM vs SRM vs SPM vs SUM vs SCM vs SOM vs SNM vs SEM vs SQM vs SDM (and think the doctor is just making this up when he’s not and one of the handful [literally, you can count us on your fingers on one hand]) of OG analysts who have been around for over two decades (with a solid background in computer science [and applied mathematics, which is considerably more important than you think if you want to analyze advanced analytics, optimization, RPA, and ML/AI technology and not just take the vendor BS marketing at their word]) when you probably struggle to differentiate sourcing vs. procurement vendors (given all the marketing noise they make these days). (And remember, whatever you do, don’t make those logos clickable! No one cares what the squiggle actually represents … it’s all about the cool graphic!)

01. Agentric AI is the Future!

There’s nothing a Procurement professional likes more than the night train than the Hype Train! (After all, thanks to the nonstop Big Tech, Big Analyst, and Vendor Marketing onslaughts, they’ve all been Blinded by the Hype!.) So keep telling them how great it’s going to be when Agentric AI does their job for them (and ignore the fact that companies are hoping they can use Agentric AI to fire them).

And that’s all there is too it! Follow these 10 steps and you too can be the next Procurement Influencer with thousands of followers ignoring, sorry, hanging on your every word. Just whatever you do, please don’t tag me in any of this content. (And if you’re looking for any of this, definitely don’t follow me.) You’re welcome!

Top 10 Ways to Be a Procurement Influencer on LinkedIn! Part I

The votes have been counted and apparently everyone wants … an Influencer!

So, welcome to Influencer Week on Sourcing Innovation! It’s time to give the influencers their due.

After all, when it comes to a:

Consultant? Nope! Once the money is gone they leave you with the mess you created (by selecting the system the big analyst firm put on the upper right of the map du jour) and you don’t want that.

Practitioner? Double Nope! Like you, they slave in the dungeon of the Tower of Spend on an old 286 which can barely play a low resolution version of Weird Al’s It’s All About the Pentiums and use Ariba Web 5.

Educator? Hell No! No one wants to learn and they definitely don’t want some random sap expending all their energy trying to teach them.

Leader? Are you crazy? As far as the CEO and CFO are concerned, ALL the bucks stop with Procurement and everything that goes wrong is Procurement’s fault, whether Procurement had any control over it or not including, but not limited to, tariffs no one predicted a year ago when the contract was signed, natural disasters, and the lack of results due to a complete lack of funding for modern technology and skilled talent.

Who does that leave?

An Influencer! Hell yes!

So now everyone wants to be … an Influencer!

Unlike a consultant, you don’t have to do projects doomed to fail. Unlike a practitioner, you get to work in the limelight and not in the ghost light of the old monochrome CRT hooked up to that 286. Unlike an educator, you don’t have to actually teach, just get likes, follows, and clicks! And, unlike a leader, you don’t have to care about results and whether your influences get any! It’s the perfect job!

But how do you become an influencer? Well, you could ask THE PROPHET, one of the OG Influencers of our space (who, by the way, only became one AFTER he learned how to solve business problems), or you could just follow this top 10 list and you’re virtually guaranteed to succeed.

10. Post top 10 lists regularly!

Letterman was right. The masses love these. While 10 is not a perfect number, the average person seems to think it is, so just go with it. They’ve been getting results for 40 years! (Since September 18, 1985, to be precise!)

09. Inspirational Quotes in fancy graphics.

Everyone likes an inspirational quote right? A little bit of feel good to start their day (otherwise they might have to stop by Dr. Feelgood‘s on the way to the office). Make sure they rise and shine to you!

08. Motivational Posters, Procurement Style.

What do people like more than an inspirational quote? A motivational poster! Even better if it has cute kitty kats because we all have to


Bonus points if you can figure out how to make these Motivational Procurement Posters Gangnam Style

07. Don’t Forget Your Hobby!

Yes, remember to tell us weekly about how you ski the specialist slopes, sail the strait, race cars or do something else super cool every weekend because not only are you a Procurement Influencer, but you’re a super cool human! (After all, an AI could never make up a story about how it raced a car at the local track this weekend or generate a picture of itself at the beach because it’s an AI, right?) And everyone wants to connect with, and thus be influenced by, a super cool human, right?

06. And Definitely Don’t Forget the Exclusives!

After all, you’re not a true influencer until you have a cult, sorry, fan club, sorry, exclusive member club of leading Procurement professionals who get access to your most exclusive content that distinguishes them as the biggest suckers, sorry, leading thinkers who will take their careers to the next level with your industry leading content (all designed to keep their dopamine levels at maximum capacity).

But Wait, There’s More! Don’t forget that you have to offer them something to sign up for at the low, low starter price of $19.99 a month! (After all, Mr. Popeil made that the magic number 50 years ago and it’s held on ever since!)

Come back tomorrow for Part II for the top 5 suggestions to be a Preeminent Procurement Influencer!

Don’t Trust an Analyst Firm to Score UX and Implementation Time!

A post late last month on LinkedIn started off as follows:

“If you’ve ever read any research papers or solution maps on procurement tech, you’ve probably figured out a couple of things.

1. It’s confusing and overly complex
2. It doesn’t cover the basic, most obvious-of-the-obvious fundamentals that everyone needs to consider.

These are:

– User interface and user experience (UI/UX)
– Ease and speed of implementation

Why don’t they do this?

Honestly, I don’t know the answer.

The cynic in me says it’s because their biggest paymasters have a horrible UI/UX and require a very complex and lengthy implementation.”

This really bothered me, not because UX and implementation time aren’t super important, they are, and they are among the biggest determinants of adoption (which is critical to success), but because anyone would think an analyst firm should address this.

The reality is that no proper analyst will attempt to score these because they are completely subjective! As a result:

  1. There is no objective, function-based/capability-based scale that could be scored consistently by any knowledgeable analyst on the subject and
  2. What is a great experience to one person, with a certain expectation of tech based upon prior experience and knowledge of their function, can be complete CR@P to another person.

Now, some firms do bury such subjective evaluations on UX and implementation time in their 2*2s where they squish an average of 6 subjective ratings into a dimension, but that is why those maps are complete garbage! (See: Dear Analyst Firms: Please stop mangling maps, inventing award categories, and evaluating what you don’t understand!) So no self-respecting analyst should do it. As an example, one analyst might like solutions with absolute minimalist design, with everything hidden and everything automated against pre-built rules (that may, or may not, be right for your organization and may result in an automated sourcing solution placing a Million dollar order with payment up front for a significant early payment discount to a supplier that subsequently files for bankruptcy and doesn’t deliver your goods) while a second might like full user control through a multi-screen multi-step interface for what could be a one-screen and one-step function and a third might like to see as much capability and information as possible squished into every screen and long for the days of text-based green-screens where you weren’t distracted by graphics and animations and design. Each of these analyst would score the same UX completely different! On a 10 point scale, for a given UX design, three analysts in the same firm could give scores of 1, 5, and 10, averaged to 5 … and how is that useful? It’s not!

(And while analysts can define scales of maturity for the technology the UX is based on, just because a vendor is using the latest technology, that doesn’t mean their UX is any good. New technology can be just as horrendously misused as old technology.)

The same goes for implementation time. An analyst that mainly focuses on simple sourcing/procurement where you should just be able to flick a SaaS switch and go would think that an implementation time of more than a week is abysmal, but an analyst that primarily analyzes CLM and SMDM would call BS on anything less than six weeks and expect three months for an implementation time. This is because, for CLM, you have to find all the contracts, feed them in, run them through AI for automated meta-data extraction, do manual review, and set up new processes while for SMDM you have to integrate half a dozen systems, do data integrations, cleansing, and enrichment through cross-referencing with third party sources, create golden records, do manual spot-check reviews, and push the data back . Implementation time is dependent on the solution, the architecture, what it does, what data it needs, what systems it needs to be integrated with, what support there is for data extraction and loading in those legacy systems, etc. Implementation time needs to be judged against the minimum amount of time to do it effectively, which is also customer dependent. Expecting an analyst to understand all the potential client situations is ridiculous. Expecting them to craft an “average customer situation”, base an implementation time on this, and score a set of random vendors accordingly is even more ridiculous.

The factors ARE absolutely vital, but they need to be judged by the buying organization as part of the review cycle, AFTER they’ve verified that the vendor can offer a solution that will meet

  • their current, most pressing, needs as an organization,
  • their evolving needs as they will need to get other problems under control, and
  • do so with a solution that is technically sound and complete with respect to the two requirements above while also being capable of scaling up and evolving over time (as well as capable of being plugged into an appropriate platform-based ecosystem through a fully Open API).

A good analyst an guide you on ways to judge this and what you might want to consider, but that’s it … you have to be the final judge, not them.

That’s why, when the doctor co-designed Solution Map when he was a Consulting Analyst for Spend Matters, the Solution Map focussed on scoring the technological foundations, which could be judged on an objective scale based on the evolution of underlying technology over the past two-plus decades and/or the evolution of functionality to address a specific problem over the past two-plus decades. It’s up to you whether you like it or not, think the implementation time frames are good or not, believe the vendor is innovative or not, and are satisfied with the vendor size and maturity, not the analyst. Those are business viewpoints that are business dependent. Analysts should score capabilities and foundations, particularly where buyers are ill-equipped to do so (and this also means that analysts scoring technology MUST be trained technologists with a formal, educational, background in technology — computer science, engineering, etc. — and experience in Software Development or Implementation –and yes, the doctor realizes this is not always the case, and that’s probably why most of the analyst maps are squished dimensions across half-a-dozen subjective factors [as they are not capable of properly evaluating what they are claiming to be subject matter experts in; as a comparison, when you have a journalist or historian or accountant rating modern SaaS platforms that’s the equivalent of having a plumber certify your electrical wiring or a landscaper judging the strength of the framing in your new house — sure, they’re trade pros, but do you really want to judge their opinion that the wiring is NOT going to start an electrical fire and burn your house down or the frame is strong enough for the 3,000 pounds of appliances you intend to put on the 2nd floor? the doctor would hope not!).

The cynic might say they don’t want to embarrass their sponsors, but the realist will realize the analysts can’t effectively judge vendors on this and the smart analysts won’t even try (but will instead guide you on the factors you should consider and look for when evaluating potential solutions on the shortlist they can help you build by giving you a list of vendors that provide the right type of solution and are technically sound, vs. three random vendors from a Google search that don’t even offer the same type of solution).

Have the Analyst Firms Finally Admitted They Don’t Know What They’re Doing?

the doctor recently went on a big rant about the analyst firms and the utter lack of usefulness in the maps they release, the focus they put on what they don’t understand, and the award categories they invent because, even though they have/had some great talent (and should be doing incredible work), what they’ve publicly released has been mostly valueless to the market they’ve been trying to serve (when it wouldn’t be too hard to provide a lot of value based on all the research and work they do). In the doctor‘s view, this is very sad because if they could demonstrate the value they provide, they would be more relevant across the market (and likely get a lot more business from smaller and/or more innovative providers who think that, because of the budgets the big players like Oracle, SAP, and Coupa have, the analysts are always going to recommend those companies anyway).

However, now he’s gone from sad to mad about something he has just heard from a couple of vendors regarding one of the biggest firms, because, if true, it means not only do they not have a clue about what is and is not valuable in tech, but they are unnecessarily creating confusing and obfuscating technology that still may be best in class.

So what have they done now? Well, apparently they are now basing 30% of the score on whether or not the vendor has “AI” in their platform, something which they’ve repeatedly proven they have ZERO ability to score whatsoever! So, either a vendor makes false, grandiose claims (and tries to use Applied Indirection to fool the Analyst Idiot that they have more than Artificial Idiocy in their Application Implementation), or they get scored low even if they have the best technology built on best practices, proven algorithms, and consistent results that give their customers a 5X to 10X ROI.

True AI adds value, but, in the doctor‘s experience,

  • up to 80% of AI claims are Applied Indirection (at best) or Artificial Idiocy (at worst); in fact, some of the “AI” in spend analysis is still the “AI” they used in the early 2000s, and the doctor would rather not spell out that sad, but still true for some vendors, racial slur
  • up to 80% of the rest, or up to 16% of tech that claims AI, is level one Assistive Intelligence; and this is typically just classic RPA (Robotic Process Automation) using human-defined parameter-based rules, and the “AI” is the automatic parameter adjustment based on user overrides … not very intelligent, eh?
  • up to 80% of the rest, or up to 4% of the tech that claims AI, is level 2 Augmented Intelligence, which is the first level of AI where the tech can learn from human feedback and provide better insights and recommendations over time on one or more specific tasks, and the first level of AI that you should even consider as AI
  • up to 80% of the rest, up to 1% of the tech that claims AI, and the highest level modern technology has generally achieved, is level 3, Apperceptive Intelligence, or Cognitive Intelligence, where the systems can not only learn from specific human feedback to recommendations but from general knowledge and intelligence available to it from integrated data sources to mimic the performance of the best human experts over time, even evolving processes, behaviours, and actions within well-defined bounds
  • and then the rest, 0.1% or less, is nearing level 4, Autonomous Intelligence, where the system can learn, evolve, adapt, and maintain itself over time without human intervention … and hopefully execute meaningful, appropriate decisions grounded in best process and fact that considers all of the relevant information available (and not go off of the rails and advise you to commit suicide because you feel bad, Hail Hitler, or sacrifice a trolley full of people and a cross-walk full of pedestrians because there might be a cat in the road — all things AI has already done)

And even where a platform has semblances of real AI, chances are that the AI (the vendor is now forced to include or arbitrarily be relegated to the dustbin because, apparently, it’s not solutions but buzz-acronymns that matter now) is producing worst results than the best traditional algorithm or methodology on expert curated data sets and dimensions. For example, the vast majority of the market believes AI improves forecasting. It doesn’t. The best AI is still inferior to the best techniques developed in the 70s when applied to the right data dimensions. All the “AI”, which is just fancy, souped-up versions of classical machine learning (using algorithms developed in the 80s and 90s for which we didn’t have enough computing power until recently), does is run all of the data through a model that integrates classification with prediction to filter out the most relevant dimensions and the best curve fitting technique as all these algorithms, at the core, are based on 50+ year old statistics! This means that, at the end of the day, their best case performance is something a human genius figured out 50+ years ago.

But to achieve that best case, the developers have to implement the right AI algorithms, tune them properly, allow them to run long enough to correctly fit (but not over-fit) the training data sets, and monitor those algorithms over time … and to do that they need to be an expert in those algorithms, which they probably aren’t. So, in order to “check a box”, and sell you a product, they are ultimately integrating algorithms that will give you an inferior result (while requiring considerably more computing power that runs up your cloud utilization bill), versus sticking to tried-and-true algorithms and processes that their experts tweaked over years and that their experts can explain and verify at any time.

And this is an almost reasonable example of what a technology vendor might do (as the best predictive algorithms are not untested “AI” but based on classical, tried-and-true, statistical or optimization functions). Most of what the doctor has seen is MUCH worse than this. And the fact that some big analyst firms are now forcing vendors with good tech to integrate underdeveloped, unproven, and often untested AI just to get a rating, make a map, or be recommended is downright stupid.

SHAME ON ANY ANALYST FIRM THAT DOES THIS! Buzzwords are not products, and unproven tech is not value. Analysts should be recommending the best solutions, regarding of the tech they are based on. the doctor is simply appalled!

A 60 Minute Call is NOT Due Diligence!

It used to be the doctor would only get a request once every month or so for a “call with a client looking for some insight into the space from an expert“, but now it’s the case he’s getting these every week, often multiple times a week, from yet another firm that “specializes in connecting clients looking for insight with experts” or some other such meaningless gobblydygook from a knock-off Dilbert Mission Statement Generator.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad in the grand scheme of events except,

  1. You can’t learn anything meaningful in 60 minutes. (We’re talking enterprise software solutions, not the results of an investigative whodunnit.)
  2. These requests are now coming from kids so young the doctor is wondering if they are still high school (despite the fancy LinkedIn titles their firms give them) … and not to be ageist, but there’s no way these kids have any deep understanding at all of any industry domain or what makes an expert (and how to judge if that expert has the right education and experience).
  3. It seems companies are using a handful of these calls as “due diligence” on a space or a company.

And a 60-minute call is NOT due diligence. the doctor does product and technical due diligence, and even a high-level due diligence on a company (which is just looking for potential red-flags and yellow-flags that will have to be watched) takes weeks of man power (as the team he worked with did market, strategy, product, and technology, and even though the doctor can do an entire product and technical diligence in S2P on his own — no team of 6 to 10 needed — it’s at least a week of effort on a single module to get enough certainty that there are no red flags and the important yellow flags have been identified). This is because a due diligence involves process reviews, document reviews, code reviews, focussed interviews, etc. etc. etc. and comparisons to standards, best practices, and market norms.

Given this, just what are you going to learn from a few call with external “experts” who don’t have any access to documents, processes and practices, and the internal stakeholders who make the decisions? Opinions. Maybe. But most likely, absolutely nothing!

In other words, if you need deep insight, find an analyst, diligence, or strategy firm that knows the space and, if you are interested in a company in particular, find an analyst, diligence, or strategy firm that that knows that company AND that company’s peers. And go with them. Don’t pay for the privilege of paying for the privilege to talk to someone who won’t end up being that useful to you. Especially if you need to be able to back up a(n investment [related]) decision that involves the company and prove you did your homework and the stars were aligned as well as they could have been when the decision was made (since no one can predict the future, just play the odds).

In other words, these firms, which the doctor will have nothing to do with, need to go away. A consultant who has the expertise to find the right analyst / diligence / consultancy for you and introduces you to the right individual in that firm deserves a finder’s fee, but doesn’t deserve a fee for the privilege of hooking you up with a random yahoo who can’t help you at all. (And even if that individual is an expert in their area, if it’s not the area you need, and they know next to nothing of relevance in the area and company relevant to you, they’re a yahoo from your perspective.)

And as you probably figured out by now, if you reach out to the doctor and he’s not the right expert for you, he’ll pass you on to someone he believes can (which could be one of the 40 experts he explicitly mentioned, and linked to, in yesterday’s post). It’s not about “sign the contract at all costs and hope to figure it out later“, it’s about helping your prospect because, even if they don’t become a client today, when their need is appropriate, they will become a client tomorrow.