Friday Rant: Spend Management Snake Oil
October 23, 2009
During his talk, Jim suggested that snake oil purveyors in the supply risk market fall into a number of categories, including “existing vendors with incomplete or partial solutions (spun as the real-deal), market information packaged and resold as real-time intelligence (which it's not), dashboards from larger enterprise software providers (which leave it up to you to fill in the blanks or pay an army of consultants to populate)” and, my personal favorite, “the one hit wonder — any service provider deliverable that takes the form of a Microsoft Office document, spreadsheet or presentation”. Not only is Jim dead-on in this analysis — he's putting a stake in the ground that someone should have posited a long time ago. Namely, that a good many of the self-proclaimed supply risk emperors out there really have no clothes.
