And we need Hackett Spend Matters to give them to us!

There’s a reason we picked on Hackett this week in our follow up to our 35 part series on why you really DO NOT need to read another State of Procurement report for Five Years, and that’s because we need Hackett to give us solutions to procurement problems.

We need them to tell us not just how to

• prioritize our concerns
• extract the core issues
• identify the most relevant barriers
• rank the most likely risks

but tell us

• why some concerns take priority, based on organizational impact
• how to identify the core issues, so you can learn to do so yourself
• where you will encounter the barriers, and the techniques for busting through them
• what the key risks are, with the mitigations and responses you need to put in place

The reality is that

• you know what your concerns are, but you don’t know which are the most critical to your success when you are overworked, underfunded, and the world is literally burning around you
• you likely weren’t trained in root cause analysis, and if you’re not a process expert, you will likely have difficulty getting to the root cause (especially if it’s deep in another part of the organization or the partner ecosystem)
• you don’t know which barriers are equivalent to reinforced concrete and truly blocking your success and which are essentially made of paper mâché and easily conquered
• how to deal with the most significant risks, especially when you can’t predict them all or influence their likelihood at all

This is the help you need … and Hackett, with the acquisition of Spend Matters, is the only analyst firm with the bench strength left in Procurement to do it!

The reality is that the original analysts in our space (first at AMR Research, which was acquired by Gartner; and then Aberdeen, acquired by Harte Hanks; and finally Forrester) all departed years ago. The number of analysts who have been in, and continually analyzing, Procurement Tech for 20 years is now countable on your fingers (and since Mickey North Rizza, at IDC, and Magnus Bergfors, at Gartner, both did a long stint in the vendor ecosystem and Jason Busch recently departed the analyst space for the vendor ecosystem, I can only confirm [besides myself] Jon Hansen of Procurement Insights, Andrew Bartolini and Christopher Dwyer of Ardent Partners, and Chris Sawchuk and the legendary Pierre Mitchell at Hackett [who goes all the way back to AMR]) as vets who have been consistently analyzing the Procurement space for at least the last two decades (back to when SI started 20 years ago in 2006). If you look at the handful of organizations with a senior Procurement analyst with two decades of experience, only Hackett, who also has Xavier Olivera and Bertrand Maltaverne, have a real Procurement Analyst team with deep bench strength where you have four senior analysts who each have 25+ years of deep Procurement expertise!

No other organization can give us the deep insights and playbooks we need to elevate our Procurement organizations, and do it without defaulting to the BS of “just implement the tech-du-jour of our sponsors and use our [associated] consulting arm to do it” — which we all know is not a solution (because, if it was, your problems would have been solved two decades ago)! But if they don’t do it soon, before Pierre and Chris retire, they won’t be able to — and, frankly, neither will anyone else! The time is now for them to stop wasting their analysts’ time on “state of” surveys and reports and instead explain what the findings of the last decade mean, what processes are needed to address the gaps, what organizational changes may be needed to implement those processes, and why we need to return to the classic

1. PEOPLE-FIRST
2. PROCESS-SECOND
3. TECHNOLOGY-LAST

approach to solving problems and that, in the modern age, we have to actually modify this to:

1. PEOPLE-FIRST
2. PROCESS-SECOND
3. DATA-THIRD
4. TECHNOLOGY-LAST

because

1. we are the ones who have to execute the business, all machines do is transmit and process data
2. problems are solved by repeatable, predictable, dependable processes that can be executed by humans in a worst case scenario (even if intended to be automated to the majority of the time)
3. no process can be executed without the right information
4. technology only comes into play when we know it’s the right solution (and we can’t know it’s the right solution until we’ve addressed the people, process, and data elements)

and to do this, you need a lot of experience, domain expertise, knowledge about what data is available, and deep technology knowledge.

And this is another area where Hackett brings deep bench strength.

From the beginning, most of the analysts in our space were not technologists but operations research people, business finance, economists, accountants, and even historians. Few had computer science or engineering degrees and fewer still relevant experience building/installing relevant applications. At Hackett, Chris and Bertrand are engineers and Xavier and Pierre are computer scientists, who all have relevant real world experience with tech. They have a much better understanding of what tech can, and can’t do, then an average analyst (and are much less likely to have the wool pulled over their eyes by a new “AI-first” player that does nothing more than wrap a third party LLM to deliver a solution of questionable performance and reliability, for e.g.) and can do a much better job of not only recommending what type of tech to use, but who you should look at and why, versus just “who comes out in the upper right of of the magic map” based on blended subjective scores that, at the end of the day, mean nothing.

But the clock is ticking and time is running out. Let’s hope Hackett realizes sooner than later what types of research and reports we really need vs. just wasting their key analysts’ on surveys and summaries thereof.

Nothing makes my point better than slide 15 on Trends in Procurement priorities in the 2026 Procurement Agenda and Key Issues Study Results sponsored (at least) by Jaggaer, SAP and Unit4 (and likely others).

Basically, every year you have the concerns of

• supply continuity
• cost reduction against inflationary price increase
• strategic business advisory
• digital transformation and the tech-du-jour (analytics to AI)
• operating model improvements

All of the risks fall into our eight ever present risk categories:

• Talent: Access, Acquisition & Retention, Retiring Workforce Impact
• Disasters: (Other) Supply Chain Disruptions
• Cyberattack: CyberSecurity Risks
• Spend Pressure: Economic Downturn, Changing Customer Expectations, Capital Access, Competitive Alternatives
• Supply Shortage (and Trigger Events): Trade Wars, Geopolitical Tension
• Regulatory Compliance: Regulatory Compliance, Ethics & Privacy, Product Liability
• Corruption: IP Loss
• Tech-Du-Jour: AI-enabled Tech, Tech Transformation Delays, Tech Obsolescence

It’s the same-old, same-old situation when it comes to initiatives, except the tech-du-jour (AI) is nearing the top of the list, and the ecosystem is essentially the same, only the names of the players have changed. And, of course, the conclusion is, surprise surprise, to employ the tech-du-jour which, lo-and-behold, Hackett stands by and stands ready to help you with (despite the 94%+ failure rates found by MIT and McKinsey).

In other words, it’s the report we expected, and the first of many to come. (As you can expect every other analyst firm and consultancy will soon be releasing theirs, if they haven’t already. But we won’t be reading them, and for the next five years at least, neither should you.)

And, with the exception of the key shifts in concerns, issues, risks, and barriers, which could be a two page summary, it’s not a report you need to read through as very little has changed in the last decade.

Between November of last year and January of this year, SI published a 35 part series on why you really DO NOT need to read another State of Procurement report for Five Years in order to save you the trouble of reading yet another report that was 95% the same as last year’s report, and 85%+ the same as the report you read five, if not ten, years ago.

The realty is that:

• the barriers to success never change (just their relative criticality based upon which ones are currently your biggest obstacles)
• the risks never change (although some go up each year while others temporarily go down)
• the concerns never change, with the exception of the tech-du-jour which just replaces the previous tech-du-jour when the hype cycle changes

And this is because

• the core function of Procurement HAS NOT changed since the first manual was published one hundred and thirty nine years ago, which means
• the issues Procurement is addressing today are essentially the same fundamental issues Procurement has always been facing which means
• the priorities have not changed either

And you don’t need to read 30 to 60 page reports to realize this. All that’s relevant is what climbed or fell on each list since last year since that tells you

• which challenges are coming your way if they haven’t hit yet,
• which technologies and trends are gaining hype status, and
• how your peers see their priorities for the year

Nothing beyond that is useful, as the functions, issues, priorities, concerns, risks, and barriers are the same (although some have rapidly climbed the charts with a certain World Leader randomly removing regimes, starting special military actions, and blocking trade routes with no warning).