Tag Archives: improving technology

Surviving The AI Revolution

Will you be a survivor of the AI revolution? You’ll need to be well equipped and prepared for anything…

This article was written by Naveen Joshi.

Artificial Intelligence is speeding the robot revolution and can be responsible for replacing a huge portion of the human workforce with machines, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it, other than preparing for AI revolution.

Artificially intelligent robots are finally set on replacing humans in the labor pool, and due to this, the society can shift dramatically. Until the AI revolution is complete, humans can either try to slow the automation of the workforce or start preparing for AI.

If the popular media are to be believed, AI is coming to steal your job and threaten your life, as we know it. The AI revolution is indeed underway and for ensuring that you are prepared to make it through the times ahead, we’ve listed a few guidelines for you.

Recognising the AI Revolution

The first step for winning every conflict is to understand your target. It is important to acknowledge that the concept of AI is not in the future; it is already here and people are using it on a daily basis. For example, because of the AI technology, Netflix knows what to suggest you watch next, and Google predicts where you are heading when you jump in your car. AI also encompasses disciplines such as machine learning, using which companies are finding patterns in data and learning to predict trends, as well as speech processing, computer vision, and robotics. Moreover, it also encompasses deep learning, which is inspired by the model of the brain. Deep learning systems work by mapping inputs to a set of outputs based on features of the thing being examined.

Identify where AI Thrives

With sufficient knowledge of AI technology, you can now start to understand where AI is optimally positioned to take over. Have a look at your market trends and conditions and take note of tasks that require huge amounts of big data processing. For example, companies are now looking through everyone’s click patterns on Google to figure out what someone wants.

Essentially, AI works best for any task that requires a huge amount of repetitive processing. If this sounds like your job, you might have to start thinking of a survival plan. You can also access websites that evaluate your automation risk, to find out what researchers have calculated for your field.

Devise an Action Plan and Start Preparing for AI

The best strategic action plan is to form a treaty. You should accept that AI will increasingly become a part of our society and look for possibilities to collaborate. There is a huge potential for AI to assist in places where humans are today falling short, precisely because of the processing power. Companies are already using AI for aiding clinicians in medical diagnosis, personalizing customer experiences, and creating agricultural methods that reduce the cost to the environment. AI has the ability to learn very well but it cannot learn flexibly. You can. There are new jobs now available that did not exist a few years ago. If you are allowing AI to do the grit work, this can create an opportunity to embrace the attributes that humans excel at, namely social intelligence and creativity.

As with every big and impacting change, there are fears about new technology like AI. Ultimately, the way you can survive the impacts of an AI revolution is by embracing the partnership. By understanding the potential that AI has to improve the world, you can look around for those opportunities to implement positive change.

Naveen Joshi is Director at Allerin Tech Pvt Ltd. This article was orginally published on LinkedIn. 

5 Common Failures in Technology Implementation

Technology should provide huge benefits in procurement. So why do so many projects fail at the implementation phase?

Join our webinar on the 7th of November and find out how to drive successful technology implementation.

If you’ve been a procurement professional for any length of time, this is probably a familiar situation.

Your company has decided to implement new technology in the procurement function. A date for go-live has been set, and some training has been arranged for current users. There are grumblings about yet another system to be used, but that doesn’t fit with current procurement processes.

When you ask around, very few, if any, of the department have been asked to input into this decision. The company certainly doesn’t seem to have spoken to people who are actually going to be using the system.

When the time comes, the technology is implemented, and training is rolled out. The procurement team accept the new system (perhaps grudgingly), and start to use it.

Within a few weeks, the (very short) honeymoon period is over, and the issues and bugs have appeared. Far from improving or simplifying the processes, the technology isn’t working out as planned. It’s begun to make even simple tasks more difficult.

Within months, the shiny, new, purpose-built technology is being used for the bare minimum that the procurement team can get away with, and they have begun to come up with novel ways to work around the system.

Difference Between Success and Failure

While situations like this may be decreasing in number, they still occur with uncomfortable regularity. When it comes to technology across organisations, not just in procurement, implementation is the stage in the process that is most associated with the success or failure of the project.

Ahead of the free webinar between Oracle and Procurious, Darryl Griffiths, Acting MD at Enrich, and implementation expert, shares his key reasons for why implementations fail.

  1. Alignment of Strategy and Technology

Ensuring that the business, procurement and operational strategy all aligns is the first step in this process. However, too often, strategies aren’t aligned, or have been created in isolation without proper discuss.

Without fully understanding the strategy, the objectives for the technology implementation can’t be fully understood. This can lead to the wrong technology for the project being selected, and not being fit for purpose against the objectives.

  1. Lack of Change Management Plan

The plan for how the technology is going to be implemented should be laid out clearly from the start. Frequently, organisations work towards their go-live date, but give little thought to the short, medium, and long-term plan following the launch.

Too few plans take into account training requirements, or how new users will receive this training when they start in the department. 

  1. Lack of Communication or Champions

Without good communication, it’s likely to be a fight to get buy-in. Without buy-in, the implementation is doomed to failure.

Organisations don’t take into account the end users of the technology. This leads to the ‘why’ of the project never being disseminated.

This leads to the perception of new technology being forced on them, and breeds resistance. This resistance undermines the project, creating a situation where users are expecting the technology to fail, rather than having an open mind on how it can help them.

  1. Poor or Out-of-Date Data

The old technology didn’t work properly because the data wasn’t right. But there’s no data clean-up been carried out before the new technology is implemented. Which means the new system won’t work any better.

There is a vast amount of data available to procurement, which technology is frequently implemented to help sift through. However, putting poor data into the system, as well as not keeping the data up to date, will inevitably result in bad data out.

  1. Built to Last vs. Built to Change

In years gone by, products were built to last. It was common for things to last 10 years or more. However, in a marketplace and environment where agility and flexibility are valued, a built-to-last system may not fit the bill.

If the system hasn’t been built to be changed easily, then it’s going to go out of date very quickly. And it’s unlikely that budget will be available for a new system after 1-2 years, when it was designed to last 10 years.

Secret of Success

It’s easy to pin-point where technology implementation fails, but far harder to ensure that it’s a success from the outset. However, if the right strategies are in place, and all the planning is carried out, procurement gives itself a greater chance of success.

If you want to find out more about how to manage your implementation, and hear more from Darryl on how you can set yourself up for success, join our free webinar on the 7th of November.

Darryl will join Oracle Business Development Direction, David Hobson, in a discussion chaired by Procurious Founder, Tania Seary. The webinar is aimed at helping Procurement Leaders come to terms with volatility, understand the role and benefits of technology, especially cloud, in procurement strategy, planning and decision making.

For more information, and to register, visit our dedicated page.

Are Procurement Professionals Stuck in the Stone Age?

Ed Cross, co-founder at Odesma, and Anya McKenna (of Market Dojo) ponder the neanderthalic and stone age ways of B2B software…

The peculiar thing about business technology is that generally it is not very easy to use. I might exclude here email, but the rest of it seems to need a training course and some sort of super user, or a training provider (or even worse a consulting firm) to come and show you how or work it for you. Whereas the most used technology that we interact with outside of work generally does not require any support.

The irony here is that business technology came first, and the use of technology first appeared in the office, long before we all had tech at home or on our person. Yet, it remains unintuitive, expensive, and, as a result, does not get utilised fully or at all by a lot of people at work.

Compare this to B2C technology, how hard is it to work? ebay for instance. Or Facebook. Or even Candy Crush. The simple answer is they are intuitive, straightforward and certainly do not need any training or consulting support to get the benefit of them. In fact even Generation X (us older types) can work them on any number of portable or fixed lumps of technology. And a lot of them are free to the user.

Where Did it all Go Wrong?

So what’s gone wrong? For this, we’ll let Ed share an anecdote from 1999. While working for PwC, I presented to a local CIPS event in Staffordshire on e-commerce. This topic was perceived as very much the new kid on the block, and a whole host of new tech start ups were receiving incredible valuations.

At this session I laid out the view of the future described by the firm, ignorant to the nay sayers. In fact there were quite a few in the audience, most notably those with a few more years under their belts than me. One or two challenged my hypothesis on the topic.

I later left PwC to set up a Private Equity backed branch of a US e-Sourcing firm Sharemax.  A year or two later the dot.com bubble had burst and I was back in Consultancy, and the nay sayers were proven right.

So, what was, or still is, the problem? From an historic perspective the leading market insight companies and so forth, focused heavily on functionality, as did many buyers of solutions. And ignored the user experience, the maturity or demographic of the population expected to use the technology.

Many people in senior or middle management positions did not grow up with computing technology, and when making selection decisions, focused on elements outside of ease of use, and considered technology against an historic understanding – one where tech is always hard to use.

They therefore condoned supplier behaviour where training and consulting support were deemed acceptable costs of enablement. And this thinking has not much changed, given the demographics of leadership.

Of course, the existing providers have not been driven to step up, because the customer has not demanded it of them. Whilst in the B2C arena the demographic is younger. The expectation is of instant gratification, solutions that are compelling, easy to use and free or very low cost. With Generation Y coming through in business we expect the current issues are about to change.

So why have B2B software providers not followed the B2C route, and provided better, more compelling solutions to pull procurement out of the stone age? You’ll have to wait for the next part of our series to find out.

Market Dojo and Odesma have partnered to combine their intuitive eSourcing software and expertise in offering business advisory services to offer clients a winning procurement solution.