For your convenience, here are links to the complete series, classic and modern:
Category Archives: rants
It’s Not AI (First,Led,Powered,etc.) or Autonomous. It is Solution with Augmented Intelligence!
By now you know our stance on Gen-AI (and how it should be relegated to the rubbish heap from which it came) because it’s not about “AI”, it’s about outcome. And outcome requires a real, predictable, usable solution that helps Human Intelligence (HI!) make the right decision. Such a solution is one that uses tried and true algorithms that support tried and true processes that provide a human with the insight needed to make the right decision at the time, every time a decision needs to be made.
This requires a solution that walks the human user through the process, step by step, and presents them with the information required to make a decision as to whether to progress to another step, what the next step is, and any conditions that need to be put on that next step. This requires a solution that automatically runs all of the typically relevant analysis, on all of the available data, and presents the insight, along with any typical decisions (as [a] default recommendation[s]) made on any similar situations that can be found in the organizational history.
Automation should only occur in situations the organization has defined as acceptable according to well defined, human reviewed, and verified rules. Not default vendor rules or unverified probabilities or unverified random computations from a random algorithm. A good solution is one that walks a user through the process, often allowing each step to be completed with a single choice or click. It’s not one that makes the choice for the user, which may or may not be the right one, but one that helps the user makes the right choice. It might seem like a subtle difference, but it is a very important one.
Even though an AI-powered autonomous solution might seem to make the right decision over 90% (or 95%) of the time, it doesn’t mean it actually is. If it looks right, it might be a good decision, but it doesn’t mean it’s a good decision for the organization at the time, or the best decision that can be made. Only human review, at the time, can make that decision. A good solution runs all the analysis it can, summarizes the results, and lets a human verify the data for any recommendation made by the system.
To better understand the the subtlety, consider a situation where the organization lets the system automatically re-auction all regularly purchased products and commodities for manufacturing or MRO where the price is typically constant over time using a lowest bidder takes all e-Auction that results in the auto-generation and auto e-Signature of a one year contract. Now, most of the time this is probably going to work okay, but imagine you let it run on full auto-pilot and in the e-Auction queue is your regular RAM contract that expired three days after a major RAM plant factory fire (that happens about once every decade if you trace back through the last forty years), and prices have just skyrocketed about 50%. Prices which would drop back down as soon as the plant comes back online in three months. Locking in a full year contract would result in excessive cost overruns on the items for almost nine months longer than necessary, instead of just three months or so. A human would know to buy the bare minimum on the spot market at overly inflated rates and wait until the market stabilized before running an e-Auction to lock in the next contract. But a system told to just re-auction and re-order at every contract expiration would do this that. It wouldn’t know that the current market rates are just temporary, why, and how to change course. This is just one example where over-automation and AI will lead to failure without Human Intervention.
A good system presents the user with the products/commodities that are typically automatically auctioned, the history of costs, the current market costs, the recommendation for auto-sourcing and term, the expected results, and whether the recommendation is for the auction to auto-award and contract or, when the auction is complete, pause and include a human in the loop to make a final decision. A well designed system minimizes the work and input required by a human, eliminating all the tactical data analysis and e-paperwork, making it easy to make the right strategic decision without a lot of effort. Technology isn’t about trying to replace human intelligence (which it can’t), but about eliminating unnecessary drudgery or computation (“thunking”) that humans are not good at (or don’t have the time for), so that humans can focus on strategic decisions and value add.
That’s why the right answer is always a solution with augmented intelligence. Not autonomous AI solutions.
Often the Best Solution is the Simplest Solution!
One of the downsides of the Gen-AI mania is the constant messaging that everything is complicated and the only technology that can make it easy is over-engineered, power hungry, planet killing, Gen-AI technology that has to consume mountains of data, be fed by carefully crafted creative prompts (that can take hours, days, and even weeks of trial and error to get right), and require mountains of effort to acquire, install, train, and tweak such a system. The claims are that only this technology can solve modern Procurement problems, when nothing could be further from the truth.
The reality is that not all problems require complex solutions. Some require very simple solutions. India recently provided us with an example of that. In a recent article on how Farmers can use WhatsApp for Paddy Procurement, India presented a rather simple solution to its Paddy Procurement problem, where it needed to simplify the acquisition of rice.
When a large amount of product needs to be procured in a whole lot of small batches, coordination is not easy, especially from suppliers who don’t have the same modern tech. Now, imagine your suppliers are not corporations, but small farms where the most advanced tech might be the cell phone they are holding to make calls. As a result, they don’t have any complicated sales and order management systems, no ability to process XML or EDI, and even using a sophisticated portal on a small screen is a challenge (even if they have a fairly modern smartphone).
However, they have WhatsApp, so the state government has adopted a methodology to support the farmers selling their wares through that platform. When they are ready to sell, all they have to do is text “hi” to a given number, enter their Aadhaar (ID) number, the nearest procurement center, and the number of bags they want to sell. The platform will then provide them with three dates and times, they choose one, and they can then show up, and, without waiting, deliver their bags and get promptly paid. Before, they might have had to wait hours (or all day) if they just showed up, and much longer for payment. Moreover, due to the efficiencies they’ve introduced and other related Procurement efficiencies, the government is able to offer farmers tarpaulin sheets to protect field stock at a 50% subsidy price.
Simple works. Never forget it, and you’ll go further than if you blindly adopt over-promised solutions that under-deliver.
Dear Enterprise Software Vendor: Should You Fire Your PR and Marketing?
Note the Sourcing Innovation Editorial Disclaimers and note this is a very opinionated rant! Your mileage will vary! (And not about any firm in particular, as a few non-isolated incidents opened up a whole new line of questioning.)
In response to a post by eCornell (which is/was here), THE REVELATOR wrote this comment (which is/was here) which is repeated here in its entirety in case it gets deleted, since anytime we tried to have a serious conversation around sales, marketing, public relations, and/or Gen-AI with Big X firms and/or (mid-sized) consultancies and analyst firms, they have quickly deleted our comments, and sometimes their entire posts rather than enter into a real conversation on the subject (and now we have developed an implicit distrust any corporate account and keep copies of everything):
NOTE: The following post was inspired by a comment by Paul Rogers
Despite feeling like someone walking the hallowed halls of Cornell University wearing a “Yeah, Harvard University” t-shirt, sometimes you have to say things that need to be said – which is the purpose of sharing this article.
Ask ChatGPT the following two questions:
? What is the role of the Public Relations professional?
? What is the role of the Marketing professional?
Do you see any mention of end client or customer success as a priority? Whose best interests are PR and marketing professionals focused on? What does the answer to these questions tell you?
Corporate communication has always been about putting a positive spin on business and the brand. It reminds me of the 1986 Richard Gere movie Power – if not a great movie, it is certainly interesting and engaging. Denzel Washington’s role as public relations expert Arnold Billings is worth the price of admission alone.
Unfortunately, beyond the company they represent, are PR and marketing people doing more harm than good?
Thoughts?
To which the doctor responded (which is/was here)
Well, SI, which has repeatedly told companies in our space to fire their PR firms going back to 2008: Blogger Relations, firmly believes that PR firms are doing more harm than good because
- you are NOT selling enterprise software to consumers and
- it’s not “image”, it’s “solution”!
As for marketing, corporate marketing can be good if it exists to educate and explain, but when was the last time that happened on a regular basis in our space? Over a decade ago … now it’s all AI-this, orchestrate-that, and whatever the bullcr@p of the day is. It’s all buzz, no honey. All show, no substance. All confusion, no clarity. (It’s bad enough that Trump has brought back the Land of Confusion with his populist politics that have taken by storm the first world over, we don’t need it in our workplace!)
So, right now, I’d say at least 6/7, if not 9/10, marketers are doing more harm than good and should be fired with their PR brethren.
There are over 666 companies in our space, and way too many pandering any type of solution you can think of. While we need at least 3-5 in each industry group – market size – geo region – module focus you can think of for competition, we don’t need 30+. Most are not going to survive, especially when most of these don’t have solid solutions built from years of experience that solve real customer problems (as opposed to just offering some shiny new tech that looks good but doesn’t solve the majority of pain points in real organizations).
This means that companies need to focus less on marketing and selling and more on:
- market research, especially listening to what the real pain points are of the customers they want to sell to (and they need to focus in on a customer group here, you can’t be everything to everyone in our space and any company that thinks it can is the first company you should walk away from)
- solution (not product) development — not shiny new tech, tried-and-true tech that works
- market education, explaining what they do, how they do it, and why it solves real pain points after building a solution that solves the pain points they identified in their research
Which means, especially if money is tight, they should forget the marketers and instead focus on hiring researchers and educators. People are getting tired of the 80%+ tech project failure rates. They’d welcome some real insight and real focus on real solutions. If only the market would wake up and realize this!
Top 10 Ways to be Labelled as a (Procure)Tech Noise / TroubleMaker!
For those of you who want to be a noise maker, trouble maker, Debbie Downer, complainer, etc. etc. etc., the doctor can confidently tell you that these are ten proven ways to accomplish that goal! Enjoy!
10. Point out that Tech Failure Rates have reached an all-time high of 88%! (Bain)
(As it is, in Procurement, We Don’t Get No Respect. We’ll get even less if 9 of every 10 projects fail! They’d fail less if … )
09. State that that RFPs for Tech should be Affordable!
(They are a critical first step in proper vendor selection once your need has been identified, and skipping this step has always proven disastrous. And then, after you select the vendor, the next step is to kick of Project Assurance, so the implementation doesn’t go off the rails.)
08. Go further and suggest that Big X SHOULD NOT be used for analytics and AI!
(The reality is, as we’ve stated again and again, limited tech talent is generally NOT interested in consulting — they want to work with the big powerful mega-corps [Meta, Alphabet, etc.] or join the wild west start-up frontier. Those not good enough get scooped up by the consultancies to try and fill the bench they need to staff the projects they sell. Doesn’t matter how good the outdated playbook is if you’re starting with the B-Team if you’re big, and rich, enough to afford it … or the C-Team if you’re not. Also, as we’ve said before, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use Big X for strategy, internationalization advice, etc. or the roots where they started where they have, and attract, the best people — just that, like every business decision, you have to be smart about where, and how, you engage to get your ROI. In fact, there are a whole slew of areas we generally recommend Big X for, and sometimes ONLY recommend Big X for, and these are covered in When Should You Use Big X?)
07. Dare to suggest it may be the end of an era for an early ProcureTech suite!
(Is The Third Act the Final Act?) Let’s ignore the fact that there has been more consolidation and failure in this space over the last two decades than anyone realizes, and that the seven suites appear to be sailing the seven seas without a sextant [foreshadowing?]. See SI’s classic Vendor Day Reprise and count how many of those companies are still around as-is. These were representative of the cream-of-the-crop when they were covered. The rate of disappearance is actually higher across the board!)
06. Note that Gen-AI is way overhyped.
(Unless you want suicidal people committing suicide in suicidal self-driving cars, for example. See valid uses for Gen-AI. And note that one of the big analyst firms pushing it in its hype cycle also noted that that it’s failure rate is 85%! [Source])
05. Remind people that intake & orchestrate is not new!
(With intake in ProcureTech tracing its beginnings back 24 years and orchestrate tracing it’s way back over 50 years as it’s just the fancy new name for middleware, which was a term coined in the 60s and implemented in the late 60s/early 70s with RPC being one of the earliest examples. See Point 11 for more hard truths.)
04. Rail against 2*2 vendor maps, and logo maps, as vendor selection tools!
(They are NOT Appropriate for Tech Selection. At most, they can be used to identify vendors to shortlist — but you still need to create a proper RFP! Remembering that:)
03. FREE RFPS are NOT free!
(How many times do we have to tell you There Are NO Free RFPs? Too many, since vendors will NOT get the message!)
02. State that there is no demonstrable ROI for attendees and vendors at big (Procure)Tech events.
(We need better events. A great experience is not business ROI!)
01. Mathematically argue that no business is worth more than a 10X multiple at investment time.
(‘Nuff said. Deeper dive in linked article.)
Now, I don’t know about you, but if wanting
- (10) tech project success,
- (09) affordable RFPs for all Procurement departments that need them,
- (08) value for your consulting dollar,
- (07) a true picture of the ProcureTech space and where the best cost/value ratio is for all buying organizations (not just G3000s),
- (06) real AI powered by real HI that delivers real value,
- (05) solutions that do what they should with (true) open APIs,
- (04) real solution guides,
- (03) valuable RFP advice,
- (02) valuable events for all (not just organizers and consultants), and
- (01) fair investments across the board for underfunded ProcureTech companies
means being a troublemaker, then make me the leader of the troublemakers! I’ve had enough of platform failures, enough of marketing soundbites, enough of one-way sales, enough of vendor marketing packaged as analysis and advice, and enough BS. Without procurement, there is no business. And, like Rodney Dangerfield, who unfortunately never got it in his lifetime, we deserve a little respect.
Procurement deserves better!
P.S. If you lead a provider organization that wants to do better, please feel free to reach out!