Category Archives: Procurement Innovation

What Does the doctor Do?

Note: This is written as a narrative and contains a lot of background on the doctor. Although the doctor believes that this information will help you put what he does into perspective, he understands that you might be time constrained and / or be more interested in a straight-forward listing of the services he offers. If that is the case, please refer to What Does the doctor Do? … For Executives instead. Thank you.

Pre-script: This post deals with the sustainability issue most important to me – me!

As time goes on, not only do I continue to spend a significant amount of time having what seems to be the same one-sided conversation explaining what I do, what I don’t do, and why I do, and do not, do what I do, or do not, I also find myself answering “uh, me” on a regular basis in calls with solution providers and other professionals in response to “Do you know anyone who does X?“. I know the one-sided broken-record is the curse of the consultant, but, even though I generally try to keep this blog not about me, or my company, I have come to the conclusion that a post might be a good idea as it could not only save a prospective client, or non-client, some time, as they can scan this post and determine whether or not I may be a good (first) contact, but it could also save the “Oh …” that often follows. And, if you don’t care about what I do, or do not do, then you can simply skip this post (which is a wee bit lengthy) and come back tomorrow where we will return to your regularly scheduled programming at the same-bat-time on the same-bat-channel.

In order for me to explain what I do, I need to give you a bit of background on what I’ve done, what has led me to where I am today, and why. Some of it you’ll find in the “about” posts, some of it you’ll piece together from comments on this and other blogs, and some of it you may infer from my writings herein. But nowhere have I made a concerted effort to try and explain what I do. My resume is long, and my formal academic CV longer, but I’ll try to keep it to the important points.

I started out by pursuing my graduate degrees in Theoretical Computer Science – Multi-Dimensional and Spatial Data Structures and Computational Geometry in particular – and teaching in Academia, but soon ventured off into industrial training, then consulting, and then IT R&D – first in e-Commerce, then in sourcing and optimization, and then into the broader supply chain from a process and modeling (especially for optimization and analysis) perspective. My academic background gave me a solid background in the fundamentals of computing, algorithms, and sophisticated mathematics – the keys to efficient software and complex modeling and problem solving. Five years of course development and delivery in academia (including internet and web technologies before they hit mainstream and object oriented technologies before they were the buzz word of the day) gave me a lot of teaching and training experience. My industry background forced me to become an expert in e-Commerce and Supply Chain processes and data requirements as well as the technologies that enabled them. I’m also an experienced software architect in both the (traditional) client-server and internet/web realms (who, given sufficient time and resources, can also code the back-end of just about anything).

This sounds diverse, but there are some common threads between everything I’ve done and what I now do – and these are a triumvirate focus on knowledge transfer, enablement, and innovation. And now you’re probably asking “What?“. However, before I can answer that, I need to get into a bit of the “Why“.

It wasn’t long into academia that I quickly lost interest in writing paper after paper (in the detrimental publish-or-perish mentality that has only compounded in recent years) that merely presented incremental improvements to a theory or a heuristic relevant to only one problem of a handful of practitioners in one or two obscure verticals. The anti-epiphany came after I had spent a few hours working through a dense 30-page paper in a well-respected journal only to realize that it was merely a simple and obvious extension of Theory T developed by Mr. X 20 years ago in the Y domain of computer science applied to the Z domain of computer science, which is almost the same, but just uses different terminology.

I also had no interest in writing papers whose sole purpose was to sit on a shelf and collect dust merely to build a publication record, which, these days, is not indicative of the relevance of the underlying work – especially since most administrators, whom I would swear do not know the difference between the front end and back end of a dog, only care about quantity, not quality. This is partially because it doesn’t take long to realize that a huge amount of great work is already sitting on the shelf ignored because most of the great academic researchers in any specialty have little or no interest in applying their work outside of the ivory tower. Great work, especially in computer science, should not be only great theory, but theory that has an application. Furthermore, although it’s rarely recognized as a worthwhile scholarly effort by the ivory tower inhabitants, I believe that working to take the best of what’s already known, to extend and modify it, and then to help someone design and build a great software application that will actually be used, and have an impact, is just as important as working on the next great theory – which the vast majority of pursuers will never even come close to. And this is why I developed a great interest in “knowledge transfer”.

Furthermore, I spent a lot of my early industry career working as a lead architect, R&D director, or chief scientist for what are now mostly unknown, and out of business, companies that produced solutions that were considerably ahead of what competitors had on the open market. Since it made no logical sense that the solutions should fail from a technology perspective, I spent more and more time asking myself why the solutions failed, since I refused to accept all potential clients were incapable of seeing the benefits, and discovered most of the time that the reason was the solution was solving the wrong problem (i.e. the business analysts, or, in most cases, the managers who assumed they knew what the problem was and skipped the analysis, did not do their homework), it wasn’t being marketed or sold properly (the salespeople were not properly educated and in a few cases just incompetent at that particular job), or the company was being poorly managed (and smart people could see it was not a wise investment from a long-term perspective).

Thus, I came to realize that not only is knowledge transfer from academia to industry (as there is a lot of knowledge there to draw from if you know where to look) and knowledge transfer within the company (everyone needs to speak the same language, understand the same problem, and work towards the same solution) important, but so is knowledge transfer and understanding throughout the supply and demand chain. This requires each participant to speak each other’s business and technical languages, but each group (marketing, engineering, finance, etc.) to be able to understand each other. Considering that each discipline has it’s own dialect these days, and that many individuals who specialize in one discipline have no idea what individuals in other disciplines do, this is a challenge for most companies. And this is where enablement comes into play – it’s not just a matter of writing code, but building a solution that enables the people who need to use it in solving their problem (and not just what someone perceives their problem to be) and, moreover, makes them want to use it.

This challenge – speaking a common language to identify, understand, and solve a common problem – can really only be solved by having one or more individuals who can work across the business – from market research through to engineering – and do so with competency and guide a core cross-functional team towards identifying a solution. This is more than just saying “we need to do X” and selecting a suite of applications that “do” X, but understanding what X is, what processes it involves, why, what fundamentally needs to be done, how those processes can be streamlined, and what new processes and technologies can be brought to bear to make it better. And thus the need to be innovative.

So where does someone like yours truly fit into the picture when he has done research, teaching, training, educational and marketing material preparation, coding, architecture, R&D & Operations management, process consulting, operations research, optimization, analytics, and business consulting in various B2B, B2C, and C2C e-commerce and supply chain spaces (and done so in the last decade alone) but yet does none of these things while focusing on knowledge transfer (as exemplified by this blog and the eSourcing Wiki), enablement, and innovation? The answer, confounding to your average recruiter, is everywhere and nowhere. Simply put, the doctor does what most others do not.

Going back to one of my previous statements that the supply chain professional of tomorrow must be a jack-of-all-trades and master-of-one (as opposed to a jack-of-all-trades but master-of-none) – I broke the mold I endeavored to fit. But the trade I focus my mastery on is not one that can be defined in any traditional business terms. My focus is purely on innovation – where innovation is relative to where you are today – and helping an interested company take their capabilities and solutions to the next level. Although the Big5 would plug what I do into a business process consulting, change consulting, management consulting, and maybe even a scenario consulting practice where the end goal is to help you make your business more efficient, more profitable, or both by identifying efficiencies, new processes, or technologies that you can bring to bear based upon the best (or most in vogue) business practices of the day, and then bring in their six sigma black belts, lean experts, or kaizen kamikazes to help you accomplish your goal, what I try to do for my clients, although very similar, is a bit different.

Unlike your average consultant who comes with his or her firm’s “best practice proven methodology” with a specific goal of “streamlining your processes” to improve your operations and bottom line, I don’t subscribe to any particular best practice methodology, don’t assume that any (overly) specific endeavor will guarantee results, and, most importantly, I don’t just work out the business part of “X” and ignore the ramifications of the suggested change or the technology that will be required to achieve “X”.

Specifically, like some of your newer boutiques in the space, my goal is to understand what your problem is or what you want to do, what underlying restrictions you have in developing a solution (based upon budgetary restrictions, manpower knowledge, and technical restrictions of existing solutions and infrastructure), and then choose, modify, or develop an appropriate methodology for the project. I try to balance the process with technology in helping a client design or build a solution, versus selling one or the other as the magic bullet. I work across the chasm that often exists between the marketing, sales, and business development and the engineering team – to make sure that both parties converge on and understand what’s required, why, and how it needs to be done. But most importantly, I try to identify a path of innovation appropriate to you and help you walk down it. This could be as significant and complex as a R&D project to develop brand new technology with features and functions no one else in the world has, as mediocre as slightly altering one step in a seven-step business process that allows you to improve efficiency 50% with almost no effort, or as important as helping you nail down your positioning, strategy, and marketplace communications. It’s all relative, it’s all specific to you, and it requires someone who doesn’t fit in any of the roles on your organizational chart. It has to be someone external, someone capable of looking at the business from a different viewpoint, and someone capable of looking across the business, which today means understanding technology, processes, and business requirements on an equal footing and how they interconnect, someone with the ability to put that puzzle together in a (slightly) new way that is beneficial to you and your customers, and, most importantly, someone who can actually help you, or your team, as appropriate, do it. That’s my view, but maybe I’m paying too much.

In short, the doctor does Innovation for the Real World, whatever that happens to be. And if you still don’t understand what the doctor does, then maybe someone like the doctor is just what you need.

The 2nd Sourcing Innovation Series ReCap, Part II

First of all, here are the posts to date.

The Future of eSourcing – Less is More Alan Buxton
The Future of Sourcing: Results-Based Process Specialization Charles Dominick
Sourcing Innovation Series David Bush
The Future of Spend Analysis Eric Strovink
Sourcing Innovation Series: Wither Procurement as Strategist in 2008? Jason Busch
Future Purchasing: The Extended-Enterprise Connector Jean-Philippe Massin
Yes Virginia! There is more to e-procurement than software! (Part 1) Jon Hansen
Yes Virginia! There is more to e-procurement than software! (Part 2) Jon Hansen
The FOSS(ilization) of the supply chain: The risks of a strategy centered on Free Open Source Software Jon Hansen
What’s Next in Purchasing? Ask Your Supply Management System Tim Minahan
Trading on the Spot Market the doctor
Let’s Get Analytical! the doctor

In Part I, we reviewed what Alan, Charles, David, Eric, and Jason had to say. In this part, we review what everyone else had to say.

Jean-Philippe Massin told us the future lied in the Extended-Enterprise Concept. In Purchasing, the trend will be towards industrialization, commoditisation, and automation; specifically, sell-side vertical e-Marketplaces with a commodity focus will become more numerous. These e-Marketplaces will feed globalization, only top performers will survive, and the purchasing department will evolve into a business in the extended-enterprise, managing the aggregation of independent top-performing companies in the network that work together to supply products and services as effectively as they can. The purchasing function will start to look more and more like trading as purchasers of the future will need to digest hundreds of parameters in order to forecast performance, select the best option, and change suppliers at breakneck speeds to maximize their company’s performance.

Jon Hansen offered a trio of posts that told us there is more to e-procurement than software and that strategies that centered on free (open source) software were fraught with risks. In his first post he points out that process, and not technology, is ultimately the main force behind successfully achieving results in terms of efficiency, spend rationalization, and spend reduction and indicates that he believes this will continue to be the case. In his second post he pointed out that achievers have more faith in their own team’s ability to understand and assess what needs to be done and that he does not expect this to change. In his last post he emphasizes that even though it’s not the technology, one still has to be careful of the technology chosen as the wrong technology can be fraught with risk. In the case of free open source software, there is the lack of imputability when software is developed via internet collaboration.

Tim Minahan, extending a train of thought started in a post by Brian Sommer, notes that we have not yet begun to tap the true value potential of supply management software. Future systems will address the major shortcoming of today’s systems, which is that systems today don’t help people make the decisions they struggle with before they enter data on a screen. Tomorrow’s systems will enable new processes and guided analytical scenarios that were previously considered impossible due to fragmented procedures, insufficient communications and data access, and inconsistent skills. They will guide buyers – regardless of skill set – toward the right sourcing and supplier management decisions. True innovation will come with technology that can inform buyers (and other executives) of the right business decisions.

In my prologue post, I noted how one of last year’s predictions by our leading spend management prophet Jason Busch might be on it’s way to reality. Last year, he predicted that securitizing direct materials and capacity was in sourcing’s future and that suppliers would benefit from the model as well as buyers. Then a study comes out by Haim Mendelson and Tunay Tunca of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business that finds that strategically using both fixed-price contracts and open market trading, supply chain participants can create greater efficiencies. Furthermore, both consumers and supply chains as a whole will benefit from these efficiencies.

In my main post, I noted that Spend Analysis Based Cost Modeling Decision Optimization are going to be the seven words of saving grace for tomorrow’s sourcing organization that wants to survive beyond the next decade. The only way companies are going to be able to maintain costs, yet alone achieve savings, is by getting a firm handle on costs and, more importantly, by identifying and achieving savings opportunities not previously explored. This is going to require an improved understanding of the cost drivers of what you are buying (cost modeling), and understanding of where variability exists, either within past buys or against market indices (spend analysis), and what the best award scenarios are (optimization). But it won’t be three applications at three different stages of the sourcing process, it will be one, and it will be at the beginning, center, and end of the sourcing process.

In essence, this years posts revolved around the common themes of talent and technology – and focussed specifically on the continued need for an appropriately assembled team, advanced analytics and optimization, and better process-based decision support software for tomorrow’s professionals. In the future, sourcing technology will be more powerful, easier to use, capable of guiding even the most novice of users through the process, and enable the optimal decision using advanced analytics and optimization. Tomorrow’s technology will merge the functions of general business analyst and sourcing agent into the single role of strategic sourcing professional who will lead the profession to new heights.

Spend Management – More than an ERP Boost

This summer, Ariba [acquired by SAP] put out a decent white paper titled “Spend Management – A Great ERP Boost that Lowers Costs and Increases Margins” that pointed out that Spend Management complements, enhances, and seamlessly integrates with ERP to enable people, processes, and technologies to improve profitability while reducing risk, optimize the management of global resources, and increase overall competitive advantage while achieving significant operational savings.

The paper pointed out that while ERP may provide the tools to manage transaction processing and financial reporting, it lacks the forward-looking visibility needed to manage costs, support business unit decisions, or plan, budget and forecast spend properly. In comparison, Spend Management fills the gaps and extends the practical uses of ERP to make every day a good day for business. Furthermore, Spend Management is strategic, addressing the larger, mission-level issue of how to spend less as an organization in comparison to ERP [which] is more tactical, addressing the more granular issues of making more efficient spending decisions using control tracking mechanisms.

The paper then states that Spend Management and ERP belong together, and for a simple reason that any organization can easily understand and accept – the unequivocal, incontrovertible need to achieve year-over-year cost savings and increased profitability. Spend Management solutions provide spend data to ERP systems, enabling companies to get a clear, consolidated view of all their spend data, which they can leverage to make better business decisions that drive business improvements and enhance financial performance.

Not bad, but there are at least three obvious problems with this paper:

  1. Spend Management solutions don’t provide spend data to ERP systems, e-Procurement systems and e-Commerce systems do. e-Procurement systems are simply a component of Spend Management.
  2. Neither Spend Management systems, ERP systems, nor their union guarantee year-over-year cost savings, and thus implying that their union addresses the need to achieve year-over-year cost savings is misleading. Remember, there ain’t no saving in a perfect world, and if you’re already more-or-less getting the best price for a commodity, you’re not going to negotiate a better price, especially when energy and raw material costs are spiking.
  3. You don’t need ERP at all for proper spend management!

Let’s address each of these in turn:

  1. Spend Management is the holistic process of managing your spend. It is usually implemented using a set of appropriate supporting technologies, including spend analysis, e-Sourcing, decision optimization, contract management, e-Procurement, etc., but could (theoretically) be accomplished without one or more technological components. Spend data is derived from spend transactions, which are usually accomplished by e-Commerce, e-Procurement systems (also known as P2P or EIPP), or e-Payment systems.
  2. You’ll only get cost savings where there are savings to be had. This is generally true in any category that has not been strategically sourced before, or any category that has not been strategically sourced recently, but not necessarily true in a category that was just strategically sourced for the second or third time. Once you’ve taken all the fat out of the supplier’s margins, built an accurate should cost model, and leveraged all you can get out of your volume, you might not be able to get a better price. Then Spend Management is all about cost avoidance – avoiding, or at least minimizing, the eventual cost increases due to raw material price increases, energy and production cost increases, and plain old inflation.
  3. The paper indicates that the role of the ERP is to make more efficient spending decisions, manage transactions, track information, provide aggregate reporting, and enable visibility. However, efficient spending decisions are made by knowledgeable sourcing professionals enabled by the right technologies that give them the right visibility and decision support, transactions can be managed and tracked by your standard relational database engine, aggregate reporting can be provided by any decent business intelligence tool, which can work off a plain ol’ database just as easily as it can off an ERP, and visibility is enabled by having all of your data in one place, which can be accomplished with any database, business intelligence, or spend analysis tool that supports a data warehouse or OLAP cube.

In other words, Spend Management is an ERP boost, but you don’t need an ERP to get the benefits out of spend management and the tools and technologies that support it. You can not only run all of today’s supporting e-Sourcing and e-Procurement tools stand-alone, but you can even run them on-demand. If you have an ERP, great – you’ve already taken a step to centralizing and normalizing your data in a central repository and you can use that – but if you don’t, no problem. Just get a full suite and use the capabilities of the tools to build your data warehouse. The only pre-condition to adopting spend management is that you have a mindset for cost avoidance. If that’s you, you can start today. Have fun!

Coupa + Amazon EC2 = Energized Procurement!

One of the great things about the blogsphere is we don’t have to wait for them to stop the presses to get a great story in at the last minute. We just type, save, publish – and presto! – you get the latest news as soon as we get it, as it happens, and, when you’re really lucky, before!

Tomorrow, the latest press release from Coupa will blanket the wire, traditional e-Procurement companies will cringe, and new age technophiles will rejoice. For tomorrow, the world’s simplest e-Procurement system will be available on-demand to enterprises of all shapes and sizes at a fraction of the cost of traditional e-Procurement systems. Just like SalesForce.com revolutionized the CRM world, Coupa is revolutionizing the e-Procurement world – and then some! By basing their new services on Amazon’s EC2 Virtual Grid Computing Cluster, they are ensuring that they’ll always have the computing power required to ensure rapid response times, regardless of how many users decide to use the system at exactly 4:55 p.m. to get that last order of the day out before they leave.

Normally it takes a big merger, acquisition, or introduction of a brand-spanking-new technology to shake-up a market – but Coupa has achieved puree with nothing but open source and a revolutionary pricing model. They don’t know it yet, but I’d say at least three quarters of the e-Procurement companies I track over on the resource site are in dire straits once procurement professionals realize everywhere that it doesn’t cost in the high six, or even seven, figures for basic enterprise e-Procurement anymore – and that it doesn’t require a six month roll-out plan either! Specifically, I predict that any company trying to make a living just selling decade old order management, e-RFX, e-Invoicing, and catalog management technology is headed for extinction. Unless they are also providing advanced payment solutions, supply chain finance, inventory visibility, or other advanced service offerings – they’re going to have a very tough time competing with a true multi-tenant on-demand e-Procurement platform with unlimited scalability and exponentially decreasing costs on a per-user basis as your organization grows.

This brings us to their transparent four layer pricing model – the first of its kind – that is designed to make the Coupa e-Procurement system affordable to even the smallest 3-guys-in-a-garage start-up while simultaneously making it best-value for your large enterprise who’s still struggling to embrace the 21st century and just needs a basic e-Procurement system. How affordable? How valuable? Although the exact prices won’t be available until tomorrow, I have it on good authority that a 10-user organization can get started for as little as 3K a year (and maybe a little less)! And – you better be sitting down for this one – a 1000 user organization can get started for under 50K per year! That’s less than $50 / user / year! And the enterprise package also includes their new “Quick Start” program which gives you a dedicated solution delivery expert, guidance on collection of key company information, and assistance in configuring your Coupa-On-Demand instance – including chart of accounts, users, suppliers, contracts, catalogs, approvals, and integration advice.

Coupa has also been working hard since their last release to extend their functionality, and now supports a number of common office supplies and electronics vendors using punch-out and cXML order delivery (including Office Depot, Office Max, Dell, and VWR), direct quickbooks order import via Traxian for small businesses, and an integration web services layer that automates the movement of data in and out of Coupa-On-Demand using XML and an open API that supports seamless integration with accounting systems and ERPs.

And I’m sure there’ll be goodies aplenty on their newly designed web-sites that will be live tomorrow. That’s right – Sites! In addition to Coupa.com, there’ll also be a new Coupa.org site as well that will provide a dedicated home for Coupa Express, the world leading open source project for e-Procurement that has already surpassed 9,000 downloads and will probably pass the 10,000 mark before the month is up!

So watch the wire – and check out Coupa*! The e-Procurement revolution is at hand!

And, for those of you still wondering, this post fits in perfectly with the Sustainable Sunday theme : On-Demand e-Procurement that uses Amazon EC2 Virtual Computing Grid to only consume as much resources (and energy) as is required to support your needs and keep your costs low helps you sustain your procurement initiatives!

*Wouldn’t Coupa make a great sponsor of Sourcing Innovation? They’ve been pretty innovative lately.  Feel free to leave any comments – including dissenting ones! – below. I know they read this blog from time to time.

The 2nd Sourcing Innovation Series ReCap, Part I

Even though a few bloggers have disappeared into the woodwork, I think it’s time to start wrap up the sourcing innovation 2007 series. First of all, I’d like to thank all of this years contributors to date and summarize the posts in an easy reference table. Then I’m going to recap each one before recapping the series.

The Future of eSourcing – Less is More Alan Buxton
The Future of Sourcing: Results-Based Process Specialization Charles Dominick
Sourcing Innovation Series David Bush
The Future of Spend Analysis Eric Strovink
Sourcing Innovation Series: Wither Procurement as Strategist in 2008? Jason Busch
Future Purchasing: The Extended-Enterprise Connector Jean-Philippe Massin
Yes Virginia! There is more to e-procurement than software! (Part 1) Jon Hansen
Yes Virginia! There is more to e-procurement than software! (Part 2) Jon Hansen
The FOSS(ilization) of the supply chain: The risks of a strategy centered on Free Open Source Software Jon Hansen
What’s Next in Purchasing? Ask Your Supply Management System Tim Minahan
Trading on the Spot Market the doctor
Let’s Get Analytical! the doctor

Alan Buxton tells us that in the future, e-Sourcing tools will be fun and helpful, taking cues from consumer-friendly sites like ecourier.co.uk and zopa.com that clearly demonstrate where the value is. Alan indicates that this is crucial if a mass adoption of e-Sourcing tools is to happen globally.

Charles Dominick said that the future of sourcing is continued adoption of the concept of supply chain management, but with smarter implementation, based on the goal of having the organization operate like a well-oiled machine, where workers are not jacks-of-all-trades and master of none. It will see appropriately assembled supply-chain management teams that have specialists for those areas requiring specialist-level expertise, like strategic sourcing, negotiation, and supplier management. An understanding of how functions within the supply chain interrelate will continue to increase in importance, but some of the often ignored purchasing skills will resurface as practitioners remember why strategic purchasing has become an elevated profession and how it significantly contributes to organizational effectiveness and profitability when done right. And the role of purchasing manager will be even more important – as this individual will be required to be a master of facilitation to keep the team running like a well-oiled machine, in addition to being well versed in all elements of the supply chain and master of a few.

David Bush, the most practical of all of us high falutin’ bloggers, proclaimed that even he sees that advanced sourcing optimization will be the catalyst which merges the function of general business analyst with the sourcing team. This is because taking a complex bid, and automating more of the lifecycle, is critical to compressing the amount of time needed, and thus, allowing more bids to be strategically sourced by the same number of people and, with integrated decision optimization, sourcing professionals can derive very detailed scenarios in a matter of hours, instead of weeks. He sees the next year or so as being a continued transformation of procurement to self sufficiency, which removes layers of inefficiency.

Eric Strovink made four prognostications for spend analysis in 2008:

  • The distinction between data-warehouse-based spend repository tools and traditional business-intelligence tools will continue to erode.
  • The distinction between true spend analysis tools and spend data warehouses will widen, in part because it is impossible to perform true ad-hoc analysis with a fixed-schema data warehouse.
  • The awkwardness and limitations of OLAP technology for spend analysis will become increasingly apparent as more general purpose data sets are considered by professional spend analysts.
  • Invoice-analysis and commodity-specific analysis will dominate the “what’s new” frontier for spend analysis during 2008.

Jason Busch pointed out that procurement will be far less influential in the year(s) ahead in a number of areas when it comes to determining corporate strategy, and pointed out procurement outsourcing, dashboarding, and risk management as three prime examples. This is because tangential stakeholders are about to take a larger role in procurement innovation. With respect to procurement outsourcing, you’ll see a lot more CFOs making the final decisions. Finance will also figure more prominently in dashboard selection and visibility. And the executive team as a whole will start to get a lot more interested in risk management.

We’ll review the rest of the posts, as well as the series as a whole, in Part II. Stay tuned!