Category Archives: Market Intelligence

Primary ProcureTech Concern: Managing Digital Fragmentation / Digital Transformation

As per our previous concern on Technology Transformation, it’s time to be digital, but with digitization comes digital fragmentation, especially when you don’t fully understand what you’re doing.

Why?

Digital fragmentation increases the risk of IP/cyberattacks (which is one of your top risks) as each fragment presents its own unique weaknesses and opportunity for attack. Moreover, it explodes the tech execution support required and increases one of the largest barriers to organizational success.

Digital transformation is also a concern because organizations know we have reached the age of digitize or die, but the digitization project failure rate is at an all time high of 88%+ (and 95% if it’s AI-based for the sake of AI) and every digitization effort to date has just resulted in more digital fragmentation. (To the point that the average mid-size organization has over 600 SaaS subscriptions and some have over 1,000.)

Impact Potential

The impact potential depends upon the degree of fragmentation. How many software applications? How many different hosting platforms? How many data pools? The impact of data fragmentation can be low if there are a relatively small number of software applications, they are all AWS hosted, and there’s only one data warehouse/lake/lakehouse. Or it can be extremely high if there are 1,000 SaaS applications, they are hosted on half a dozen cloud stacks (AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce), there’s a data warehouse/lake/lakehouse for each of the divisions, and so on.

Major Challenges/Risks

Cybersecurity
Every one of your SaaS applications provides an entry point into your organization if hacked. Every cloud provider provides multiple entry points if hacked. Your data warehouses provide a huge amount of data that can be used against you. These hack points are in addition to all of your internal servers / on-site applications, employee laptops and smart devices. An average organization these days is a cybersecurity nightmare and a hacker’s dream.

Data Integration
Chances are all of your applications have their own data models, own unique entity ids, and own standards for data access. Integrating your data across applications is a nightmare, forcing integration through data warehouses/lakes/lakehouses, which in turns creates a data replication and synching nightmare.

Data Maintenance
Not only is there the synching issue from the replication used to support data integration, but less used apps means there are less checks and updates for the critical data they are the master applications for, and data quickly becomes stale and out of date. And employees depending on that data and accessing it through the lake don’t know that, and can make bad buying and partnership decisions based on that.

Final Words

Managing digital fragmentation is not easy. In fact, it’s a nightmare because most organizations don’t have, and never had, Master Data Management (MDM) or a Master Data Governance (MDG) strategy.

Primary ProcureTech Concern: Economic Downturn & Deflation/Recession

There have been recessionary fears for the last two years. They are not going away, because most countries are teetering on the brink of a major recession if not a depression!

Why?

This is a significant concern because it contributes to the top risk of spend pressure because economic downturns always result in job loss and a drop in consumer spending as many consumers have to tighten the belt. And this, of course, contributes to the #1 joint risk of rising cost/spend pressure.

Impact Potential

The impact potential is dependent on how bad the downturn is, how long it lasts, and how global the downturn is. It can result in anything from a slight drop in sales (if you are in a mostly recession proof business and have one of the most affordable price points) to a massive drop in sales if you’re selling “luxury” goods to average consumers who, being unemployed, have to cut all luxury products from their purchasing.

Major Challenges/Risks

Prediction
When will the next downturn hit? How long will it last? How bad will it be. Right now the markets, and the US in particular, are defying all logic. Trade wars usually depress markets. Considerable over-inflation (which is the case in AI right now) typically leads to rapid depressions when the myth fails to become reality.

Detection
Detecting when it’s starting. When it’s not just a temporary blip, but when a downturn, whether a shorter one (of a few months) or a longer one (of a few years) is starting and when your organization should be adjusting its operations and strategy.

Planning
Just like you should have mitigation plans for significant risks, you should have mitigation plans for the downturn, which might involve shifting or changing product lines, pausing all expansion efforts, putting hiring on hold and planning for attrition (as people retire or contracts end), and even reducing operations with respect to production and/or support. It might also mean, for an international organization, shifting focus to different markets.

Final Words

The nature of today’s markets that allow rampant over investment without sufficient regulation ensures that recessions are inevitable. Your job is to predict them, and this is yet another reason you need a top economist.

Primary ProcureTech Concern: Geopolitical Uncertainty

As Koray Köse would be quick to point out, trade is dependent on politics, and with politics comes geopolitical uncertainty.

Why?

Geopolitical uncertainty is a huge concern because geopolitical uncertainty often results in instability of supply and cost and contributes to the three highest risks: rising cost, supply shortages/constraints, and regulatory compliance. In addition, it also strengthens the one of the more significant barriers to success: category/market complexity.

Impact Potential

Geopolitical uncertainty often leads to sanctions, port shutdowns, border closings, and sometimes the complete termination of supply lines. It can also lead to product, factory, and bank account and also asset seizures. All of these impacts are significant. Best case scenario, it’s just millions in losses, the organization can afford it, and keeps going. Typical scenario, major interruptions, if not termination, of product lines; very unhappy customers; significant, ongoing, losses; and possible closure of divisions or loss of markets. Bad scenario: one of the only sources of a key rare earth or technology component becomes unavailable, the source can’t be sufficiently replaced, and your main business line is terminated. Worst case scenario: a regime change seizes all of your assets in a country, terminates your supply line, indicts your senior executive in the region for treason, and your business is terminated.

Major Challenges/Risks

Event Monitoring: monitoring and detecting events that not only signal that a significant geopolitical event has taken place that is likely to interrupt your supply chain but also events that signal that a significant geopolitical event might be coming. For example, polls a short time apart that signal a rapid shift in political leanings (to the far left or far right) can signal a major shift in the next election. Massive, violent, protests and riots can signal a possible uprising. Unsanctioned military operations can signal an attempt to overthrow the government. Detecting the right events is key to making the right predictions.

Impact Analysis: detecting an event is one thing. Predicting a likely outcome is another. Determining the extent of that outcome can be harder still. And, finally, determining the full, long-term, impact on the organization is often extremely difficult, as some assumptions will need to be made in each step of the reasoning, and the wrong one will lead to the wrong conclusion.

Final Words

Geopolitical uncertainty is a huge concern because you can never know for sure what is going to happen, but you need to have a good idea if you want to prepare. So you need to ensure you have access to a trade expert as well as an economist.

Primary ProcureTech Concern: Tech Transformation Delays/Obsolescence

It’s a digital world. Adapt, or fade away.

Why?

It’s a digital world but, as we have repeatedly explained, it’s not AI. It’s not people using AI. It is people who embrace and properly use the appropriate digital tools who will win. (See our prior article.) Therefore, it’s organizations that embrace these people and give them the right tools who will win.

As a result, acquiring these tools and getting them in the hands of capable employees is a top priority. Especially since an organization knows that their competitors understand this as well and have the same goals — get tech capable employees, let them select and acquire the right tech, and get an edge. As a result, delays are bad. Obsolescence is worse.

Impact Potential

Significant. Everything is digitized these days. Not being able to do anything digitally is a significant drawback, if not a roadblock. And not being able to do it as efficiently and effectively as possible is a detriment. Impacts can range from:

inefficiency where tasks require more headcount, more time, and more overhead
ineffectiveness where analysis doesn’t get done, bad decisions get made, and opportunities get lost
insolvency and we’re not exaggerating here because if enough of the risks materialize, costs shoot up, sales drop down, supply becomes unstable, and the organization can’t operate lean and mean, it could be the first in its market to file for bankruptcy

Major Challenges/Risks

TQ: Technical Quotient: in order to understand both the technological needs of the organization as well as whether or not a specific piece of software will support the necessary processes requires a significant amount of technological knowledge, especially considering all of the marketing claims that an average individual will have to wade through to get to the facts

Technical Support: in order to ensure that the software can be appropriately implemented and utilized, you will need appropriately skilled individuals who can support platform integration and implementation and project assurance … and technical support is a major barrier

Technology Market Knowledge: you need to keep up with emerging technology, separate the wheat from the chaff, and identify when an emerging technology or market offering is about to make your current platform obsolete. (And this goes far beyond just adopting random “AI” based on vendors claim, it requires rigorous evaluation to make sure the technology is appropriately reliable and scalable.)

Final Words

It took 30 years, but we’re finally Being Digital. Either you accept it and modernize, or fade to black.

The Sourcing Innovation Source-to-Pay+ Cascading Mega Map! (2026 V2 Edition)

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Still useless, but still slightly less useless than every other logo map that clogs your feed!

1. Every vendor still offering software/services as of 4 days ago!

2. Every vendor logo is clickable and takes you to a live site (as of 4 days ago)!

3. Every vendor is mapped to a meaningful category as of the last date of analyst investigation!

So what’s the point?

To again make it utterly clear you can’t select a vendor based on a random grouping of logos on a map, even if they are categorized!

Not even if the map categorizes the vendors by market size, industry, and/or geography. Those are just proxies for organizational spend, solution needs and cultural requirements. And not every mid-market manufacturing plant in the USA is the same.

The only way to select a good vendor is to follow a proper assisted process and engage an expert who understands what vendors are out there to identify the right vendors to invite to the RFP process once your true needs have been identified.

Especially considering the true number of vendors out there is many times more than what an average big analyst firm will tell you, especially when they restrict their recommendations to their paying clients in their maps, and multiples of what an average big consultancy will tell you, especially when that consultancy only knows their partner solutions (that they need to maintain significant focus on to maintain their preferred partner status).

So, what’s the value?

As we explain in detail in the real value of the sourcing innovation mega map (2026 Ed), it shows you

why you need proper proper assisted solution selection (and we can’t stress this enough)
it shows how unstable the space is:
- fixty-six (56) companies are gone
- a dozen-plus (12+) companies have been acquired or renamed
- there are just too many options for an average buyer to make sense of
it (statistically) proves quite a few vendors ARE NOT GOOD (for you at least)

So let this be proof that there are a lot of logos in our ProcureTech+ space and that, if you want logos, you got logos!
666 of them!
Enjoy!

			Source-to-Pay
Souce-to-Contract			Procure-to-Pay				Intake-to-Orchestrate
Sourcing + SXM + CLM	Sourcing + Analytics	SXM + Analytics	e-Procurement	Invoice-to-Pay / AP	Expenses	Payments (& P-Cards)	Training
Sourcing + SXM	Sourcing + CLM	SXM + CLM		Sourcing	SXM	CLM	Analytics
Direct Supply Chain	Cyber Monitoring	ESG / Carbon	Marketplaces	Legal	Marketing	SaaS	Intelligence