Author: Ian Burdon

29 Aug

Posted at 15:37h in e-Procurement Software by
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We live in transitional times. It was 50 years ago that Thomas Kuhn published “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” which introduced the world to the idea of the “Paradigm Shift” – a term since misappropriated and misused in many walks of life including business. Kuhn was referring to those moments in scientific understanding when the whole frame of reference shifts and the world is reinterpreted in a completely different way. The usual examples are the shifts in understanding brought about by Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein and others.

24 Aug

Posted at 12:21h in e-Procurement, e-Procurement Software by
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For some reason, social media gives credibility to even the most suspect stories. Take a read of this article: How We Screwed Almost the Whole Apple Community. The authors drew a screw with a non-standard head. They emailed the drawing to themselves with a text suggesting (but providing no evidence) that it might be a leak from Apple and then posted a photo of the email and drawing on Reddit. They then waited to see what would happen. It took 12 hours for things to liven up. First, the Apple blog Cult of Mac reported ”Apple May Be Working On A Top Secret Asymmetric Screw To Lock You Out Of Your Devices Forever” and thereafter it went viral. The interesting thing for me was their analysis of the credulity of each successive wave of commentators as the story moved from Reddit to the IT press to bloggers to social media.

08 Aug

Posted at 09:35h in e-Procurement by
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e-procurement suffers from two problems: the first is the “e” and the second is “procurement”.  Both “e” and “procurement” immediately put people on the wrong mental track.  “e” leads people to think that it is all about IT. “Procurement” is now so diffuse in meaning that people think it is about buying things and it is not.

11 Jul

Posted at 08:24h in e-Procurement, e-Procurement Software by
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Shortly before I stopped working for Government I attended a particularly dispiriting conference. The theme was “Delivering More With Less”. I went to a session on “Re-engineering Government Procurement” and listened to assorted “experts” and senior figures claimed that the thing to do was to sort out procurement processes then hand it all over to SAP and Oracle. I could have thrown myself out of a high window had we not been on the ground floor. One speaker wondered out why things were so often going so badly in government despite their having invested in ERPs and there was a sense of bafflement when I asked if he had considered that things were going badly precisely because they were using ERPs.

09 Jul

Posted at 08:15h in e-Procurement Software by
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When it comes to e-procurement, the proper concerns of supporting and enabling Procurement have been put to one side in the excitable chatter and discussion of the technology. The signal gets lost in the noise.  It’s like going to a showroom where the salesmen and their acolytes do not tell you how fit their cars are for your particular purpose but instead, squabble about which has the sharpest fins or shiniest chrome.

28 Jun

Posted at 08:52h in e-Procurement, P2P Europe by
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In my recent article, “e-wheels on my Wagon” I explained why I think PEPPOL is a decade behind the curve. Actually, I want to go further than that and explain why PEPPOL fails to address one of its primary targets – stimulating cross-border trade, particularly by and for SMEs. e-wheels on the wrong wagon in fact.