“Disruption is intensifying new technologies, artificial intelligence, and smaller innovative startups are eating into the market share, not to forget the customers’ constantly changing needs and regulatory environmental shifts. At the same time, all that is happening with technology solutions is creating rigidity rather than agility. Scaling these tech solutions to meet end-user needs quickly is challenging, and integrations are getting even more time-consuming and complex. Technology vendor lock-ins reduce the flexibility to embrace newer solutions with better technology, leading to a slower deployment cycle and higher security risk. It’s just not the best ecosystem of growth and agility.” – Procurement Insights Research on Composable Procurement
I recently read about a very thought-provoking topic – the “Tech-Savvy Collaboration Cure.”
“Collaboration” is a funny word that is ubiquitous in thought but elusive in actual practice. Collaboration – true collaboration is not a technology play. You don’t really come together through technology; you come together and collaborate based on a shared understanding of the industry in which you are working.
Michael Lamoureux shared the following excerpt from my August 19th post, “Why it’s time for service provider leadership to step out from behind their organizations’ logos,” on LinkedIn, which speaks directly to the point about the importance of collaboration.
“Leading with technology is a RECIPE for disaster – and I say this as a tech guy! In short, don’t assess the technology; assess the people’s knowledge of your industry behind the tech.”
In short, what has always made technology work is not the technology itself but the people – practitioners and providers, behind it and their understanding of the unique attributes or requirements of the industries they are in.
This last point will become increasingly important in the emerging “composable procurement” age.
What Is Composable Procurement?
“The level of adaptability in a procurement infrastructure plays a critical role in how well an organization can handle its present, future, and unique needs. This is where the concept of “composability” gains importance.” – Composable Procurement: Adapt Faster, Build Quickly, Drive Value (White Paper 2023)
Over the years, I have referred to the time in the late 1990s and how a representative from one of the big ERP companies told me they don’t get out of bed in the morning for anything less than $1 million.
Their answer was to my request about building a data sharing “bridge” between the ERP back end and a front-end eProcurement application. It was a bridge too far.
Back then, procurement technology was strictly a backroom play in which IT and Finance were the overseers and gatekeepers. Compounding the problem was that procurement’s functional requirements were a low priority on the upgrade list. The lack of urgency may be why we still use spreadsheets, but that is a discussion for another day.
Interestingly, even if procurement needs were at the top of the list, the costs, as mentioned above, to upgrade functionality and the complexity and time to do it were significant obstacles.
The reason for the expense and complexity – upgrades meant significant changes to the base solution source code. As someone familiar with old dBase II coding, adding a new line of code can cause a bug in another line of code that was previously working.
Fast forward to today, and this corruption or “pollution” of the source code of the base solution is no longer a problem with composable procurement Apps. That’s right; there are now Apps for procurement functionality that can be quickly and easily introduced and integrated into your current platform on a timely, cost-effective basis.
A Collaboration Caveat
Without going into too much detail on these exciting, new Apps – something I will do in an upcoming post, I will reiterate what I said earlier. While App tech is a notable breakthrough, the real differentiator between one service provider and another is their procurement industry expertise.
It is not about how well they understand their technology but how well they understand the unique attributes and challenges procurement faces – ideally on a first-hand basis.
This fundamental procurement-world knowledge is critical for success because composable procurement is about optimizing supply chain adaptability and resilience. As a result, responding to real-world stakeholder requirements in real time requires business knowledge to build and leverage technology knowledge. Without the former, collaboration becomes a one-way conversation between a provider and practitioner regarding how to use technology without knowing it’s the right technology for you.
The message is to put as much thought into your provider selection as you do in introducing a composable App.
In my next post, I will talk about the emergence of the extended composable App or AppXtend.
Procurement Insights
Composable Procurement: How To Collaborate Effectively in the New Disruptive Innovation Era
Posted on October 11, 2023
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“Disruption is intensifying new technologies, artificial intelligence, and smaller innovative startups are eating into the market share, not to forget the customers’ constantly changing needs and regulatory environmental shifts. At the same time, all that is happening with technology solutions is creating rigidity rather than agility. Scaling these tech solutions to meet end-user needs quickly is challenging, and integrations are getting even more time-consuming and complex. Technology vendor lock-ins reduce the flexibility to embrace newer solutions with better technology, leading to a slower deployment cycle and higher security risk. It’s just not the best ecosystem of growth and agility.” – Procurement Insights Research on Composable Procurement
I recently read about a very thought-provoking topic – the “Tech-Savvy Collaboration Cure.”
“Collaboration” is a funny word that is ubiquitous in thought but elusive in actual practice. Collaboration – true collaboration is not a technology play. You don’t really come together through technology; you come together and collaborate based on a shared understanding of the industry in which you are working.
Michael Lamoureux shared the following excerpt from my August 19th post, “Why it’s time for service provider leadership to step out from behind their organizations’ logos,” on LinkedIn, which speaks directly to the point about the importance of collaboration.
“Leading with technology is a RECIPE for disaster – and I say this as a tech guy! In short, don’t assess the technology; assess the people’s knowledge of your industry behind the tech.”
In short, what has always made technology work is not the technology itself but the people – practitioners and providers, behind it and their understanding of the unique attributes or requirements of the industries they are in.
This last point will become increasingly important in the emerging “composable procurement” age.
What Is Composable Procurement?
“The level of adaptability in a procurement infrastructure plays a critical role in how well an organization can handle its present, future, and unique needs. This is where the concept of “composability” gains importance.” – Composable Procurement: Adapt Faster, Build Quickly, Drive Value (White Paper 2023)
Over the years, I have referred to the time in the late 1990s and how a representative from one of the big ERP companies told me they don’t get out of bed in the morning for anything less than $1 million.
Their answer was to my request about building a data sharing “bridge” between the ERP back end and a front-end eProcurement application. It was a bridge too far.
Back then, procurement technology was strictly a backroom play in which IT and Finance were the overseers and gatekeepers. Compounding the problem was that procurement’s functional requirements were a low priority on the upgrade list. The lack of urgency may be why we still use spreadsheets, but that is a discussion for another day.
Interestingly, even if procurement needs were at the top of the list, the costs, as mentioned above, to upgrade functionality and the complexity and time to do it were significant obstacles.
The reason for the expense and complexity – upgrades meant significant changes to the base solution source code. As someone familiar with old dBase II coding, adding a new line of code can cause a bug in another line of code that was previously working.
Fast forward to today, and this corruption or “pollution” of the source code of the base solution is no longer a problem with composable procurement Apps. That’s right; there are now Apps for procurement functionality that can be quickly and easily introduced and integrated into your current platform on a timely, cost-effective basis.
A Collaboration Caveat
Without going into too much detail on these exciting, new Apps – something I will do in an upcoming post, I will reiterate what I said earlier. While App tech is a notable breakthrough, the real differentiator between one service provider and another is their procurement industry expertise.
It is not about how well they understand their technology but how well they understand the unique attributes and challenges procurement faces – ideally on a first-hand basis.
This fundamental procurement-world knowledge is critical for success because composable procurement is about optimizing supply chain adaptability and resilience. As a result, responding to real-world stakeholder requirements in real time requires business knowledge to build and leverage technology knowledge. Without the former, collaboration becomes a one-way conversation between a provider and practitioner regarding how to use technology without knowing it’s the right technology for you.
The message is to put as much thought into your provider selection as you do in introducing a composable App.
In my next post, I will talk about the emergence of the extended composable App or AppXtend.
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