Author: Pete Loughlin

02 Jul I’ve banned the word “meeting”. And I’m going to ban the word “data” next

A meeting is not what you do. It is the forum in which you do something. You discuss problems in order to develop a plan to resolve them. You provide updates on progress of a project in order to gain approval to move to the next stage. You may sell your product or buy a product. These are the things you do in a meeting. If you have a busy day coming up, preparing an important presentation and responding to lots of emails, you wouldn’t say “I’ve got to use the computer a lot today” – you just wouldn’t. So why do people say “I have lots of meetings today”? So I’ve banned the word meeting. I want to remain focused on the purpose of any meeting rather than the meeting itself and I want my staff and colleagues to do likewise. And next, I’m going to ban the word “data”.

22 Jun Functionality fetishism

There's a Venn diagram on which I sit near Jason Busch. Many of our views, some of our backgrounds and parts of experience overlap. But it's not an exact match and the difference is illustrated by Jason’s piece commenting on my view that many, if not most e-procurement implementations are “half assed”.

14 Jun World class or half assed? The current state of e-procurement

I can buy something from amazon in just a few clicks. I feel confident that I’m getting a good price and I feel safe because the product I’ve selected has good reviews. The whole amazon experience has encouraged millions to change the way they shop. The purchasing process (as we like to think of it – it is more accurately a sales process), has been refined and iterated over the years, so what’s gone wrong with the B2B version – e-procurement? The e-procurement vendors’ sales and marketing material will tell a very different story. They'll explain how corporate purchasing could be but it won’t tell you what, in 9 out of 10 cases, it is really like.