One of the greatest advantages available to procurement organizations right now is the availability of ‘best of breed’ solutions that can be integrated into an overarching technology ecosystem.
This point came up in a panel I moderated for BT Sourced, the procurement services group of BT, at their hybrid event Dare to Discover: Reaching New Heights for Procurement. Although the ‘official’ panelists were Charlie Clark (Rosslyn Data Technologies, Darkbeam), Ulf Zetterberg (Seal Software, Time is Ltd.), and Chirag Shah (MarketMaker4, Simfoni), Adam Brown, Head of the Procurement Digital Garage at BT Sourced, was so enthusiastic about some of the topics, he jumped in as well.
One thing he was particularly passionate about was the concept of technology modularity: being able to plug in or weave together multiple solutions and a data repository as business requirements demand.
But procurement and their users aren’t the only ones that have a perspective on best of breed technology – solution innovators do as well.
As point solutions develop, their executives have to make the decision between digging deeper (vertical development) and branching out (horizontal development), potentially encroaching on the domain of other providers in the ecosystem.
As Charlie, Ulf, and Chirag shared, these decisions are made with input from customers and in consideration of their current alliance partners’ focus. What we can say for sure is that the overall procurement technology ecosystem is constantly shifting and evolving, requiring procurement to revisit and re-examine their solution choices regularly.
