To Centralise or Decentralise? (Part 3)

By Paras Sood

Having discussed the short-term activities for an organisation to consider when organising their procurement operations, let's now take a look at the medium-term activities:

To Centralise or Decentralise? That is the question... (Part 2)

By Paras Sood

From my perspective, the argument for centralising purchasing operations has to revert back to the original intentions of strategic sourcing and how much an organisation wants to control the procurement activity within a company. If we assume that an organisation is looking to drive cost savings and manage their spend, the next steps are largely based on the organisation’s cultural drivers for how ‘spend under management’ can be achieved.

Applying Big Data Transparency to Improve Our Lives

By Mickey North Rizza

In 2002 I was using a Handspring Treo, a personal device assistant (PDA) to capture my address book information and emails. A few years later, I was using a RIM Blackberry to do the same, but it had the added benefit of being a mobile phone too. These days I can do a thousand things on my smartphone which is a PDA, mobile phone, camera, media player, GPS and an internet tool that lets me tie all my interactions together in one device. WOW, it’s pretty cool and a superb all-in-one personal device. But nothing compared to all the information that it touches and captures.

Failure to Communicate = Misalignment

By Mickey North Rizza

Business strategies are developed all the time. Business strategies often fail during implementation because the strategies are not shared with those that need to execute them. George Palmatier said it well: Failure to Deploy is often a Failure to Communicate. Communication failure leads to misalignment. If you don’t communicate the expectations, how do you expect others to execute when they don’t know the expectations?

It’s Budget Season: Do you have your list of requirements yet?

By Mickey North Rizza

As we transition into autumn and back to school, for over 75% of companies it is also the time to start discussing budgets for next year. Oh, how even the word “budget” conjures up long days of negotiating to save your current budget and add more to it!