The real reason robot analysts don´t roam the earth yet

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! 

What is India's India?

Some five years ago in a Delhi Hotel, a senior french executive asked me the question 'What is India's India?' 

I blinked, of course, not knowing where he was going.

He explained 'I mean, where would India outsource its work since your growing costs seem to be unsustainable..would you go to China, Philippines, or Africa perhaps?' 

Having not thought about such a topic in advance, I mumbled something about how India was still competitive compared to USA and Western Europe and how we would not have such an issue for another 10 years. 

There was a better answer and that lay in small-town and rural India. Here costs were (and would likely continue to be) as little as 20% of what it is in big city India (Bangalore, Chennai, and so on). Of course, Indian outsourcers would slowly but certainly tap into this vast and almost untapped resource pool when the need arose. There would be no need for Indian companies to go to China or Philippines for cost reasons. India could vertically integrate itself across the services value chain and not have to look elsewhere for cost reasons (I stress cost reasons, because there are other good reasons to deliver services out of China or Egypt for example). 

This recent story from the New York times shows one such initiative and the fundamental changes it is bringing to people's lives in small Indian villages.

Would you outsource Bid Management

I noticed a company in Netherlands offering Bid Management services to interested clients. Then I found one in Ireland, one in Australia and this one in the USA calls themselves Competition Managers. 

No company I worked for has outsourced bid management but I have only worked for three till now. 

So would I outsource Bid Management? 

I had blogged earlier about the three different dimensions of bid managment, i.e. the strategic, the operational, and the creative. Maybe we can try to answer this question along these dimensions. 

The Strategic Aspects of Bid Management: I would probably never want to outsource anyy of this. This will involve sharing company IP, your positioning within the bid, pricing information and decisions, organizational politics and most importantly, lots of sensitive information about your client and your relationship with the client. I can't imagine outsourcing and having to share any of this with my vendor - except perhaps to evaluate specific strategic ideas in a bid, for example to help forge a partnership with another vendor or to employ an expert consultant to do some specialized research or something like that. 

The Operational Aspects of Bid Management: Here there is surely a lot more potential for outsourcing. For some operational activities, it might even be desirable to outsource, especially when the Bid Manager has to handle both the strategic and operational aspects which can be difficult. Here, the challenge to outsourcing, however, comes mainly because operational managment of a bid often requires an insider's networking ability and connects within the organization. 

The creative Aspects of Bid Management: Here is where you have high potential for outsourcing, especially for everything that you submit as part of the bid such as proposals and presentations and collaterals and so on. An expert can surely fine tune the message and present it in the best way. Of course, the limitation here is clearly that the creative side of Bid Management also involves some critical oral presentations and so on, which you cant outsource. You have to defend your proposal with your client, no one else can do it for you. 

So, outsourcing is possible in  Bid Management, but...

In the beginning,

it is appropriate to talk about my beginning. I have been doing Proposal and Bid Management (there is a difference between those two, more about which later) for more than ten years now. Most of these bids were in the Outsourcing and IT Services business. Most of the projects or jobs we were bidding for were with large multinational corporations, including the Fortune 500. These clients were all over the world though mainly headquartered in the USA, Europe, and Japan. The competivive and single source Bids I have participated in ranged in value from US $50000 to US $ 200 Million. The Bids ranged from Outsourcing and Offshoring of IT and Engineering Services to Engineering Design of mechanical parts to development of custom IT solutions to solve business problems and needs.

To me, Bid Management has several dimensions. First, Bid Management provides the thought leadership for the bid (which is strategic, which has decision making authority, which requires deep and experiential knowledge of the subject matter). Second, it means managing the bid operationally (often called proposal management since the bid invariably consists of a significant proposalling phase, about which you can learn at the premier organization for proposal managers, APMP ) and third, managing the creative aspects of it (writing or deciding the key winning messages and the executive summary, signing off on the bid documents, presenting the bid to the client and so on). - Of course, I must state that every organization treats these roles differently and they are often attached to different organization roles, such as for example business development or sales or solution architecting or presales. Also, every organization has a different terminology and nomenclature which will hopefully achieve some level of standardization over time. -

I have played these different roles separately at times and often together in the same bid. So, in my blog you will find aspects dealing with each of these 3 dimensions of Bid Management

The Strategic
The Operational
The Creative

Why do I want to blog about Bid Management?

I am writing this so I can clarify and crystallize my opinion and improve my knowledge. I am also hoping that presales, proposal and bid management and sales professionals (especially rookees trying to find their feet in these professions) will find something of interest here, including hopefully, the ability to electronically interact with similarly hazardously occupied souls.

I am also writing this because I believe bid managers play a crucial yet little understood role in business (and dare I say, Society) and I would like to lay my little brick in building up the recognition of this profession and its practitioners.

And mainly because, Bid Management has given me immense intellectual satisfaction and thrill - I want to tell my stories - and maybe you will tell me yours.