Category Archives: Best Practices

Breaking Down The Barriers: The Talent Gap

We’re continuing our foray into the top barriers to success that we outlined in our top barriers post that chronicles the barriers that keep coming up over and over again in every Procurement survey in our effort to ensure that you don’t have to read another state of procurement study for the next 5 years. Today’s topic: the talent gap!

A Brief History …

As we have previously noted in our discussion of category and market complexity, with each successive innovation, business, and process improvement, processes and tasks became more complex and required more education and experience to perform. As a result, with each successive innovation, the available talent pool shrinks. When you consider that traditional post-secondary programs haven’t kept up with the pace of innovation in business in decades, there’s a lack of formal training programs, mentorship programs disappeared decades ago (and every time there’s a workforce reduction, the older generation is the first to be let go or be bought out), and most businesses haven’t invested properly in training in decades, you can see that, for many traditional complex tasks, the talent pool is shrinking quickly.

But the lack of talent in traditional areas is just one side of the coin. The other side is that technology is progressing faster than even technology professionals can keep up. Combine this with the recent SaaS explosion in most corporations, with some large corporations using over 1,000 different SaaS applications, and the increasing complexity of “AI”-X applications, and the talent gap is expanding in tech as well.

The Problem

The problem here, as we expounded upon in our brief history, is multi-fold. There’s not enough talent in many domains, and in domains where there is talent, the rapid pace of development and innovation is still leaving top talent behind.

The Necessary Realization

In theory, the multi-fold solution is easy, but in practice, it will take a lot of human effort to realize, just like execution support can’t be solved overnight.

1) Bring Back Training

Stop trying to hire someone with all the skills and knowledge they need to do the job that is at least somewhat customized to your operation and start training again. Formal programs. Ensure all the materials are accessible online all the time so the parts your employees tend to forget (because they don’t perform the tasks regularly) are quickly and easily accessible.

2) Mentorship and Shadowing

Don’t wait until someone leaves to start looking for a replacement. Start training a replacement for a key position within three months of someone new taking the role via shadowing and mentorship. Make sure there is no task that relies on one person (even if always done by one person as it’s not demanding enough to require more than one employee) and that there is always a backup person. Stop trying to replace teams with agentic software and start trying to empower small teams with augmented intelligence so they can do the work of teams three, five, and ten times their size but still ensure the knowledge remains in the organization.

3) KMS: Knowledge Management System

Despite being introduced in the late 2000s, these never caught on and this is, honestly, one of the biggest reasons we have a talent gap today. Not only do most organizations not do enough planning around succession for those that perform key functions (it’s not just the C-Suite you need a plan for), but they don’t capture the key knowledge built up by long time employees who know how to run certain functions efficiently and effectively. That’s why performance degrades over time as people leave and new people are hired because the days when you’d join a company and stay for five, ten, twenty years or life disappeared with the last millennium. When organizations failed to properly capture this knowledge when the first round of massive layoffs hit in the dot com crash of 2000, and then never learned from it (and we saw the same mass exodus of senior, knowledgeable, people in the financial crisis of ’08), we ended up with massive increases in the “talent gap” as the knowledge required to forge talent suitable for your organization was lost. (On top of the fact that knowledge was increasingly leaking to China with the global outsourcing system.)

The reality is that unless the knowledge needed to run your business is captured, you’ll never have the talent you need, real or virtual (as these new-age AI-based agentic systems that will, according to the marketing, solve all your problems won’t work at all unless properly trained, and they can’t be properly trained unless the right data, processes, and organizational knowledge are appropriately captured — that’s a big reason these efforts continually fail and will continue to fail).

4) Augmented Intelligence Systems

For well-defined tasks for which mature (pre Gen-AI) agentic workflows exist that can be appropriately defined, controlled, and tailored, implement such systems to ease the burden on new employees as they attempt to learn the role and be productive and strategic.

The Technological Requirements

The technological requirements, especially for the KMS and the Augmented Intelligence Systems, are considerable and require supply chain aware sourcing and sourcing aware supply chain and expertise from source to sink and back again on both sides.

A continuing reminder that if you want guidance in the short term, hope that your favourite provider reaches out to Bob Ferrari of Supply Chain Matters or the doctor and enables us to focus on writing the series (or in-depth e-book) explaining what modern Procurement and Supply Chain Tech needs to look like (and how it needs to be implemented) to address the challenges, reduce the risks, and address the priorities versus just dripping out tidbits as free time permits.

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.)

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.