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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.

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.

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”.

The business case for e-invoicing is normally measured from the perspective of the accounts payable process in the buying organization. Indeed, it is often said that most if not all of the benefits are stacked in the buyers favor - it’s the buyers that get to automate and eliminate process whereas for the supplier they only seem to incur costs. It’s time suppliers woke up. Take a simplistic view and you can barely make a business case for e-invoicing but take a closer look and the benefits can be astonishing.