Why procurement is badly served by researchers

This time last week I had lunch with my friend Jason Busch, the pioneering American blogger and editor of SpendMatters, who was over in the UK for a few days. One of Jason's regular fixtures on his blog is the "Friday Rant", which he often uses to vent his spleen at whoever or whatever happens to have pissed him off that week. (Today's posting is the rather more gentile but still opinionated Rebound or Not, Now is the Time to Shine.). Well, taking a leaf out of Jason's book, so to speak, here's a rant of my own that I've been meaning to post for several weeks now but somehow haven't got around to. It concerns the quality of published research in the global procurement community.

Basically, I think that most of the research being conducted right now is pretty poor – and that's putting it mildly. Whether it's academic studies, consultancy surveys or research from supposedly independent analysts, my assessment having read numerous of their reports over the past few years is that most serve CPOs and the cause of procurement development rather badly. There are various reasons for this, in my view, and they vary according to which providers you are looking at. 

Let's start with the academics. Unlike some procurement practitioners, I happen to think that intellectually and methodologically rigorous research has its part to play in this profession. Indeed, business academics at their best make sense of the corporate world in a way that nobody else can. The trouble is that there aren't many really top-notch academics specialising in procurement. In most cases, what they end up producing from a research standpoint is either of little practical interest to those outside the academic community or it's the sort of basic survey that the big consultancies get their most junior employees to knock out in a fraction of the time that academics take. (Why it takes six months-plus to publish a short report with the findings of a simple online survey of 100 CPOs, such that it's already out of date, I don't know! Perhaps it's my journalistic mentality, but to me when it comes to fast-changing issues like the global recession, timeliness is everything.) 

But if academics are guilty of being slow and inwardly focused, management consultancies are often just downright sloppy. Badly designed questionnaires, unclear objectives, unfathomable charts and a failure to display even the most basic grasp of statistics (eg, the difference between a percentage increase and a percentage point increase) are just some of the common failings I've observed in recent years. Add to that a "me too" research agenda and a reluctance to scratch much below the surface of the companies (read: existing or would-be clients) surveyed – at least publicly – and much of what the consultancies produce today adds little to our knowledge and understanding of procurement issues. 

Lastly, we have the analyst and specialist research firms. While I don't doubt that there are some highly capable and experienced people working for these, in general I find their reports too narrowly focused on process and/or technology, and – in some cases – blatantly swayed in their terms of reference by the business goals of their sponsors (the same criticism also applies to much of the research commissioned by software vendors and other service providers). And let's face it: there aren't that many analyst or research houses specialising in procurement, so there's a dearth of quantity as well as quality.

Despite these failings, the need for data and intelligence in procurement, along with the skills to analyse and translate it into meaningful strategy and decision-making, is growing rapidly. Whether it's information about industries, supply markets and categories, investigations of current good practice or more forward-looking assessments of where the profession is headed, CPOs need the research base – in all its forms – to support them with high-quality, practical and timely insights. My contention is that, at present and in most cases, they are poorly served.

Comments

[Jan-Patrick Willmes]

three short comments on this provoking thought:
1. I am personally a strong believer that there is nothing more practical than a good theoretical (hand) book
2. I (y)our organisation(s) is "The Learner Within" than you do not need to rely on "Data" - and at the same time it optimizes your own decision logic and confidence level
3. Market Making needs significant Data input in order to calibrate, co-ordinate and cultivate laser-focused strategies and especially capable opto-human-interface to take the right/ (second) best decisions within a set of constraints.

Bottom line: counterthesis of the week - the total "Cost" of this kind & value activity remains the same ;-)

[Dick Jennings MCIPS, solicitor]

Well said Geraint! And you're the one to call out that the emperor has no clothes since as a journalist you just CAN'T go along with the polite crowd, pretending stuff is interesting and useful when it isn't. In your game if you don't sort the genuinely interesting from the rest you're dead.

Here is an embellishment to your rant. There is a terrible misapprehension out there that writing "academic" stuff means writing material every bit of which can be supported by references from other published material. University students are increasingly taught how to do this, with painstaking footnotes for every claim they make. The result is that instead of thinking an issue through with their own common sense and intelligence they produce twaddle. Awful, tired, endlessly recirculated stuff in which the fact that a sentence was published by someone else puts it on a pedestal. And the fact that someone used a phrase automatically elevates that phrase to sacrosanct technical jargon.

I am a lawyer so, goodness knows, I'm used to trying to make sense of complicated expressions and dense sentence structures. But I give up in frustration when faced with a lot of so-called "academic" writing on procurement. It can be almost impenetrable, with no promise of any likely new insight at the end of it.

There are two particularly pernicious conseqences of this tendency. One is that working procurement management think that because they can't make head or tail of this stuff it must be clever and they must not be academic enough to understand it. (Wrong! If it doesn't make sense to an informed and intelligent reader with the right specialist background it's rubbish.)

And the other consequence has been sometimes at Easton House, where personnel have tried to write helpful material to guide the profession but have been seduced into the same travesty of "academic" style. Please: have the confidence to write with common sense about stuff you know, or bring in a suitable expert to cover stuff you don't! And either way, unless you have something useful to say, and can express it lucidly, leave that keyboard alone!