As we progress from the Future of P2P (more this week) to the Future of Strategic Sourcing technology we will inevitably spend time talking about Spend Analysis; ahead of that, here’s a query for this Monday.
MMQ: When Will Spend Analysis Start Working More Like Google?
The Context
- Fully-automated spend analysis delivers great value, no doubt. Having auto-classified and enriched spend data presented in pre-packaged and customized reports with powerful analytical capabilities can put a procurement department light years ahead.
- Is spend analysis a push technology or a pull technology? What should it be?
- There would seem to be a way to take something as powerful as Google’s Instant Search and apply it to enterprise spend data.
- At some point, will internal enterprise search capabilities become powerful enough to bypass the need for structured reporting and/or dedicated spend analysis solutions by delivering real-time search results that auto-classify and enrich spend data drawn directly from the back-end systems? Or will the spend analysis solutions grow to offer that capability? Is that capability a desired future state or is there something better? How should spend analysis work?
You may recall from this article that our “Monday Morning Query” series poses a question to our readership that has been gnawing at us or is something that we feel is worthy of reflection…… if you have an opinion, please chime in.
Tagged in: Monday Morning Query, Spend Analysis, Technology
