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.
Andrew, what a terrific thought! I think we all desire better and faster analysis tools. But first we need to overcome the issue of data integrity and accuracy? Many companies are still struggling with the accuracy of data going into their enterprise systems.
But I am willing to dream big dreams. I am sure some Israeli start-up is working on this already.
Julia
Julia –
Great to hear from you. I hope that many start-ups and established technology companies would be pursuing new/advanced approaches to spend analysis. The market opportunity certainly exists. We’ll see