Last week I implied that Procurement has been a laggard, by comparison with Marketing, in embracing 'digital'. I suggested there is a need for digital procurement strategies which support the achievement of procurement strategic objectives, for example, cost reduction, innovation, risk mitigation, CSR.
Before we can develop appropriate strategies we need to understand 'digital' and its potential. This blog discusses 'The Cloud' and in subsequent blogs I hope to discuss 'mobile', 'social' and big data'.
At a very basic level it may be suffice to understand that it is cloud technology which enables 'Apps' - no cloud, no apps. The impact for procurement is that Apps can now be accessed and developed to reflect our needs. The challenge therefore is to define the appropriate applications portfolio needs and, if an app doesn't exist, incentivise its development. The procurement professional needs to become both a visionary and a discerning selector of the ever increasing range of available apps. However, if you take this one step further you will understand than the cloud means apps can talk to each other, so, customers apps, marketing apps, suppliers apps, supply chain apps all have the potential to be interconnected and talk to each other - just visualise yourself in the London Olympic stadium and that you have the capacity to instantly exchange information and 'know how' with every other person in the stadium, including the athletes and the coaches, and every person watching the Olympics throughout the world - that's what cloud interconnectivity has the potential to delivery.
One of the big impacts is that cloud completely transforms the eProcurement business justification.
