Are Traditional Analyst and Consulting Models Outdated and/or Unethical?

There is a lot of preamble (summary to date) in this post, and if you have been fully keeping up here and on LinkedIn, click here to skip it.)

Last Wednesday (2024-04-17) the doctor released the Sourcing Innovation Source-to-Pay+ Mega-Map which presented a new and improved mega version of the logo maps (with 666 distinct logos for your viewing pleasure) that are becoming all too common in the space where:

  1. every vendor was verified to be in operating AND offering their solution (as of 2024-04-13)
  2. every vendor is clickable (so no more deciphering runic logos, 4 pt font, or which vendor among 3+ similar vendors is actually being referred to)
  3. every vendor is mapped to the closest standard category/categories (where the core categories have been defined repeatedly on this blog, see, for example, this series)

The reason the doctor created this massive Mega-Map (despite disliking, and sometimes detesting, them), is because it was the only way he could educate you on all the flaws (making even his map useful ONLY if you plan on using it as clickable desktop wallpaper); these flaws include the flaws referenced above (corrected in the SI map), but also include these flaws (and this list is NOT exclusive):

  • these logo maps are nowhere near complete; (many maps to date have only captured 1/10 to 1/7 of the space)
  • the landscape changes DAILY (vendors come and go)
  • the vendors are only comparable at a minimal baseline, which is generally not enough to satisfy any company, IF they are comparable at all
  • the majority of vendors with comparable solutions are still NOT relevant for you

After this explanation, he went into a big rant on how, Like Analyst Firm 2*2s, Random Logo Maps are NOT Appropriate for Tech Selection! The reason for this rant was because these maps are not only being presented by some parties as proof they have what it takes to do your tech selections, but they are being used by Procurement organizations and overworked consultancies as a foundation for vendor identification for Tech Selection. This is scary when you consider all of the flaws outlined above, and the utter lack of knowledge it conveys on how to do identify the right vendors for a tech selection RFP and short-list.

For a high level outline on what is need for a tech selection, we refer you back to the linked article as well as the follow up article on why Firms that Rely on Logo Maps and Analyst 2*2s for Tech Selection are NOT Appropriate for Tech Selection (Either)!

The only point I will emphasize is you have to know the space well, and most clients are lucky if the consultancy has more than half a dozen to a dozen partners (i.e. the same old, same old mega-vendors they recommend day-in and day-out because they see it as too much work or not profitable enough for them to actually identify, research, and/or keep up with smaller, best-of-breed vendors, even though this thinking means that, like many Execs that started in the late 80’s, they are just taking their turn to Walk the Dinosaur and will soon go the Way of the Dodo because, as THE PROPHET has decreed in Prediction No. 9, the day is coming fast when SaaS[+IP] Management Solutions [will] Start to Eat Services Procurement — and this includes tech selection!)

This should be expected as even most analysts don’t know more than a few dozen of the same-old, same-old solutions that they spend the majority of their time on every year (as some firms ONLY cover paying clients and/or ONLY include paying clients in their map) as they need to spend a lot of their time keeping these high paying (usually 6 figure) clients happy as well as taking the CPOs who pay for research subscriptions happy with advisory services.

Furthermore, when you consider the number of analysts left in the space who have been covering the Source-to-Pay space consistently for more than a decade, those are few and far between. Remember that Duncan Jones recently retired from Forrester, all those big names we know and love from Gartner (including the AMR names, as AMR was one of the firms that broke the space open before Gartner acquired them) are gone (from Gartner), Aberdeen was acquired by Harte Hanks, only Chris Sawchuk is left at The Hackett Group, which takes us to Ardent Partners, where we have Andrew Bartolini and Christopher Dwyer (who go back to the Aberdeen days), IDC, where we have Mickey North Rizza (who goes back to AMR and is one of the first to cover S2P), and finally Spend Matters where you have Xavier Olivera who hits the 10 year mark this summer, Jason THE PROPHET Busch, and Pierre Mitchell, one of the co-founders of S2P coverage from back when he was VP of “Supply Management” Research at AMR Research in 1999! (And yes, I know that Magnus Bergfors is at Ardent now, but he’s only at the 9 year mark as an Analyst due to his 2.5 year vendor break.) In terms of solo, you have Pete Loughlin who started Purchasing Insight in Nov 2013, Peter The Public Defender Smith who started Procurement Excellence in 2010, and Jon “The Revelator” Hansen who goes almost as far back as I do as an independent (and further with his industry experience), all the way to 2007, which is one year after the doctor started Sourcing Innovation in 2006. And that’s about it.

As a result, the analysts who have seen a considerable amount of vendors are few and far between. the doctor has already stated that the roughly 500 vendors he has reviewed as an analyst over the past 17 years (with over 350 covered publicly on Sourcing Innovation and Spend Matters) probably puts him in the top 3 analysts globally by vendor count, but as the Mega-Map has just proved, that would still only be half of the vendors in the space, if all of those vendors were still around today! (Some went out of business and quite a number were acquired; in the latter case, some of their solutions are still around with a new look and a new name, and others were sunsetted.)

Along with the Mega Map, these articles have generated quite a lot of commentary on LinkedIn, for example:

But the chatter didn’t stop there. It just began. Joël Collin-Demers (Pure Procurement, who better have 512 vendors competing for the Procurement Cup next year) has doubled down on the need for digitization (although the doctor disagrees on the industries we need to start in) and Procurement Process Orchestration (which, alone, won’t save you), a cry also echoed by Jon “The Revelator” Hansen where he asked What is “Supply Chain Orchestration.

Preamble ends here.

However, it seems the doctor hit a few nerves with these posts (his favourite thing to do, because if you stop feeling, well, at best you’re paralyzed and, at worst, you’re dead) and Jon “The Revelator” led the charge (after waking from his chocolate-induced coma where he was consumed with solving the Chocolate Mystery)!

Basically, after catching up on the Mega-Map and the subsequent rants, he decided that we need to replace solution provider maps since many don’t even track the companies that have been serving the market for 20 or 30 years with a loyal client base in addition to all the new entrants not big enough (to pay them enough) to get coverage. He proposed we need a Draft Kings in our Space where each analyst picks, say, 10 providers to regularly cover (that don’t overlap those covered by other providers) (i.e. force each analyst [firm] to jockey for position to report on the same-old, same-old on the same top 10; of course, this would require vendors to play along, and analyst firms willing to give up that sizeable contribution they get from those big vendors, so it would only work if the vendor gave the ONE firm they selected an amount equal to all the money they used to split across firms to make up for all the vendors the firm lost). So while it may not be likely this will happen, it did lead to a great discussion on what an analysts (firms) responsibilities are and where the market might go. (Check the Comments in the linked post.)

But Jon “The Revelator” still couldn’t sleep. He was visited by the ghosts of accountability past, present, and future and had to ask should analyst performance be assessed by the successful implementations of the providers they list in their (Dynamic) Analyst Solution Map, where he assumed that, based on the prior discussions, analysts, and firms, should at least transition to a dynamic analyst solution map (because, among other things, it could revolutionize how we understand and engage with the (solution) landscape, which he feels is necessary based upon the high failure rates we still encounter in software/SaaS implementations [including AI, where 85% of projects are failing*]) and asked if analyst performance should be assessed by the successful implementations of the ten providers they list. (It’s thought provoking, and while the doctor agrees that they should be accountable for the accuracy and completeness of the coverage, since it is typically a consultancy or implementation partner doing the implementation, and not the vendor or the analyst firm, you can’t hold an analyst or their firm responsible for what is not under their control.)

But it also kicked off a great discussion about transparency, kicked off by yours truly and Dr. Thierry Fausten who agree that an analyst/consultant:

  • should NOT recommend a solution they haven’t seen LIVE
  • should NOT recommend a provider they haven’t engaged with in (roughly) the last year (or so, two years max)
  • have deeper requirements for detailed ranking vs. just market positioning
  • etc.

… and this led into a detailed discussion between us and James Mead about analyst requirements, and ethics, and disclosures in particular.

Some of us believe that an analyst:

  • must publicly disclose any direct investments in the companies we cover (or significant indirect, e.g. > 5%, if we have self-managed 401Ks/SSIPs/RRSPs/etc.)
  • must be willing and able to disclose any providers we are currently engaged with if asked (as this can’t necessarily be public if the project requires an NDA)
  • must publicly disclose any vendors who give us referral fees or commissions on sales for referrals, as that could definitely bias us

As the doctor has already stated,

  • he has no direct or significant investments in any companies in S2P+ as his goal was to be unbiased (at least from a financial perspective) since day one
  • he will always disclose potential competitors he is currently engaged with if asked by a (serious) potential client
  • he does not accept referral fees or commissions on sales from any vendors, and will not engage with a vendor who insists that is how they pay consultants/analysts

And he was glad to see that at least a few independent analysts are publicly speaking up and indicating they have the same beliefs. (Some do accept referral fees, but they publicly disclose on their website who their partners are that pay them such fees.)

However, there really hasn’t been a peep yet from any analysts at the big firms. Which leads the doctor to ask if the current analyst / consulting models are outdated, and maybe even unethical, especially since it is a rather well known fact by some that:

  • one of the big analyst firms ONLY included paying clients in their 2x2s
  • another of the big analyst firms rewrote their inclusion criteria on every iteration of their 2x2s so that the company size/revenue/geography/etc. requirements were the absolute minimum to include all of their paying clients [that they wanted included] while eliminating as many of their non paying clients as possible
  • he’s been told by dozens of the smaller vendors he has been covering over the past year that two of the bigger analyst/consulting firms, in addition to the firm that has historically only included paying clients, will NOT cover them unless they pay for a write-up and research bundle that is in the 50,000 to 70,000 range!

All of this bothers him greatly. This is why:

  • when he (co-)designed the Spend Matters Solution Maps back in the day, he did so on the condition that they were not pay-to-play, and any vendor who was willing to meet the requirements could be included (namely they must:
    • complete the questionnaire in sufficient detail
    • give us the live demo
    • agree to be included in the publication regardless of how they score relative to other vendors [as it was a huge commitment of analyst time])
  • he does not charge vendors for coverage on SI or the public to read the coverage; now, it’s true that these vendors may get more coverage from the firms charging them 50,000 to 70,000, but if the analyst is not a technologist by training and trade, the doctor doubts their coverage would be any better
    (and yes, this does limit how many vendors the doctor can cover on SI as SI thus generates zero revenue, which is why, unless he decides the vendor has developed something substantially new, or the amount of coverage they need is too much for one article, he has a minimum of two years between successive coverage)

But he wants to know what you think about this, and what you think analyst (firm) and consultant responsibility should be. For example, maybe it’s okay that a firm only covers the vendors who pay them (especially if the firm switched to a Draft Kings model), but shouldn’t the firm at least publicly disclose that in a very easy to find manner, as well as minimum fee scales required for that coverage (and not just footnote it somewhere in the back page of a report you can’t even read unless you spend somewhere between 5,000 and 25,000 or find a vendor who sponsored the report who will give you a copy in exchange for your personal information and a forever subscription to their spam, err, mailing list)?

Anyway, the doctor can’t wait for the next article from Jon “The Revelator” Hansen and the discussion that it will hopefully kick-off. It will be interesting to see if we get anyone from the big analyst or consulting firms commenting or if they will (continue to) pretend that we just don’t exist …

* Ready to jump off that cliff-bound out-of-control bandwagon with no steering and no brakes yet?

Firms that Rely on Logo Maps and Analyst 2*2s for Tech Selection are NOT Appropriate for Tech Selection!

In our last article, where we described in detail the many, many reasons why logo maps (including the Sourcing Innovation Mega Map on Source to Pay+ with 666 Unique Clickable Vendor Logos which were verified to be valid as of 2024 April 13), we not only reiterated how these maps are mostly useless but explained that your mileage will vary widely between a map created by an analyst who’s likely seen 1/3 to 1/2 of the vendors in depth and a(n) (former) implementation consultant or (want-to-be) influencer from a CPO background who has no in-depth technology education or experience (beyond the systems he used).

Those who read between the lines would have seen this post coming — not only are they not appropriate for tech selection, any firm that relies solely on them or analyst firm 2*2s (which are great if you are searching for some holy smoke to keep the beast of procurement technology at bay) is also inappropriate for tech selection projects.

Your results with such firms will be about the same as the bigger firms with “consulting partner” status with all the (same) big players, as they will ultimately just recommend the same ten firms for your Tech RFP over and over again, whether or not they are the right firms (and solutions) to meet your needs.

In order to effectively select a set of potential solutions for a client, you need to, at the very least:

  • understand the processes the client needs to support and the gaps they have
  • understand the solution types needed to support the processes, and the client’s gaps in particular
  • understand the client’s current technology landscape and Technology IQ, including what is replaceable and what is not (since, gosh darn it, some clients are going to hold onto that ERP they overpaid for until you dodge their six-gun pistols and pry the contract from their cold, dead hands)
  • understand the client’s unique situation based on vertical/industry, market size, and geography/culture
  • understand what global vendors support the processes, fill the gaps, synch with the tech stack, and can, possibly through third party integrations/partners, address the client’s unique requirements

This is a tall order. So tall in fact that, despite the growing demand for technology transformation and digitization across the Procurement landscape, outside of a few niche vendors that primarily focus on specific industries and specific solution types, the vast majority of procurement transformation shops aren’t able to fulfill it. Most will

  • have the processes down pat, they are consultants after all!
  • have a decent understanding of the common/core solution types, as they smart ones will actually read the expository articles written by the analysts (that they have access to anyway*)

Some, who employ technology and industry-specific professionals, will be able to build a decent understanding of

  • the client’s technology landscape and technology quotient
  • the unique requirements to look for/enable based on vertical/industry, organizational size, and geography

But few, if any will be able to:

  • identify even a handful of relevant global vendors that take into account the first four requirements

This is because, as pointed out in our last few articles:

  • the space is much bigger than they think, with
    • more types of product offerings,
    • considerably more vendors then they think exist, and
    • considerably more than they can process
  • they don’t have the deep technical background or technical understanding to differentiate between two vendors that speak the same and present applications that look the same in a 60 minute demo, but differ greatly in underlying power, extensibility, integration capability, etc. where you need a deep technical background and/or competitor understanding to tease it out (as well as a deep understanding of Procurement and the competitive [solution] market place)
  • they don’t have a process to do a proper technical assessment, diligence, or tech analysis …
  • and they certainly don’t know how to do a deep assessment by module/area to truly differentiate two solutions to qualify them as suitable for selection if they submit the best RFP

As a result, many consultancies will just do their in-depth process analysis, write up functional requirements based on that, and toss it over the wall to the solution providers to figure out, selecting from their partners if they feel there is enough overlap, then from the upper right in the analyst maps they paid for, and, finally, from the logo maps from their most trusted source. And, as we’ve explained, this doesn’t cut it and is why many sourcing / procurement software selection projects fail to live up to client expectations. Because, and we can’t say this enough, the most you can use logo maps / analyst 2*2s for is vendor discovery. Not validation for your projects!

Now, while the doctor has yet to receive an answer to his transformation process inquiries from any consultancy/service provider that fully satisfies him (he is demanding, after all), he is happy to say that, recently, a few# providers have acknowledged that transformation is going to require getting a lot more intelligent in tech and updating their processes and methodologies to recognize that, while it’s still The Wild West, it won’t be tamed by hope and grit alone — you’ll need the right tools to conquer it (and, FYI, those tools aren’t Gen-AI, they are good old-fashioned predictable, dependable steam- and gunpowder-powered tech solutions in the hands of us old and busted masters; the new hotness has nothing on us).

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* this is your regular reminder that Sourcing Innovation has never had a paywall and never will for baseline vendor coverage or expository posts; should SI choose to offer books, in-depth [comparative/market] intelligence, or similar IP services, for example, it may in the future sell this non-blog content, but every blog post will remain paywall free — almost 6,000 and counting …

# and we mean few, he can currently count them on his fingers on one hand, thumb not required

Digitalization alone is NOT a cure all to our problems!

A recent post on LinkedIn said digitalization is an emergency because:

  • Health workers are feeling squeezed
  • People can’t find the housing they need
  • Farmers can’t find enough hours int he day
  • Manufacturing firms can’t find the workers they need

And while digitalization is an emergency for some businesses, DIGITALIZATION WON’T SOLVE ANY OF THESE PROBLEMS, because lack of is not the core issue. Since the poster is living in Montreal and the doctor is living in Halifax, we’ll focus on the source of the problem from a Canadian perspective, but the reality is that the majority of countries with these issues has the same source problems:

1) Today, 20% of Canadians don’t have a family doctor, compared to 2001 when it was only 13%. This is because, from 2001 to 2021 we saw a 23% population increase. In the same time, we saw a 12% decrease in health workers. (And things have only gotten worse since COVID, but StatsCan is always a couple of years behind. The Nurses association says we are short 60,000 nurses alone!)

2) The national vacancy rate is 1.5%! Year-over-year rent increases are 8%! One bedrooms in downtown Halifax are going for 2K a month! Pre COVID, they were 1K. Pricing is out of control across all major Canadian cities.

3) The days are the same length they’ve always been. What farmers can’t find is enough seasonal workers, despite the unemployment rate, because they can’t afford to pay seasonal workers a living wage. (And that’s why our migrant farm workers in the bigger provinces are essentially facing modern slavery conditions, as per a UN report.)

4) Manufacturers can’t find the workers they need because of a lack of SKILLED workers. Everything is going tech, but yet our STEM graduate rates in Canada hover around 22%! That’s 1 in 5. But if you don’t have decent math, computer, and electronic equipment skills, you don’t have the skills a manufacturer needs.

Thus, it doesn’t matter how much digitization you apply or how good the systems are, we still have the fundamental problems that:

1) it takes a doctor a certain amount of time to properly diagnose a patient, a surgeon a certain amount of time to do a surgery, a nurse time to put in the IV, check the vitals, talk to the patient to do a cognitive assessment, etc. THOSE TIMES CAN NOT BE SHORTENED.

2) We need to BUILD more housing. We need to at least DOUBLE the vacancy rate so that the housing is WHERE it is needed in a market that is COMPETITIVE and REMAINS AFFORDABLE.

3) We need to HALT INFLATION, reduce farm taxes, bring back critical subsidies (and not invent new “grocery taxes” to halt greed mongering, the CEOs will just hike prices for consumers in the end), and make farm work a living wage again.

4) We need to promote and train for STEM.

Only then will digitization help because all it can do is

1) minimize the downtime between seeing patients

2) help people find those affordable units faster and submit applications faster and do the background checks faster

3) help farmers minimize their planning and “back office” operational time

4) help manufacturers get the most from the skilled employees they hire (but there IS a limit on productivity increases)

This is because, as the doctor has said time and time again, all computers are good for is thunking, not thinking, and all Gen-AI does is exacerbate problems because you don’t know if the sh!t it is making up (that’s what generative means — make stuff up) is correct or not! As a result, they can be great at automating tactical data processing and bring the following benefits:

1) centralized country-universal health records, integrated systems, and remote home/self care support — if a nurse or doctor can instantly get all the data on your history they need, they can review it all before seeing you, assess with knowledge, and get to a likely correct diagnosis, and treatment faster; also, if they never have to rekey existing data and just add to the record, it’s less time between patients

2) better three-way support for landlords to find tenants and comply with legislation, tenants to find properties that meet their needs and keep landlords honest (with reviews and instant reports to), regulators who can ensure everyone is using the system properly and fairly

3) easy planning, monitoring, management, and farm-tech selection best suited to the needs of the farm workers based on farm size, location, produce/livestock, and workforce

4) better procurement, production planning, (up)skill(ing) maintenance, design, testing, etc. — maximize every hour on engineering stuff, not back-office paper pushing

But none of this solves the core problems we have or helps if the workers aren’t there to begin with!

Like Analyst Firm 2*2s, Random Logo Maps are NOT Appropriate for Tech Selection!

In our last article, we explained why the doctor created the The Sourcing Innovation Source-to-Pay+ Mega Map, even though he despises logo maps. It was literally the only way he could expose how every one of logo maps released to date was completely useless (and some to the point that they were harmful, but that’s another rant for a later time).

In a nutshell, all of these maps had the following problems, which were correctable (and corrected in the Sourcing Innovation Mega-Map):

  • vendors / solutions no longer existed as of release date
  • categories were meaningless and not actual solution modules
  • vendor logos were not clickable or even footnoted (so you had no clue what that ruin actually represented — a new age vendor or a demonic symbol from a long lost hieroglyphic or symbolic language)

As well as the following problems, which still exist in the Sourcing Innovation Mega-Map (SIMM) because some of them are just not (fully) addressable:

  • nowhere near complete (the further you get away from the Source-to-Pay core, the less complete the SIMM likely is
  • no indication that the landscape changes DAILY (vendors come, get acquired/merge, go out of business, add new capabilities and modules, drop existing modules, etc.)
  • the vendors aren’t always comparable even at a functionality baseline
  • not all vendors with a comparable solution are relevant to the same (type of) company

We ended our last article noting that the right vendor for you was dependent not just on the module(s) you needed to address the process gaps the transformation consultants defined, but the industry/vertical you are in, the size of your organization, the cross-organization user base you need to support, and their technical intelligence (TQ).

The logo maps don’t capture that. (But, to be fair, the vast majority of the analyst market maps don’t either.)

But more importantly, they don’t always (accurately) capture what solution(s) a vendor accurately captures. The reason for this is that, to be completely accurate, the creator would have to be fully aware of, and have seen, the current full end-to-end solution as of the day the map was released and then accurately map the providers’ solutions to each of their logo map categories.

the doctor has likely reviewed more Source-to-Pay solutions over the past 19 years as an analyst than almost any other analyst except for Mickey North Rizza (15 years at AMR / Gartner / IDC), Duncan Jones (who was Forrester Vice President and Principal S2P analyst for 16 years straight), and Pierre Mitchell (25 years at AMR / Hackett / Spend Matters). (Just about every other technology analyst still active in our space has only been a full time market analyst for a decade or less.) Even though he has reviewed, in depth, over 500 hundred solutions (and written about 350+ in detail on Sourcing Innovation and Spend Matters [but good luck finding at least 1/3 of the Spend Matters coverage since, as previously mentioned, the site refresh dropped co-authors on many articles, many of his articles were co-authored, and he was always second billing], he hasn’t even seen half the solutions on the map in depth (but still believes the ratio of in-depth vendor knowledge that went into this map is still greater than every other logo map produced). As a result, his classifications, like any other analyst, are based on, in order:

  • in depth demos, diligence or evaluation projects
  • detailed vendor communications (beyond just what’s on the website)
  • website / third party summaries (looking at the functionality where possible, not just the language)

Which means that, if the website/materials were out of date when reviewed (and it’s been a few years since the last review), the classification could now be highly inaccurate. The eProcurement vendor could have shifted mostly to I2P/AP. The supplier management vendor found a niche in risk management or category sourcing and dropped most SXM capabilities. The contract management solution, interchangeable with forty others, didn’t get traction and was dropped. And so on.

So if your mileage varies in this map, put together by someone who has consistently been at least a part time (if not full time) analyst since Sourcing Innovation was started in 2006, imagine how much it will vary in a map put together by a former consultant, who might have only seen the same ten solutions he was always implementing in depth, or a former product manager who doesn’t have a solid technical background and can’t accurately judge the true capabilities and potential of the solution he’s looking at. (the doctor has an earned PhD in computer science and has been a software architect / research scientist / CTO, compared to the average analyst who, in the early days, came from an operations / logistics / management background if you were lucky and a journalism,
English, or history background [because they could actually write] if you weren’t.)

In other words, no matter how cool these (logo) maps look, at best they will be mostly useless (if they give you clickable logos so you can begin your own research effort), or completely useless otherwise.

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It’s a Wild Wild West, and (Gen-) AI won’t tame it!

In this linked post, Jon the Revelator shares his thoughts about “supply chain orchestration”, which is, in his words, the latest incarnation of “agent-based modelling within a dynamic Metaprise” (probably because no one understood what a Metaprise was, no one in their right mind would want to live in a Metaverse, and orchestration just sounds cool). After all, the technical definition of “a synchronized [versus sequential] architecture (private hub) that simultaneously links or incorporates the unique operating attributes of all transactional stakeholders on a real-world, real-time basis” is pretty close to what orchestration does, which today is supposed to link all the systems the organization uses to capture the unique operating attributes of the different transactional stakeholders.

Jon also notes that stakeholder input is required to lay a solid foundation, and that orchestration cannot forget the people aspect, as people are responsible for Procurement. This is where most systems fail today. They don’t focus on usability, stakeholder connectivity, or end user enablement. The process is important, as is automation capability, but it’s not about AI (and definitely not Gen-AI which is just Artificial Idiocy), but Augmented Intelligence where the system automates the tactical and not only allows the user to focus on the strategic, but provides enhanced intelligence to enable strategic analysis. Machines are great at the repeated error-free calculations required for thunking, but they are definitely not great at strategic thinking.

As a result, while software can be a tool to tame the wild west of Procurement, it will only be if it is the right software tool in the hands of an old Pro who knows when to grab the reins and when to grab the Colt 1860. And only an old pro will understand what to look for in a reliable tool, because, unlike the new generations, we don’t fall for “the new hotness”. (Check the comments.)