Procurement Insights

Nineteen years ago, a vendor’s PR team asked me to cover their news. I asked them questions instead — and then tracked the answers for years. This week it happened again.

This blog carries the following words as a badge of honor: “Truth Is Believing.” Accuracy Is Knowing.

In 2007, Ariba’s PR firm contacted me to discuss a milest...

In 2008 I told procurement to think like a CFO and act like a CIO. In 2026, I am telling the C-suite to think like procurement.

Earlier this week, David Shillingford shared a recap of a Fortune COO Summit panel on whether supply chains are ready for the next disruption. It is a sharp summary, and worth reading in full. But one detail in it stopped me, because ...

For two decades we tried to eliminate it. The AI era is about to show us what it was telling us all along.

For more than twenty years, procurement has treated maverick spend as something to stamp out. The logic was clean: if people followed the approved process, outcomes would improve; if they stopped buying outside contracted channels, savings would rise; if ever...

There is a thoughtful conversation going around about what a Chief AI Officer really owns — vision, governance, architecture, adoption, risk, operating models, outcomes. The lists are sensible, and the people making them are right that enterprise AI is not a narrow technology initiative. It is an enterprise-wide change.

So I want to ask a question that sits one leve...

We have a habit, in enterprise technology, of giving expensive problems flattering names. “Center of Excellence.” “Best of Breed.” “Digital Transformation.” The label arrives after someone has already decided the thing is good, and it does the work that evidence is supposed to do. You can carry a problem for twenty years if you keep giving it a nice enough name.

Tec...