Category Archives: Market Intelligence

With Suites, What you are Sold Vs. What You Get Vs. What You Need are Three VERY Different Things!

A while back, Dan Gianfreda published a piece on LinkedIn on how what you need is not what you are sold when you buy a a shiny, “all-in-one” procurement platform that is 10X bigger than what you will actually use (on a multi-year contract with a massive implementation that takes months longer than promised and ensures you don’t have the majority of the functionality you need until the contract is almost up), and he was right. But it missed the full picture. The reality is that not only are you sold 10 times more than you will use, but what you will use doesn’t cover what you need, and with a poor selection, might only be one 10th of what you actually need!

In other words, you need to see the full picture:

As outlined in the response post, just because a suite has a module, there’s no guarantee that module is anywhere close to what the organization really needs, especially when the capabilities can vary greatly (and the definitions even more so). Sourcing can be a simple RFX or a multi-staged integrated RFX/Auction platform with embedded strategic sourcing decision optimization. We still see canned reporting modules sold as “modern spend analysis” when they are anything but. And most AI claims are pure BS (or an indication that you should probably run for the hills if that’s the only selling point).

Even if the suite theoretically has the core/must have functionality the organization needs, that’s only meaningful if that functionality is implemented in a way that supports the organizational processes and policies. If approval chains are required, tamper-proof audit logs need to be in place, validated process steps are needed for public sector compliance, and so on — and the suite has none of those, it don’t matter how user friendly, integrated, or “powerful” it is because the organization will NOT be able to use it.

Moreover, the core functionality differs by organizational type and since most platforms only do one of indirect, direct, services, capex projects, or tailspend well, selecting the wrong suite will render it totally useless for the majority of sourcing/procurement projects, which will add insult to injury of the huge cash outlay you agreed to (for an ROI that will never, ever, materialize).

Moreover, as previously indicated, you can NEVER assume that all (or sometimes, even any) of the solution providers will:

  • ask the right questions to understand the challenges
  • do the right due diligence to ensure their solution will solve those challenges
  • be honest about their capabilities (or, outside of the dev team, even understand those capabilities)

because, chances are, as I have indicated many times, everyone in the ecosystem exists to make money off of YOU, but not necessarily to help you. (Especially when too many vendors took too much money and are now under extreme pressures to fulfill ridiculous growth requirements in just a few years or risk massive layoffs, being folded into a bigger player, or getting dropped from the portfolio entirely before going bankrupt.) There’s no time to do it right, just to sell, sell, sell. (Which is why we keep advocating employing an independent consultant to help you with selection, project planning, and project assurance — since their remuneration depends on helping you, not someone else.)

So remember this before you start looking at big suites as there is a good chance you’ll likely be paying 10 times what you should be (based on what you are using) while still only getting 25% of what you actually need in the best case. (And there’s nothing wrong with building your own Best-of-Breed ecosystem, even if you need to add an orchestration player to that mix, if that is what maximizes the return on every dollar spent.)

(Supplier) Diversity is Dead!

Editor’s Note: This is an extended version of a comment that was made in response to an inquiry by THE REVELATOR on LinkedIn about the progression of supplier diversity.

The simple fact of the matter is thus: diversity threatens fascists who want authoritarian dictatorships. This means that as long as far right wing agenda politicians keep getting elected in first world countries (which has been happening more than not over the last decade), not only is DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) not going anywhere, but it is going to be rolled back, and done so faster than most policies that came before in countries which equated diversity progress with measurable outcomes.

The sad reality of the situation is that as soon as the board/chief/president of an organization or governmental department concluded that you were not diverse if you did not have x% of whatever minority the board/chief/president thought you should have x% of by time y, and started equating diversity success with measurable outcomes, we went from a situation where “equal opportunity” was replaced with “minority designated role”. And instead of being a further step in the right direction, it was often a step backwards. Under equal opportunity, if two candidates were roughly equal for a role, the role is to go to the minority candidate. And that’s a good thing. However, under “minority designated role”, non-minorities are banned from consideration, and this is not a good thing if there are no qualified minority candidates available for the role. A senior role that should demand a full University degree (Bachelor’s or higher), a decade of experience, and one or more certifications may end up going to someone who just has a 2 year associates degree, only 3 years of work experience (barely relevant to the role), and no certifications as that is the most qualified person who applied.

What many firms fail to take into account when considering diversity mandates is the number of qualified candidates in the minority who are actually in the vicinity of, and who are then actually interested in, and willing to take on, the position. For example, if you were to demand that half of your coding team need to be women, good luck with that when only 25% of STEM graduates in North America are female. (So if you did get 50%, a lot of other companies wouldn’t get any female hires.) Or if you demand that 1/5th of your workforce be hispanic, to mirror the US population distribution, but it’s an in office job in a major city in an expensive neighbourhood where 95% of the local population is white, good luck with that. You might meet your quota, but you know that the vast majority are not going to be qualified for the role.

And DEI didn’t stop there at some organizations and institutions in North America. As soon as people figured out that a DEI program or a particular minority designation could be used to exclude people of certain religion(s) they didn’t like, it went from a tool of inclusion to a tool of subversive discrimination. (So much for equity and inclusion!) Then came the backlash; the labelling of anything even remotely related to DEI, equal opportunity, or humanity as woke; and a full on assault by the fascists and authoritarians.

More specifically, in countries where they have enough power in the government, the authoritarians are dismantling any and all programs they have control over, barring any third party organizations with such policies from doing business with their government, and doing whatever they can to overturn all DEI and Equal Opportunity legislation they can, as far back as they can.

Moreover, given that these far right wing parties are being well funded by donations from the tech bros who spend more time meddling in global politics than running their own ventures, there are not many options for progression of ANY diversity on the global stage.

We’ll Say It Again. Analyst Firm 2*2s Are NOT Appropriate for Tech Selection!

Last year, while ranting about the plethora of utterly useless logo maps (which includes the Mega Map the doctor created to demonstrate the extreme futility of these maps), we also did a dive into why analyst firm 2*2s are NOT appropriate for tech selection. This is coming up again as a certain firm is really pushing All AI all-the-time and you can tell it’s about to infuse all their maps. Plus, the biggest firms are really pushing their quadrants, waves, and marketscapes, and most of these are showing the same solutions they showed last year and the year before that and the year before that and so on (going back a decade in some cases).

That, and a number of people are lamenting their lack of usefulness on LinkedIn, with one person even creating yet another logo map to highlight the “significant solutions that matter” (but we’ll save that rant for another day), so it’s time to make it clear that these maps are not appropriate (on their own) for tech selection. For example, in a discussion on my post on how your standard sourcing doesn’t work for direct, Thomas Audibert correctly states that static quadrants, in any form, do not work. (And then went on to correctly note that if you say there are, for instance, 80 sourcing solutions, it means that there are at least 20 niche (geographic, industry, customer size, …) categories of interest and that, unless they are catered within 20 different quadrants, this makes no sense to me.

And it doesn’t, because all a map can do, in the best situation, is give you a set of more-or-less comparable solutions that each serve a specific function (so you don’t end up trying to compare a Strategic Sourcing to a catalog-based e-Procurement to an Accounts Payable solution which, of course, serve three completely different functions). If it’s a good map, and by that I mean focussed on two things max, like Spend Matters Solution Map that only scores tech (on one axis) and only presents tech vs average customer scores (on the other axis), then you can use it to verify that one or two of your key requirements are met (such as the tech is solid and the customers are generally happy), but that’s it. (But if it’s a map that squishes 16 different scores into 2 dimensions, that’s useless … you don’t know what is contributing to the scores. What’s most important to you could be the lowest score in that score mish-mash number that looks above average.)

Moreover, at the end of the day, all an analyst can do that is useful is rate a vendor on one or more business independent objective dimensions that can be scored easily and, more importantly, give a customer comfort that the vendor does well on this dimension and they don’t have to worry about it in their evaluation. (For example, if a vendor does well in Spend Matters Solution Map, you know you don’t have to evaluate the underlying technical foundations, which is something most companies aren’t good at.) However, that’s not enough for a selection.

When it comes to tech, it’s important that:

  1. it’s solid
  2. it fills the need you are searching for
  3. it is easy to use by the majority of the users for the functions they will be doing the majority of the time

And, guess what, an analyst can only verify the first requirement. Why? An analyst doesn’t know your needs, you do. Moreover, they don’t know the TQ (technical quotient) of your users, the functions they do daily, or the processes they follow. You do. So, how can you expect an analyst to produce a map that tells you that.

But, if you’ve been paying attention, the solution to your problem is not tech. It’s process. And until you nail that, and then select the tech that matches that process, tech alone will NEVER solve your problem. NEVER.

And since analysts don’t know your business, or your

  • business size, Procurement department size, maturity
  • culture
  • risk tolerance
  • innovation level/comfort
  • current processes / required processes
  • customer service needs
  • etc. etc. etc.

or even how these slide on a scale across different companies of different sizes across industries, there’s no way they can produce a map that tells you all of this. Or even a fraction of this.

That’s why you need an analyst or independent consultant that truly understands the solution space you are searching in, what those solutions should do, and how to help you identify the subset that is not only technically solid but is also likely to meet your business requirements. (And remember, It’s the Analyst, not the analyst firm. If the analyst hasn’t reviewed dozens of vendors in the space you are searching in that offer the type of solution you are searching for, doesn’t know the must vs. should vs. nice to have requirements, and, most importantly, doesn’t have the technical chops to validate the solution technically (which is the weakness of every non-IT / non-Engineering business department), he’s not the analyst for you!

We Finally Know the Source of the AI Buzzword Bullsh!t!

The Agentic Software Service Hyper Optimized Learning Engine custom built for drowning the World Wide Web in soundbite and buzzword marketing bullsh!t centered on AI, or the A.S.S.H.O.L.E. for short! (With fervent thanks to the esteemed Arthur Mesher for delving deep into the depths to uncover the source of this madness!)

Technology Project Failure is at an all-time high, boosted by the recent AI failure rates (which are on the rise as almost half of AI initiatives are being scrapped in process, see CIO Dive), and while the hype should be subsiding (and shifting to the next hype cycle), it’s now hitting us harder and faster in what should be its death throes than any hype cycle that has come before.

The AI marketing onslaught is coming so hard and fast that it’s impossible to imagine how so much new soundbite, buzzword, FOMO, and FUD content can be produced so fast and so overwhelming to the point that it seems humanly impossible. And that’s because it is. It’s not coming from humans, it’s coming from the A.S.S.H.O.L.E.. As we have indicated in our previous posts on Gen-AI LLMs, one of the valid uses for Gen-AI is mass content digestion, search, summarization, and generation.

It appears that one of these systems was customized to ingest all of the initial human-generated AI BS and trained to spew out marketing soundbites, social media posts, articles, and other forms of web content ad nauseum and to continually ingest new content on the subject to create even more content, including AI-generated BS content from other AI systems that tried to copy the original A.S.S.H.O.L.E..

And even though it doesn’t matter, since apparently every LLM can be trained to emulate the original, the only question that remains is, who currently owns the source engine, what LLM was it originally built on, and what LLM is it running on now? This is obviously the industry’s best kept secret. I hope someone who has gotten to the bottom of this will let us know the full story of the A.S.S.H.O.L.E.. Considering the intellectual and financial pain and suffering it has caused, we deserve to know the truth!

For those interested, since I’m sure LinkedIn will disappear Art’s post if it hasn’t already, here’s the original. (And the Gartner rant ain’t half bad either!)

The Lack of Adoption of Analytics is NOT Complicated!

According to THE PROPHET, the reason that we’ve never seen a breakout $100M+ pure-play (spend) analytics vendor is it’s complicated. (Source: LinkedIn)

But the reality is that it’s really not.

First of all, approximately one third of all multi-nationals are headquartered in the US. In other words, one third of global enterprise is based out of the US, where the strategic decisions are made. Let’s say that again, one third!

Secondly, and this is the real explanation, in our age of participation trophies and only focusing on the positive (when there really isn’t any), no one is willing to state the truth, and that is most of the employees responsible for strategic [spend] analysis are just too math stupid.

Analytics, at its core, requires good mathematics skills and, with traditional analytics applications, good computer skills.

However, the US, where many multi-nationals are based, consistently ranks in the lower part of the OECD international rankings and is currently 34th in the PISA [out of 79 scored countries] (with an average numeracy score of 249, below the TOTAL OECD average of 263, with over 1/3 of its adult population at level 1! This means they can’t even do basic arithmetic and problem solving [or calculate a tip FFS, but that does explain why they believed their administration when they lied and said other countries pay the tariffs] — and that’s the average business employee in the US, since anyone with a level 2 on the OECD can likely fake it in a STEM career in the US.

As for THE PROPHET‘s reasons as to why Spend Analysis has consistently underperformed the hype:

  • While 3/4 of solutions have always been reporting in drag, I’ve been highlighting at least a dozen Best of Breed solutions consistently for the past decade. They have existed for the past 20 years, you just had to look (and understand what to look for. But this site did a great job of helping you with that!)
  • Yes, scale came at the cost of dumbing down the UX (for the US market in particular)!
  • Unfortunately there is no faster way to die as a Spend Analysis vendor then to get scooped up by a (mega) suite or a Big X Comsultancy.
  • Actually, the analytics and optimization is not powerful or complex enough in most solutions. Again, the problem is that the vendor didn’t add incremental levels of simplification (i.e. dumbing down) so each user could take advantage of it at their mathematical (in)competency level.

But the real reason, as hinted above, is that employees resisted these advanced spend analytics solutions because they knew they didn’t have the mathematical skills to use them. (Which the US Education System should be blamed for [and why it should be fixed, not dismantled], not the employees, unless those employees went to University and chose not to take math courses to try and make up for the failings of the public education system they were subjected to.)

As for THE PROPHET‘s signals that the times they are a changin’:

  1. Good + Cheap = Dangerous
    Faster? Check! Cheaper? Check! Smarter? Well … Ask Woody!
  2. Analytics is Merging with Execution
    This is key for adoption of analytics — do it when you need it and apply the findings right away.
  3. Intake, Orchestration and Agentic Tech
    I guess I have to say it again!
    ????? ????????????? ?? ???????? ??? ??? ??????? ????!
    When what we really need is a Revenge of the Nerds! (If the USA even has any left!)

However, the real reason that we may finally be entering a new era in analytics is the following:

4. Most companies are trying to stave off bankruptcies as a result of US trade, market, etc. decisions that have already bankrupted many SMEs and they now realize that analytics is a key part of that solution. You can’t optimize spend you don’t understand, or understand the impact of a sudden 145% increase in tariffs if you don’t understand how much you are sourcing from the country in question.