Category Archives: Blogologue

Today’s “Social” and “Professional” Sites are Bad Netizens! So What Do We Do?

Two decades ago, I asked: Are You Being a Good Netizen because odds were if you were reading Sourcing Innovation (or, at the time, e-Sourcing Form or Spend Matters or one of the other sites offering you best practice advice and free insights on a daily basis) you were a consultant, service, or software provider. And while that wasn’t a bad thing, it also wasn’t a good thing.

The reason: the people who needed to be reading these independent sites the most were the actual procurement and sourcing professionals that these sites were created to serve. People who didn’t have regular access to high-priced best practice consultants, training course, or local professional groups to learn from. People who were thrust into the Island of Misfit Toys with little or no experience. People who needed real help, especially when it came to understanding the root of their problem, what processes and knowledge were needed to address them, and how to identify the right technology, and then solution provider, to help them.

People who, once they understood what they needed, would happily invite the consultancy or solution provider for a briefing or demo once they understood what that provider had to offer — yet few, (and sometimes) if any, consultancies or solution providers would tell their customers about the great resources that would not only help the customer, but the consultancy or solution provider. They weren’t good netizens, even when it would cost them nothing and only help them in the end. (And, frankly, helping a customer understand you’re not the right provider for them and saving you months of sales cycle effort only for the customer to walk away when the light-bulb turned on is a good thing — you want to spend your time with potential customers whom your solution is right for, because, once those customers get a taste of that solution, they’ll never let it go. While it’s true that organizations never want to change tech because of the time, effort, and cost required, it’s ten times true for tech that actually works that users like — they will fight tooth-and-nail to keep it, and when it’s a department/low-enough cost solution, even if corporate mandates something new, that department or user will still renew a license on a P-Card to keep it.)

Back before the social and professional networks were a big thing, the average buyer had no source of information beyond the country’s professional organization, the highly redacted analyst and consultancy sites, and whatever Google would serve them. That was not nearly enough.

But then the social and professional sites came along, and, for a while, things started to get better. Peers could inform each other of third party and independent sites that had free knowledge for the taking. And for a while, that’s what happened.

But then things changed, especially with the two most popular and commonly used sites (and, more or less, the only two sites that remain), when their focus shifted from enabling people to connect and learn to extracting money from their users any way they could, tweaking the algorithms to only advertise paid content or content from their most popular posters and favouring the few that regurgitate the mainstream hype over the independent thinkers trying to move knowledge, or at least the conversation, forward.

They’re not good netizens, and it’s hard for people who need good content to find the content they want.

Used to be you could Google, but now that “AI summary” is injected by default, the sources, and real information gets buried.

So we’re back to the early 2000s, where the only solution is for providers to stop pushing the hype and start sharing the knowledge again. There aren’t many sites left from when SI started (with Jon W. Hansen‘s Procurement Insights now being the 2nd oldest blog), but others have arisen — but how many people know about them?

(Including those who might follow the authors on LinkedIn and maybe see every third or fifth post. We’re talking about

and others. How many people really know about these sites? The answer: Not enough.)

So, pretend it’s the early noughts and go back to sharing human to human what’s really useful and what really matters. Otherwise, you’ll just end up getting dragged down to the lowest common denominator as a result of all the derivative Gen-AI garbage posts that now clog your social and professional media feeds.

Dear Vendor: Your Top 10 ProcureTech resolutions for 2025: Part 2

Last Friday we noted that even though we were done with our dumb, dead company walking, and smart company series, that did not mean that we weren’t going to give you good suggestions for 2025 ProcureTech resolutions. The simple fact of the matter is that if you are going to make resolutions, you should at least make good ones. So today we are going to give you five more great ones.

#5 No More Buzzwords (There’s Enough Hogwash Already!)

As per another of our posts from July, the Procurement Space is Filled with Hogwash! Too many marketing soundbites, buzzwords, and overall misdirection. the doctor can’t remember the last time he saw real content from a solution provider on precisely what the solution does (without at least a good dose of exaggeration), how it will help the customer now and over time, and what results the customer can realistically expect in the first year.

And definitely, and we mean most definitely, don’t use any buzzwords. As per our post on Demystifying the Marketing Madness, the following buzzwords, among many others, should be instantly dropped from your vocabulary (if they haven’t been dropped already):

  • AI-backed/driven/enabled/enhanced/powered etc.: no one cares; they just want solutions that give results … and a bit of honesty
  • Autonomous Sourcing: the entire point of any back-office technology is to automate tactical data processing and workflows that don’t need human intervention; all platforms should have some autonomy, and, moreover, only a small set of categories should be sourced fully autonomously (as per our recent post, the real answer is Augmented Intelligence)
  • Delightful Procurement: you’re offering enterprise tech, not a culinary experience
  • Intake-to-Procure: it’s not about taking requests in, it’s about executing sourcing, procurement, supply (& supplier) management, and similar events — so who cares if you can take requests you can’t process (no one, and, in fact, this might even upset your customers!)
  • Margin Multiplier: what the heck does this mean? anyone?
  • Orchestration: this is just a fancy term for easy API-based integration; middleware is not new, and the fact that it’s now SaaSy doesn’t make it special
  • Smart Procurement: technology is not smart; it’s dumb; just because computers calculate a billion times faster than we do doesn’t mean they think
  • Spend Orchestration: this is just a fancy word for orchestration of Procurement systems
  • Sustainable Procurement: all procurement should be sustainable, plus, sustainable means something different to everyone
  • Supplier Insights: so generic that every SXM platform can qualify; be specific!

Get the picture? Drop the buzzwords and go back to basics.

#4 No Pay-to-Play, Only Pay-for-Payback

Major analyst firms have recently hiked their fees again. As per our post on does it matter if analyst firms aren’t entirely pay-to-play if the Procurement space thinks they are, analyst firms are now seen as very expensive pay-to-play offerings.

Some vendors are paying the “minimum fees”, even though they are receiving nothing in return. Even worse, as noted in a recent article, some vendors are paying multiple times that, and getting almost nothing in return. A writeup or too. Access to research. A few “leads” that downloaded a select “report”, which aren’t leads at all and rarely result in even prospects, let alone sales.

Real analyst firms don’t charge for discussions, demos, or even basic write-ups. They charge for advice and work product (that you have an unlimited right to if you paid for it) and introduce you to customers who are actually looking for the type of solution that you offer.

Don’t pay for generic research. Don’t pay for papers you don’t get unlimited (non-exclusive) commercial rights to. Don’t pay for shared access to download lists. Pay for research you need. Pay for papers you own. Support partners who can help you identify potential clients who need you.

#3 Get Expert Help

SI has been telling you this for years. You don’t know everything. You’re definitely not experts in everything. So identify your weaknesses, admit them, and get help. Customers don’t care if your team are employees, contractors, or partners. Right now, they want results … and, given that their costs and risks are skyrocketing, they want results fast.

So whether you need help with product, marketing, sales, implementation, integration, or education, get the help, get it now, and succeed. You need to succeed as much as your customers do.

Please remember that, relative to the value they deliver, expert consultants are cheap.

#2 Customer-Centric Focus

By now you should see that the common thread is customer focus. And we don’t mean whatever you can to sell to them — we mean whatever you can do to serve your current customers and make them as successful as you possibly can. The goal should be more than whatever you promise them in sales. Happy customers renew without question. Happy customers trust you and are willing to buy more from you over time. Happy customers are willing to tell their peers about you. Happy customers will speak on your behalf at important events.

Successful companies focus on their customers, who in turn make them successful. After all, implementation success goes well beyond the basics!

#1 F*ck Gen-AI!

If you’ve read our post on valid uses for Gen-AI, you know our disdain for Gen-AI, and that it’s well earned because Gen-AI, overhyped to the max, is hallucinatory, biased (and often hateful), inciteful, scamming, destructive, brain-washing, sleeper, and probably full of dangers we’ve not yet discovered.

Gen-AI, like all technologies, has uses, but very limited ones. It was designed to process massive amounts of data, and, unlike traditional Deep Neural Nets that retrieve a canned response, instead assemble a response as a collection of sub-responses that are, statistically, most appropriate for the request at hand. As a result, it’s best suited for the summarization of large documents and response generation in natural language. No more, no less.

Plus, the recent 85% Gen-AI failure rate reported by Gartner should be more than enough to make you think twice. Customers are tired of the Gen-AI hype. It hasn’t delivered, and for most situations, it never will. Most Procurement processes require detailed mathematical calculations, analytics, and reasoning, which is something Gen-AI doesn’t do and never will (despite what some of the zealots may continue to believe). Plus, as we’ve already said, it’s not autonomous systems or BS AI, it’s Augmented Intelligence which uses the right solution for the problem at hand, which is sometimes traditional ML and sometimes just workflows that encode expert knowledge.

So unless your uses cases are restricted to massive document processing, creating a more natural language chatbot (which can take and forward requests to real solutions), or creating more natural language summaries of massive data sets, there’s no place for Gen-AI. So just F*ck it!

And use real-AI instead. After all, there is so much you can do with AI in Procurement, Sourcing, Supplier Discovery and Supplier Management with the AI we had before Gen-AI! And if you have advanced (predictive) analytics and optimization, the options are endless.

Dear Vendor: Your Top 10 ProcureTech resolutions for 2025: Part 1

We know that our last post said that we were done with our dumb, dead company walking, and smart company series, and officially we are, but if you’re going to make ProcureTech resolutions for 2025, then you should at least make good ones. So we’re going to give you ten great ones. The first five today. The next five next Monday.

#10 Cut the Cr@p

First of all, Procurement does NOT need to be reimagined! As per our post back in July, Procurement is not something to be reimagined as it is not something that should even be redefined at the core. The purpose of Procurement has not changed since the first known Purchasing Manual was published back 137 years ago. It’s the process of sourcing, acquiring, and paying for the goods and services the organization needs, and doing it in a manner that ensures that the products will meet the needs, at the best price, and show up at the right time — and that as many orders as possible are “perfect” (or, more precisely, problem free). No more, no less.

If you want to survive the coming consolidation that will see a massive amount of mergers, acquisitions, and outright failures, you need to sell. If you want to sell, you need to not only solve customer problems, but convince the customers you can solve theirs. And the best way to convince a customer you can, and will, solve their problem is to be completely honest and transparent about your solution, what it does, how it does it, and what it will deliver against the real needs they have. With no cr@p.

#9 Data Foundation

In Procurement, everything relies upon good data. Solutions require good data — platforms, the modules they contain, the algorithms that power them, and every other technical component. Moreover, the humans relying on those platforms require good data to make decisions — good data that is processed by analytics into good information that give the human professionals the insight they need to make the right decisions. (At the end of the day, it’s human intelligence [HI] and the best platforms support human intelligence with Augmented Intelligence.)

This requires doubling down on creating a good schema, collecting good data, verifying that data, and maintaining that data over time. It shouldn’t be just collect some data haphazardly, execute a function, push it to a table in the database, and forget it. Your solution has to be normalize and cleanse the data, validate the data, use the data as required, store it in a standard schema, and mark any data that can change to be reverified on a schedule.

Organizations need a data foundation. Make sure the data foundation you give your customers is enough.

#8 Risk Awareness

COVID (Pandemic). Special Military Operations. (Geo-Political Conflicts, Border Closures, and Sanctions.) Canal closures and more Logistics Challenges. (Panamanian droughts and Houthis in the Red Sea.) Tariff threats (that are soon to be reality). This is just the beginning. The soon to be total abandonment of climate regulations in the US (and possibly a few other “first world” countries) is going to accelerate global warming (if the number of bombs dropped in the Middle East over the past year hasn’t accelerated it already). This will result in more unpredictable natural disasters. The tariffs coming in the US are going to spark unpredictable trade wars. Monetary and oil shocks that will come from the BRICS allowing alternate currencies to be used, as well as pursuing their own, will lead to more risk and disruption. The ease in trade we saw for the first two decades of this century may never be seen again in our lifetimes. Risk is everywhere, and compounding daily.

Thus, you must ensure that your solution is as risk aware as it can be. Sourcing modules must collect risk information. Analysis modules need to collect and process risk metrics. SXM modules need to track all available qualitative and quantitative risk information about every supplier being used. Contract modules need to support, check for, and suggest risk clauses. Procurement modules need to bring up risk information before every order, and automatically block suppliers where the risk has become too great.

Risk is critical. That’s why Sourcing Innovation did a 9-part series on supply chain risk.

#7 Focus, Focus, Focus

Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Don’t even try to be anymore than you are. Procurement people are realizing that any company that claims this can’t deliver because you can’t be everything to everyone. Instead, focus on your core modules and strengths, define your ICP, double down on your value prop, and focus on being the best you can on those modules and strengths.

Doing so will increase your chances of customer success, and customer success generates potential customer interest. Plus, focus will allow you to optimize your sales, implementation, integration, and execution processes; get customers up faster; get them results faster; make them happy faster; and that will lead to renewals and, most likely, increased subscriptions at renewal time.

We’ve tried to hit upon this point throughout the years, most recently in our smart company series, but hopefully this is the year it will stick.

#6 Integrate, Integrate, Integrate

Since you can’t be everything to everyone, you need to focus. And since customers will usually need more extensive solutions than any vendor can offer, usually for specialized needs, the most successful vendors will integrate with complementary best-of-breed vendor solutions that will make it really, really easy for their customers to share the data they need between the applications they need.

The key is to support an end-to-end ecosystem for Source-to-Pay+ by integrating with all of the solutions necessary for your customers to support end-to-end Source-to-Pay+ solutions. Successful companies make their customers successful, no matter what. They work with partners and complementary providers as needed.

Organizations need platforms, not just point solutions. Especially since you need to be risk aware.

Failures Are Starting. How Much do the “Great And Reputable Technological Network Engagement Review” Firms Have to Do With it?

As SI recently posted on LinkedIn, corporate failures are already starting! Two notable companies in the UK with great solutions and decent customer bases have filed for insolvency in a little over a month. We think they will both be rescued (this time), but if good companies with good solutions (where current / former leaders made just a few of the critical mistakes I chronicled in my dumb and dead series — which every company’s leadership SHOULD read, but none actually do as no one will admit they aren’t perfect anymore) are at risk of going out of business, what does this say for startups who raised too much money, created too little in terms of solution value, and have no significant customer revenue to get them through tough times?

(As you may recall, even though you were blinded by the hype, we tried to give you a distant early warning that there are too many tech failures and you need to do something about it before you end up the next casualty.)

Having talked to almost a hundred small companies over the past year, that group has included dozens which are struggling financially and over a half a dozen that spent large six figure amounts (which might be a small amount compared to the seven figures an enterprise client will spend, but which consists of the entire Marketing and Analyst Relations budget for sometimes two years for these companies), and most of those have admitted they have yet to see, or saw, ZERO return.

Imagine spending 100K to 200K, when that is your entire marketing budget, on a promises of leads over a one to two year period only to see ZERO when all is said and done, and, even worse, to have no reprint rights to the work you paid for when the contract ended, no access to the database of “registrants”, and no unique insights that your sales team can use. (Or, engage one of the Great And Reputable Technological Network Engagement Review firms and you won’t have to imagine!) Now imagine being almost out of money, struggling to make payroll, and not having enough in annual recurring revenues to maintain minimal staffing levels. Unfortunately, this is becoming too common (and we know one of the companies that filed for insolvency made a significant investment in one of these Great And Reputable Technological Network Engagement Review firms and saw little return).

Th reality is that unless you are a reasonably large vendor, offering an enterprise suite, with high six to seven figures available to spend with these firms to achieve preferred customer status, and guarantee a position in one of their maps, there is little value from just sponsoring some research, getting a write-up, and hoping for some leads from the very limited reprint rights you get. It’s typically not a good investment for a small company, especially one that doesn’t have the budget to lose.

Now, at the end of the day it is the company that chose to sign the contract, and the company that made the mistake, but if they entered the contract under false promises, should not some blame rest with these Great And Reputable Technological Network Engagement Review firms?

Two Decades of Tough Times for the Oompa Loompas

Long time readers will know that Sourcing Innovation has been covering the plight of the Oompa Loompas ever since some of them gave up chocolate for code (at Coupa). And it hasn’t been good. Fifteen years ago there was E. Coli at the Nestle Plant (link). Five years ago, there was potential Hepatitis A contamination with Kentucky QVC Chocolate (link). Today, Lindt is facing a lawsuit over lead levels. (Source)

Hopefully some day they can go back to Chocolateering in peace.