Horses for sources had an amusing Fools Day Story about Robot Analysts replacing human analysts. The idea is not so crazy after all and
has been tried in more primitive forms and certainly with less fancier names
than Phil Fersht has coined. At least some advisory firms have tried to automate
and make their sourcing templates so standardized that even a robot can read, understand,
and respond to them! Some have gone further and tried, once the vendor responses
are in, to use a machine to easily count the Ys and Ns to the series of
interrogatory questions, to calculate the $ value of all the Ns, to add it to
the vendor´s quoted prices and then to rank the vendors by price! Integrate all
that into a database driven online tool fitted with a reverse auction engine
and voila, you have made the software soul for your robot advisor! If daily
life became that simple and orderly, many of us in the outsourcing business
would immediately turn jobless!
I have watched the sourcing advisory industry evolve over a decade
now and have seen how some advisors have tried hard to standardize the sourcing
process through detailed and precise templates and so on. Invariably on such advisor
led deals, vendors have complained mostly to themselves how such straight
jacketing kills their otherwise abundant creativity. The buyers have generally
complained how little these advisor mandated processes and templates reflect the
unique nuanced rich realities of their business operations. The advisors have generally
complained about how little the clients listen to them and how little the vendors
comply with them and how they then need to stay on with the client post
contract to clean up the mess and ensure the vendor delivers the promised
value. In the end, everyone finds a way to do their dharma and move on – the client
convinces the advisor to customize their templates, the vendors find ways to
make robotic evaluation of their offer difficult, and the advisors give up once
again on their vision of an automated, mature, robotic sourcing market!
So, now that we know why we don´t have robot analysts among us, do we really miss them? In 2014, the sourcing world does seem more livable without them, but hey, we are game for a challenge! Bring them on and we will find a way to humanize and clutter them up and frustrate them too!
