Category Archives: rants

THE STATE OF PROCUREMENT HAS NOT CHANGED! So Ignore all the Reports Flooding Your Feeds!

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).

In two weeks — ALL YOUR DATA BELONGS TO MUSK, ZUCKERBERG, NADELLA, and ALTMAN!

Not being facetious here! It could be step 1 in Musk’s plan to own all your data!

A ruling in two weeks could ultimately result in ALL YOUR DATA BELONGING TO MUSK, ZUCKERBERG, NADELLA, and ALTMAN!

In only two weeks, Texas Third Court of Appeals has a hearing on an emergency motion by Alex Jones’ lawyers that temporarily blocked the transfer of any Infowars assets. (Which were supposed to be transferred and sold to pay off the more than US$1 billion in defamation lawsuit judgments for the relatives of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.)

Now, whether or not you agree with that judgement or not or the sale or not, that’s not important. What’s important is that on October 14, 2024, LATHAM & WATKINS LLP, on behalf of X Corp., filed a “Notice of Appearance and Demand for Service of Papers” relating to the case and then, on November 25, 2024, filed a statement on “X CORP.’S LIMITED OBJECTION TO TRUSTEE’S PROPOSED SALE MOTIONS”.

Now if you think this has anything to do with Musk trying to protect Jones, Infowars, or its assets, you’re wrong.

Let’s take paragraphs 1, 2, 3, 4, 25, 26, and 36.

1: Objects to the sale of any account on the “X” platform.

2: Specifically, Infowars, Banned.Video, WarRoomShow, RealAlexJones, and any other account on X belonging to FSS or Jones

3: because accounts on X are X. Corp’s exclusive property

4: and X-Corp is the sole owner

25: and has ultimate control over the accounts.

26: While section 3 of the X Terms of Service (TOS) makes clear the account holder owns the content, section 4 gives X Corp broad rights to “access, read, preserve, and disclose any information”.

36: In addition to being a personal license, the license X Corp. grants to account holders
is an intellectual property license.

Getting the picture? Probably not. Let me spell it out.

An account belongs to the person or an authorized person from a legal entity that creates the account (and, in the latter case, can only be transferred to another person from that legal entity) and cannot be transferred to anyone else under those terms of services.

As a person, you can only access the account as long as you personally are mentally and physically capable of doing so and do not violate the terms of service. As a legal entity, as long as you remain a valid legal entity and have a valid designate to do so.

When these conditions cease to be met, your access is denied, and your account eventually shut down, but X Corp. retains the right to preserve, access, and read that data for eternity, while your (or anyone else’s) rights to such data effectively expire (unless you preserved a copy of such data off of the platform, and transferred your copyright to another entity before you died) as you no longer have a copy or the ability to prove copyright. That data then effectively becomes property of X Corp.

And this is Musk’s effort to have a Judge state that this is legally correct. Because, like its peers, xAI used every available bit of data on the internet to train its models, including every copyrighted book, song and movie/tv show in digital format they could access. And, like his peers, Musk doesn’t want his company sued. (And that’s the real reason there is a 10-year moratorium on AI regulation. It’s not to catch up to China. It’s not to ensure the government has the ability to experiment without recourse in civilian monitoring, military, and electioneering efforts. It’s so the politicians don’t lose access to the biggest money pots out there.)

This is the first step. Have a judge say that social media platforms (where internet users spend most of their time and post most of their data) legally own the service, which is defined as non-transferable in the TOS which also allows the platform to retain all data posted indefinitely. Have the the only copy of the data when the service is abandoned or terminated and assume the rights by default. Then you can’t be sued because you now own the data (because you will by the time the no AI regulations moratorium expires and laws actually get passed).

Sources:

1) CP24.com

2) KUT.org

3) Demand for Service of Papers

4) LIMITED OBJECTION TO TRUSTEE’S PROPOSED SALE MOTIONS

The Proliferation of AI-Generated Content Guised As Research is Damaging Our Space!

Real Research Requires Real Human Intelligence and Effort

(I’m not here to be nice. I’m here to educated and inform. Something most sites, including LinkedIn, are doing very little of lately!)

Joël Collin-Demers recently made the understatement of the year when he said 15 functionalities comparing ZIP to Jaggaer isn’t analysis/comparison, it’s pattern-matching by an LLM with no domain context. At best it’s unhelpful. At worst it points procurement leaders toward the wrong tools entirely in response to, with no due respect, a complete crock of AI sh!t published by TEEM.Finance (and reported by a TEEM member who claims instant supplier sourcing & portfolio analysis, with AI# in the tagline, which is another crock of AI sh!t that I must also address).

First of all, at best someone selects an inferior product, wastes a lot of time and money, and ends up in a situation where they are still limping along trying to get basic tasks done with yet another platform that doesn’t come close to delivering on its promise while doing nothing to deliver an increased return on the large amount of money spent on SaaS supposed to solve the organization’s Procurement pain.

At worst, it points the buyer to a product that costs five times as much, doesn’t even accomplish core use cases (if the product works at all outside the demo lab), and results in an absolute disaster upon implementation (with next to zero adoption and more bypass than the organization has ever seen due to the lack of core capability) that results in the organization having to issue another RFP and go through the whole process again with a jaded and angry employee base who expects nothing good will come of it.

The danger of a poor Procurement product pick cannot be understated or underestimated. Nothing will cripple an overworked and under-resourced Procurement department faster than a bad platform (and doubly so if it contains [Autonomous] Gen-AI)!

So, with so many bad product comparisons and maps out there (including Gartner’s and Forrester’s), which I have tackled repeatedly on Sourcing Innovation, why the need to target this one? Because while Gartner and Forrester can be relied on to give you the generally best bet from among their customers which have been confirmed to have relatively equal core functionality,

  1. a random comparison between two different players based on a mere 15 data points that are randomly selected and called “use cases” only guarantees they both exist in the Source-to-Pay space,
  2. any use of AI is flawed from the get-go,
  3. and any comparison that scores Zip 94% and Jaggaer 100% is obviously a complete and utter crock of AI generated sh!t

Let’s revisit Joel’s comment where he calls out Solution Map (which Hackett will hopefully keep).

  • Over 500 clearly defined functions are scored on a scale of technical progression (from 0 to 5). Not 50. And definitely not 15!
  • A 100% based on TODAY’S known Best-In-Class functionality would require a Solution Map score of 4.0. Most suites averaged in the 2.5 to 3 range (average to slightly above). Jaggaer is no exception (and Zip is still far from a suite, it’s I2O slowly adding baseline procurement capabilities, not S2P). (Remember, I DESIGNED the core Sourcing, Supplier Management, Analytics, and Contract Management [this one joint with Pierre Mitchell] maps and DESIGNED the common core across all the maps for Solution Map 2.0. And I scored them for 7 years.)
  • They DO NOT cover everything … there’s always innovation, and always edge cases we ignored (as the goal was to produce a useful map for the majority).
  • They were TECH and CUSTOMER SATISFACTION only. And you need to assess more than that to select a vendor (as per our Successful Vendor Selection series). (And, sometimes, you have to figure out what you should even be looking at, which is why I penned a 39 part series to walk you though the thought process (and Joel, stop complaining about having to write an 8,500 word series on P2P functional requirements … you’re just getting started).
  • And they compared apples-to-apples. This report compares apple-to-oranges, as it’s conclusions are “choose JAGGAER ONE if your organization manages direct materials, manufactures products, or operates in a heavily regulated sector” or “choose ZipHQ if your procurement team needs to configure complex approval workflows across IT, Legal, and Finance without technical resources“, which effectively boils down to “choose Jaggaer if you need Source-to-Pay, and “choose Zip if you need Intake to Orchestration” which is a recommendation that DOES NOT require you to read a report to figure out. All you need to know is
    1. Jaggaer is Source to Pay.
    2. Zip is Intake to Orchestration

    and the answer becomes pretty f*ck!ng obvious!

In order to be useful, at a bare minimum, this is what a comparison needs to do. Define the product domain being compared. Identify the extent of core, should have, and nice-to-have functions required by a product to support the product domain (based on standard functionality and domain use cases). Create a maturity definition for each function. And then use HUMAN INTELLIGENCE to score each product selected for inclusion (on actual demos from the vendor or willing partners and/or current customers). Not bullsh!t Gen-AI that can be fooled by bullcr@p marketing!

Anything less is not a meaningful product comparison. It’s simply an exploration against a few points of interest.

Now, if that’s human led, that can be useful as supplementary material in a decision. After all, the Solution Map will merely grade functionality like flexible workflow configuration on a standard scale but won’t track specifics of how it’s done, how user friendly vs. partner friendly vs. vendor friendly the configuration is, actual customer use cases where the workflows had to intersect 3 or more departments and average customer sentiment on that feature, or provide any other color that might help you make a decision when two solutions look acceptable from a technical and customer satisfaction perspective.

So, if TEEM.finance or someone else wanted to hand pick the most common / relevant use cases, dive in, do a human review, and present their analysis as key points to consider — that would be awesome, and a great excuse to keep writing (so long as said writing is NOT turned over to [Gen-]AI)!

After all, I’m not going to do it (because, frankly, I’m not interested in seeing the same old functionality over and over [as I already saw, and wrote, about it all multiple times — and you should be able to access that if you have a Hackett Membership] as most of the suites have done little to upgrade anything in the last few years as they have switched private equity ownership and bled key talent), and neither are most analysts (who have to cover more vendors than most can handle — remember, there are over 700 vendors in our space, and if you don’t believe me, I again refer you to the mega-map of 666 vendors SI compiled for you).

But it has to be a real review, based on a real demo and/or real discussions with customers, and not AI in any way, shape or form. Otherwise, at best, it’s sl0p. At worst, it’s the written word equivalent of toxic waste. And let’s NOT forget that and continue to fight against the use of AI where AI should NOT be used!

Now, as to the other crock of sh!t, namely instant supplier sourcing & portfolio analysis, with AI. There’s no instant. Yes, there are some great tools out there that can identify a list of potentially relevant suppliers in seconds, compared to the weeks of manual searching you might have had to do in the past, and there are tools out there that can automate sourcing ONCE you have identified your precise item needs, your price tolerances, and your pre-vetted supply base … but, guess what, AI CAN NOT DO all the stuff in between, especially if the product (or category) is high-risk, high-complexity, or high-impact (under the Busch-Lamoureux Exact Purchasing Framework).*

You have to vet the supplier. You have to make sure it’s still operating, the license certificates, registrations, and insurance are both real and current, that the products are still offered, that they are real (by getting a sample), that they will suit your needs, and that the supplier is capable of producing the quantity you need in the time-frame you need it in. You then have to qualify the risks and impact, sign off on them, and enter the supplier (and approvals) in the system. Then you have to define the sourcing project, your tolerance, and your conditions for bid acceptance. YOU! Not BS AI!

In other words, there’s nothing instant about it … and for a highly complex product, or category, that could be days or weeks of manual human work even after all the tactical drudgery is automated for you. So, while a tagline that said faster supplier sourcing and portfolio analysis, with AI, would be 100% true, a tagline that says instant is inherently false. (Unless, of course, your risk tolerance is sky high and you don’t care if the worst case scenario hits and destroys your business … so if you’re looking to be the next Eddie Lampert and dismantle a 100+ Billion company [in today’s dollars] in record time, go for it!)

# name and image hidden as I’m not entirely sure it’s not a bot auto-publishing AI slop

* to be totally honest, you can’t even expect AI to be reliable for low-risk, low-complexity, and low-impact products/categories either, but since the impact of the mistakes it’s going to make will probably require less manual effort to clean up than dealing with all of those products manually, you can potentially live with it

The Dark Ages Were Bad …

… and, after most of western society was likely still recovering from the long term devastating effects of the volcanic winter of 536, that probably set us back 1,000 years in the grand scheme of societal development and civilization advancement.

… but that’s a minor setback compared to what’s in store for the Age of Retardation that is coming!

But let’s back up. Consider this recent article on LinkedIn by Karl Waldman on this Medieval Lesson: Cutting Skilled Workers Hurts Long-Term Growth where Karl discussed why the age of great cathedrals came to an end.

It had nothing to do with lack of wealth — there’s always been wealth, all that changes is who controls it — or a lack of interest — the Christian religion has consistently held more than its fair share of dominance through Europe from the building of the first great cathedral until the present day (and whenever it loses control in one country it finds a new one to take over). It was lack of skill.

As per the post, the European cathedral builders developed an ornamental tradition so specialized it took decades of guild training to master. When the Black Death killed a third of Europe’s population, the skilled tradesmen disappeared because the training pipeline that produced it had been destroyed.

Now think about what we’re doing today.

We’re pretending AI can do the work of experienced professionals and cutting them left, right, and centre. We’re pretending we don’t need junior workers (because they do the tasks that AI seems to do okay) and not hiring. We’re walking all of our institutional knowledge out the door, as well as our ability to react and fix exceptional situations with creativity (that will break AI when they arise), while ensuring there’s no one around to absorb even a morsel of that knowledge and skill.

We’re not only replicating the end results of the black plague at a rate that’s even faster than the black death spread across Europe (it took about 7 years with the first 4 being the worst) — and not only are we destroying all of our capability to build tomorrow’s businesses, but we are throwing away all of our capability to even maintain today’s businesses if something goes wrong! After all, our current staffing levels are minimal, and most of the people we have left are in cognitive decline thanks to the AI they are being forced to use for “productivity” reasons.

When the next unstoppable pandemic hits, and wipes out all of our silver haired experts with no skilled talent to replace them, we will enter the Age of Retardation and our global society will collapse faster than the Aztec Empire. (And if you don’t know how fast one of the greatest civilizations in Central America fell, maybe you should brush up on your history!)

San Altman is definitely the P.T. Barnum of our age …

But to repeat claims (as per this Futurism article) that he’s the Bernie Madoff or Sam Bankman-Fried of our age without proving he has the IQ he says he has (which some of us don’t believe he has), or providing evidence he’s the world’s biggest sociopath (as that’s who you’d have to be to knowingly defraud major investment funds of hundred of billions of dollars, funds that likely hold the retirement funds of hundreds of millions of people) seems just a little unfair. After all, if Sam can barely code and misunderstands basic machine learning concepts, which I totally believe (as that would seem to be a fundamental requirement to believing AI actually works and is actually capable of intelligence in its current form), that would seem to indicate his IQ is on the low side and that he thus believes that his AI works and is actually intelligent.

If this is the case, then even though all of his investors will most likely eventually lose Billions (and likely Tens of Billions, and maybe Hundreds of Billions) of dollars on “AI” that will never work, it’s not fraud because he might actually be dumb enough to believe every word of what he’s selling. Fraud, like many major US crimes, requires intent (and, in Sam’s case, would require understanding what his firm’s offering actually does vs. what he seems to believe it does).

18 U.S. Code § 1341 starts off with “Whoever, having devised or INTENDing to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses …”. He didn’t devise the scheme of raising venture capital and private equity, so that doesn’t apply. If he believes his garbage actually delivers intelligence (even though it doesn’t), and will work better with bigger models and better data centres funded by the money he’s trying to raise (even though it won’t), he’s not intending to defraud either. Which means that he’s not a Madoff (who devised a Ponzi scheme with the intent to defraud) or a Sam Bankman-Fried (who willfully misused crypto funds for his hedge funds and pay personal debts).

He’s just a showman peddling his digital puppet theatre (who is blissfully unaware of how bad it is) and if you’re dumb enough to fall for it, that’s on you, not him!

If you’re looking for real fraud, maybe look to your federal government?

PS: I never thought I’d feel the need to defend an individual who I see as one of the biggest scourges of the digital age! But when there are a lots of individuals out there actively defrauding consumers with knowledge and intent every single day and getting away Scott free without any effort whatsoever to even formally recognize the fraud, that was a really unfair byline.