Category Archives: rants

… And Keep Your Big Platforms. Big Brains Will Still Win in the End!

Five years ago, about the time when the big data hype first reached insane hype levels, SI published a post that it was sick of all the big data hype and how it is not the answer to all our problems because, not only is this a load of baloney, the reality is that there’s no such thing as big data in business. As we said then, relative to our ability to process it, data has always been big. And, in business, big has always been meaningless. Furthermore, in business, we’ve always been able to process as much data as we need to in reasonable amounts of time if* we make good algorithm and technology decisions

Plus, the fact that all of the hype around big data is often centered around the fact that we will be able to replace science with math and processes with AI programs is even more ridiculous. There is no such thing as artificial intelligence. And even though we’ve finally taken automated reasoning to the point that we have assisted intelligence, there’s a big difference between recommendations from a leading expert system (which not only can’t know when it is wrong but how much it can be wrong the few times it is wrong) and an average, experienced, professional in the domain (who can know how likely they are right, and if they are not likely to be right, how far off they are likely to be).

But even worse than the big data hype is the big platform hype … how mega platforms backed with cognitive abilities can do it all! They can do a lot, but they can’t do it all. And any delusions we might have that they can are only going to get us into trouble. Because as soon as we start trusting them blindly, we’re going to turn two blind eyes and that’s when the 2% failure rate is going to kick in, and materialize in the absolute worst way possible.

In Procurement, it’s going to miss the fact that a new organizational vendor is a very high risk and make a 2 year sole-source award for a small, but critical, custom made component in your (engine/control system) assembly when, in fact, it should be excluding the vendor which just had its credit score downgraded from a B+ to a D-. It’s not going to predict that in all probability, the vendor is not going to be able to secure enough loans to stay afloat (until it fulfills your orders and other customer orders and grows its business after losing a major contract that accounted for one third of its production) and will shut down and stop delivering product in 3 months when no one’s watching. Your production line will go down for 2 weeks while you find a backup supplier to quickly bring a production line up, make a minimal order, and air-freight it to you. If it’s a big automotive production line that goes down for 2 weeks, that’s easily 10M down the drain, and that 1M you saved is wiped out ten times over in a second.

But that’s not the worst thing that can happen from us turning two blind eyes. In this situation, the company temporarily loses some money, and as long as it has enough inventory to keep most of its customers happy, and it can keep its failure quiet, no one notices. Now, if its a medical diagnostics vendor and a (visually-based) diagnostic expert system (designed to help with the identification of all skin conditions) used by a remote doctor fails and mistakes melonoma for a relatively benign lesion, it’s a whole different story. When you consider that skin cancer is one of the five fastest spreading cancers, by the time the patient goes back in and insists something wrong, it could be too late — the spreading could be too far and the patient will be doomed (since melonoma, while only 1% of skin cancer, is not only one of the fastest spreading skins cancers but also has the highest fatality rate and causes the majority of skin cancer deaths each year).

Big Platforms give Big Confidence, but it’s false confidence. I’ll take a real human expert any day. Yes, she’ll make a mistake sometimes. But she also knows when she’s not sure and you should get a second opinion. That’s not always something a system can tell you. It’s above a threshold, below a threshold, or on the line (and no decision is made or classification is given). But that’s not always the right way to look at a situation.

* And, FYI, hiring college drop-outs whose college experience consists of cutting and pasting HTML and javascript code and fiddling with it until it works is not a good technology decision. There’s a big difference between being able to code a web-page and develop a highly scalable, reliable, and efficient enterprise computing system. BIG DIFFERENCE!

Tomorrow is March for Science Day. That IS Important For Everyone.

Why? Besides the obvious that all modern technology is the result of science, you won’t get your next-generation cognitive sourcing platform without more advancement in, guess what, data science.

And, right now, in the US, every year, in addition to having to deal with the introduction, and passing, of more anti-science policies, you also have to deal with the fact that funding for science (education) is diminishing as well and it’s the cornerstone of all progress. What do you think inspires the continual advancement of advanced mathematics and statistics? Scientific need. And where do you think the roots of most of your analytical algorithms come from? Science.

So even though you spend your days slicing data and running reports in the back-office to meet the business goals of savings, reduced inventory turn-around time, reduced, risk, etc. — you’re still using the results of scientific research and progress. Don’t forget that. Or someday Kyle may not be able to flick the internet back on again when it starts to fail. (The sad reality is that because of a lack of science education and knowledge, some people actually believe this is how you fix the internet.)

For more information, see March for Science

We’re In the Midst of Conference Season … What Have We Learned So Far?

There are two conference seasons in enterprise software, Spring and Fall, and enterprise sourcing and procurement falls into this squarely.

Every year, it seems to get crazier and crazier, but what have we learned?

The Bigger You Want to Appear, the Bigger Your Conference Needs to Be

Back in the day, if you were big, you satisfied yourself with a low-key user workshop … so low-key that it might not have even made your website. These days, you do big 3-day affairs, splashed across the relevant parts of the web, and keynote it with the biggest names you can get, whether or not they have anything to do with Sourcing.

The Bigger You Want to Appear, the More Events You Appear At

It used to be that you went to an event or two and splashed your banner, but now you go to every major event — ISM, Procurement Leaders, ProcureCon, SIG, etc — and all their instantiations. You’re on a constant roadshow, because the gospel needs to be spread far and wide.

The More Attention You Want, The More You Focus on Indefinites

Instead of focussing on functions, or process improvements, or knowledge, there is a big focus on value, customer success, or organizational recognition.

In other words, many of the big vendors, who have been pumped up by big PE coffers or IPOs, have apparently used their reserves to lure away the big enterprise CMOs under the assumption that the broader enterprise success strategies will work in Sourcing and Procurement. Their tactics are certainly getting them noticed, but these people are used to selling to IT, Operations, Marketing, Accounting, etc. — everyone but Procurement.

They haven’t yet figured out that Procurement is different.

First of all, Procurement are tough negotiators — they’re not going to pay a penny more than they think the software, and the services (be it implementation, process improvement, or other best practice education) that comes is worth. So unnecessarily boosting overhead by spending money on trade shows that don’t deliver value (because they don’t enable any learning opportunity) or on keynotes that don’t advance the knowledge of the attendees (because they don’t know anything about Procurement) or on drastically overpriced venues doesn’t help their case.

Secondly, Procurement want more than one-way conversations. They want interactions. They want input into the next release and the overall roadmap. And they want to learn as they do it. But these days, many user conferences have done away with the user feedback sessions, even though it’s the perfect place to do it.

It wasn’t long ago the marketers in this space got that. Let’s hope they reclaim their top spots after the new mega cos realize that the enterprise marketers they brought in are missing these fundamentals. Because for our space to advance, everyone has to be smart on all sides.

How Many Billions Are Lost Each Year to Dumb Sourcing?

Today I saw an article entitled E-Sourcing is Dead, Long Live Intelligent Sourcing Systems and all I could say is what parallel world did this article materialize from? Given that we’ve had Strategic Sourcing Decision Optimization with multi-line item support, freight brackets, and carrier support for 17 years, advanced analytics algorithms with smart trend projection and outlier analysis for just as long, and easy access to pretty much all market and public sector buy data in e-friendly countries for over a decade, this should be the case. But it’s not.

We’re not even in a position to say half of mid-size or larger organizations even have anything resembling a modern e-Sourcing solution, and only a small fraction of those have embedded optimization capability, and only a small fraction of their customers actually use it. In reality, e-Sourcing is barely alive and just coming into it’s own. After all, the oompa-loompa empire is only valued at about Two point Five Billion … and in software terms, that’s pretty puny when you consider the market valuations of companies like SAP (approx 107B) and Oracle (approx 220B) … either of these companies could easily buy out the oompa-loompas and put them back in the chocolate factory on a whim! (Which would be a shame since they make great coders.)

But regular readers will know this to be the case, as it’s been SI’s core lament for a decade now — and the market still doesn’t look poised to change. Even though, as SI has stated over and over (and over) again, the average year-over-year savings from the proper application of optimization backed sourcing is 10% across the board. That means if you’re sourcing 105M, that’s 10.5M in savings that could be yours, as soon as you can attack all 100M of spend. If it takes an average of 3 years to get through all spend, that’s 3.5M a year for easy taking. But you’re probably sourcing closer to 1.05 Billion, which means you’re overspending by an average of 105 million, or 35 Million each year. That’s a lot of money, but obviously not enough to take notice.

So obviously we need bigger numbers. How much money is lost in the economy overall each year due to the lack of application of advanced, optimization backed, sourcing? While it’s pretty hard to get a firm grasp on OPEX in the US, and how much of that is addressable by optimization-backed sourcing (as payroll can’t be optimized, only outsourced services, and taxes are taxes), the US Census keeps good data on CAPEX, and in 2015, CAPEX was 1.65 Trillion! Ten Percent of that is 165 Billion. If, and this is an overly aggressive estimate, 10% of that was optimized, that still leaves 149 Billion on the table in the US alone. The US is about one forth of the global market, and assuming CAPEX / OPEX ratios are about equal, this says, globally, that’s about 600 Billion from CAPEX alone left on the table each year because companies aren’t optimizing spend. SIX HUNDRED BILLION. And that’s a lower, lower bound estimate. Is that number big enough for you???

Don’t Get Sucked in By Impressive Words!

It’s conference season, and that means marketing overload for many vendors. And there’s a few words the doctor is hearing a bit too much and he’s NOT impressed! So what are these words?

Digitization

Digital. Digital Procurement. Digitized. Digitized Procurement. Digitization. Ugh. They’ve been using variations of the same word for almost 20 years — and despite claims to the contrary, the meaning hasn’t really changed. You’re analog, or you’re digital. There’s no degrees to digital.

Look at the dictionary definition for crying out loud! Of, relating to, or using data in the form of numerical digits. What’s new, or even enticing, about this? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!

Internet of Things

The internet has ALWAYS been an internet of things. Computers are not people. They are computers. The only difference today is that we are sticking computers in more things to collect and transmit sensor data automatically rather than reading it, and entering it into the computer. It’s not the big whoop most companies are making it out to be as most companies haven’t developed much that uses that near real-time in a truly useful way.

Cognitive

It’s not artificially intelligent. It’s cognitive. And the bull crap has reached a whole new level. Let’s look at the definition.

Of or relating to the mental process of perception, memory, judgment, and reasoning.

Yes computers can perceive through sensors, store data in memory, use algorithms to assign, or judge, and use very advanced automated algorithms to reason, but we’re overlooking one key word here. Mental. Computers don’t have a mind, and they are not intelligent. The implication here is that which is cognitive is intelligent, and they are not intelligent.

We haven’t even reached true AI yet in any field and we are supposed to believe that a little Sourcing or Procurement vendor has reached the next, cognitive level of AI development? While a best in class vendor may have a few algorithms that are almost cognitive for a few, select, situations, considering the billions going into AI research and the limited progress most specialist vendors are making, you know we’re not ready to be throwing this term around.

And, an honorable mention (because, while not common in our space yet, it’s coming):

Postmodern

the doctor‘s been seeing this word a lot on social media in marketing and commentary, and, unfortunately, it seems like it’s starting to creep into our space. For those of us that actually went to a real University and have a sound (classical) education, we know that Postmodernism is a rather broad intellectual movement across the arts and fields with applied arts (like architecture and archaeology) based on a philosophy that takes us from the literary-influenced philosophy of modernism to a post-modern way of thinking that developed in the middle of the last century and reached wide acceptance in the 1980s, when it was a Land of Confusion.

This was the time of the MRPs (and not the ERPs). Do we really want to be associating our new and innovative solutions with that era?

So please, please, please don’t get sucked in by the the impressive words. Instead look for impressive, time-saving, value-adding functions (and forget the feature lists). (But that’s another rant.)