Most data still lives in a single, centralized server with a content team whose purpose is to
manage - with a growing cast of vendors, materials, commodities and categories, and a suite of under used big applications for Business Intelligence and Analytics, that usually fail to satisfy even the most basic cost benefit metrics. The company then spends much of its time with quarterly reports about up-time, software upgrades, security breaches and the next laptop refresh. These activities are as important as de-silting a lake: essential - but invisible = until it fails - forgotten again, when it is fixed. Infrastructure and IT Managers are necessary but not sufficient for success in the current age. Much of what was always critical from a category and commodity level needs standardization and - if truth be told - buyers often have far more grip in their vendors and Master Data Management systems, if they are surrounded by content teams that make consistent, enrich, templatize and standardize material data using and leverage analytics using emerging digital technologies.
Fig: Dedupe and Content Cleansing to
achieve unique records and Data clarity
Data Specialists are always necessary in the procurement business, and now there are casting calls everywhere for digital data leaders who understand data, they're enablers and certainly not one or two lead executives. It is an army of data enablers who can work on Enterprise data, apply automation and get manual as dirty data is not always on-size-fits-all solution's, in order to make centralized governance and standardization become organizational anachronisms. Let's just agree that data sanitization is horizontal to vertical business - everyone needs it - but without a view of the available data and creative application that transform business processes and models, data sanitization enables - but won't yield - competitive advantage.
As business executives, project managers and directors are always seeking competitive advantage, data is now - and forever - a competitive weapon, which has substantially elevated the status of decision making versus drowning in the data swamp.
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